Fred Tasker’s goal is to taste a glass of wine from every state and nation that makes it. So far, his quixotic quest has taken him from California to New York and from France to Uzbekistan. In his day job as a feature writer for The Miami Herald, he has covered everything from Miami City Hall to Aviation to AIDS to religion. His wine column is syndicated nationwide by the McClatchy Tribune News Service, and he has judged numerous wine competitions including the Sonoma Harvest Fair.
E-mail him at ftasker@miamiherald.com.
Long a top-rated winery in the Mendoza region, Luigi Bosca for years has exported more than half its wines. Still, promoting them at the London Wine Fair, he found himself drawing world maps to demonstrate even to knowledgeable wine fans that Argentina is at a proper latitude to produce good wine.
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Their goal: To make wines that are gustoso -- tasty, says senior winemaker Santiago Margozzini. ''We're looking for roundness, sweet, ripe tannins,'' he says, ``with spicy, peppery black fruit, so soft and mellow you can drink it as soon as it's done fermenting.''
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Aw, don't go to all the trouble of dragging out the grill, cleaning it, oiling it and spending blistering hours creating your masterpiece of the barbecue arts -- and then serve it with beer.
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Pietro Ratti is a smooth operator in what can be a rough neighborhood. He works in Piemonte, the cool foothills of the Alps in northern Italy. He makes wine with the nebbiolo grape that can be rough with tannin and prickly with acid before developing into opulent marvels of tar and roses with a decade of age.
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Tracking a wine friend's vacation travel a year or two ago, I took a globe, put one finger on Miami and the other straight through the earth from it, thus balancing the globe at the point farthest distant from us.
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ftasker @MiamiHerald.com Look at New Zealand on a globe. It's closer to the South Pole than the southern tip of Australia, closer than South Africa, closer than all but the southernmost points in Chile and Argentina.
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Paul Fraser, 34, is a surfer dude of sorts. He spends half the year near the beaches of his native Australia, half near the Pacific swells of California.
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Lovers of the rich, ripe wines of Argentina are penciling in a new destination on their ''must-visit'' wine maps. Sixty-five miles south of the wine capital of Mendoza, 5,000 feet up on the eastern slopes of the Andes, a new wine region is rising around an estate called Bodegas Salentein.
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When you think of Portugal, you think of port wine -- sweet, rich, powerful, the aperitif and classic after-dinner drink. Just ask Winston Churchill. Or Thomas Jefferson.
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After years of drinking more wine, and more expensive wine every year, Americans are reacting to the economic downturn by drinking at least as much, but cheaper wine, shop owners say.
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To hear Michel Chapoutier talk, you might think he's a maverick. ''I'm not trying to make the best wine possible,'' he says. ``I'm trying to create the best expression of the soil.''
As Passover approaches (its first night is Saturday), Jewish Americans turn their attention to kosher products. The Nielsen polling people say this season will see purchases of:
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Festivals, festivals. This time it's the Miami Wine and Food Festival, pouring wines last Thursday from 60 makers in the courtyard of the elegant shopping mall Villages of Merrick Place in Coral Gables. The walk-around tasting had a marvelous selection.
On Jan. 15, 1920, the night before Prohibition was to begin, a handful of stalwarts gathered at Johnny Schrader's Feed Store in Fort Lauderdale for a final few public drinks and what the local newspaper would primly describe as ``highjinks.''
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Alex Trebek: Sparta and Troy, Harvard and Yale, Napa and Sonoma. Contestant: What are history's eternally enduring rivalries? It's true. Napa and Sonoma, two neighboring northern California counties, each making some of the world's best wine, have a spirited competition that's quickly apparent to all who visit.
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As I hope you've noticed, I spend a lot of time writing about inexpensive wines, which these days means $20 or less a bottle. Unlike buyers of $12 wine magazines, a lot of newspaper readers are casual wine fans, unlikely to spend $40 for something to drink with dinner. I hope that gives me the credibility to write once in a while -- like today -- about expensive wines.
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It had to happen. Wine consultants survey the country and find that 21- to 35-year-olds prefer wine to beer. And, while they like wine, they know little about it, and have no strong brand loyalties.
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Winemakers who create the world's fine sauvignon blancs probably never will agree on how it should be done. This is a good thing in that it guarantees a wonderful variety of styles, and a bit of a drawback in that, as Forrest Gump would say, you never know what you're going to get.
When hard-charging former Texas Instruments exec Kathy Charlton offered Bordeaux winemaker Benoit Murat a job in her new winery on the Pacific Ocean side of Seattle in 1999, he wondered if she was serious.
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Chardonnay remains the chameleon of grapes, infinitely malleable depending upon where the grapes are grown, when they're picked and how they're made into wine.
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A ticket to the Grand Tastings at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival in Miami Beach last week went for $187.50, and was offered by scalpers on eBay for $400 and more. But even fans willing to pay those prices don't drink $50 wines every night at home.
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Who blogs about wine? Well, I do, now, on a blog called ''Wine Beneath the Palms'' at MiamiHerald.com/Wine. What kinds of people blog?
It dawned on wine-shop owner Michael Bittel when he stopped to fill up his car at a Kendall gas station, walked inside and saw shelves of candy bars, loaves of bread and a $45 bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne. ''They're selling wine in gas stations,'' he says. ''Expensive wine.''
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''I've been fooling around with zinfandel my whole career,'' says Randle Johnson. ``Sure, I was a cabernet sauvignon guy, too, but all of us cab guys want to try our hand at zinfandel.''
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In the sunlit, rolling hills of Tuscany, the tops of most decent-sized hills are crowned by old stone castles. They were fortresses once, relics of the city-state wars from 1200, when Siena beat Florence, to 1500, when Florence beat Siena, more or less settling things.
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It's appropriate that the new Italian wines are arriving just in time for Super Bowl parties. Red-blooded Americans want no wimpy wines with their two-fisted, game-day fare.
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Nobody knows how we wine tasters suffer for our art. And when we try to tell them, we get no sympathy. I'm not complaining too much, but I tasted 70 American petite sirahs and about 200 other wines in three days last week at the San Francisco Chronicle 2008 Wine Competition. And ended up with a raw throat and a stunned palate.
Hip Sips: A guide to South Florida wine tastings ruce Shaw and Sandra Aaronson sit on stools in the back of Wolfe's Wine Shoppe, sipping a light-bodied but intensely flavored old-vines zinfandel.
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Whenever I need a hug, I write a column about the most inexpensive, pretty-good wines I've tasted lately. The reaction from readers is always positive enough to get me through another week or two. Like a vitamin B-12 shot.
