Try serving wine at a tailgate party or while watching the big game on your 42-inch flat-screen and your average football fan is likely to call you an effete snob. And then go back to guzzling wan, tasteless light beer.
My, how we love chardonnay. It made up 26 percent of all the wine we drank in 2007, far ahead of cabernet sauvignon at 15 percent. It's the equivalent of bellying up to the bar and asking for a glass of chardonnay more than 3 billion times.
Are you one of those people who recycles bottles, carries a canvas bag to the supermarket and drives a gas-sipping hybrid car? Then you're the perfect market for a new line of organic, fair trade wines just arriving in the United States.
It's an abundance of riches: The annual San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition gives its 60 or so judges a chance to sample wines from all over the country, with 4,913 wine entries from 23 states. And it gives us a chance to tell our readers about some really nice wines.
Accidents happen, the people at the Accidental Wine Co. like to say. Good thing for them that they do, too, or the Accidental Wine Co. would be out of business.
It takes courage to drink port. You can find yourself labeled old and doddering, a Lord Plushbottom sort slumped deep in a leather chair in a decaying men's club, nodding off over a snifter and a smoldering cigar.
OK, OK, even I don't drink wine while watching the bowl games on TV. That calls for beer. But you don't have to settle for regular or light (''I can't taste my beer!'') brews. If you're having friends over, put on a beer tasting. It could be a welcome distraction if your team is losing.
This is sure to offend some friends, but I must be honest: When I come to your home for a party and the only thing to drink is a big old liter and a half of oaky Yellow Tail chardonnay -- or worse, you show up at my doorstep with Yellow Tail's jammy shiraz -- a little part of me dies inside.
As the holiday season heats up, there are plenty of reasons for opening bottles of bubbly even before New Year's Eve. What's nice in this tough economic year is that sparkling wine is equally festive whether it costs $10 a bottle or $200. In fact, the cheaper stuff may be more festive because you don't have to pay all that attention to fineness of bubble, subtlety of bouquet and all that.
Christmas nears. Hanukkah is Friday. Kwanzaa is Dec. 26. It's the time of year when many go all out for feasts that, over time, become treasured family traditions. We need wines to go with them, of course. Here are some possibilities.
Wine's a great holiday gift. But it must be given properly. The first thing you have to think about is price. Give your father-in-law too cheap a bottle and he'll think you're miserly; pay too much and he'll think you're trying to soap him up.
Wake up! The turkey is digested (almost), and Friday is the first serious shopping day of the holiday season. One good way to ease the hassle is to visit a bookstore or sit down at your computer and buy well-chosen books for your friends. Here are some new titles to consider.
Released on the third Thursday of November, France's beaujolais nouveau is the first wine of the season in the northern hemisphere. It's vinified quickly and gently, turning out a light-bodied, unserious, very fruity red wine from the gamay grape that's intended for drinking without navel contemplation.
With Thanksgiving just two weeks away, it's time to think about the most important part of the feast. And Turkey Day wine pairings are a challenge. I mean, what wine goes with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, yams, cranberries, green bean casserole, creamed onions and pumpkin pie?
They say a well-turned phrase doesn't become a cliché unless it's true, and in that case, California chardonnay is America's biggest wine cliché. Doesn't matter if we tire of it. Doesn't matter if we rail against it and start ABC movements, vowing ''anything but chardonnay.''
Down along France's Rhône River, south of the region where the pricey Burgundy wines are made, is the Rhône Valley. Many a time when I was put off by the prices of Burgundy on a restaurant wine list, I have turned to Rhône wines to save my daughter's inheritance.
Cabernet sauvignon may have been born in France, but today it's the quintessential American wine -- big and brash, supremely self-confident, a little loud, even rude at times.
I once visited Italy for a wine competition. In preparation, I read a 300-page book on Italian wines and wrote down the name of every one of them -- only to find a dozen wines I'd never heard of once I arrived.
Remember merlot? Remember how good it was -- soft, smooth and creamy, redolent of black cherries, mint and spice? Remember how it was a hedonistic haven for those who loved red wine but found cabernet sauvignon a bit too muscular?
Marcelo Papa has an enviable job. He's winemaker for several of the lines at Concha y Toro, Chile's biggest wine company. Its portfolio stretches from Frontera, whose chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon and merlot sell on supermarket shelves for $9 per magnum, to the august Don Melchor, perhaps Chile's best cabernet sauvignon, at $50 a bottle.
Still America's favorite white wine, chardonnay continues to evolve, always seeking that sweet spot of consumer satisfaction.
Wine is like revenge. Both are best served cold. But just how cold the wine should be depends on type -- red, white or pink -- plus grape variety, flavor profile, quality level and even where it was made.
Chris Hancock has been watching you eat and says he has you figured out. When you're dining, you don't bother with the sniff-sip-and-slosh method of drinking wine, he says. You just drink it.
No matter how long they argue, winemakers never will agree on how to make sauvignon blanc. One camp believes it should be sweet and full of pineapples, like chardonnay. Another contingent seeks the green, feline flavors of France's Loire Valley. There's the grassy style, the flinty style and so on.
If Alice (in Wonderland) can believe in six impossible things before breakfast, I can appreciate six improbable tipples by happy hour. Some of the following are rarer than others, but all are items you don't come across in your average supermarket (you gotta go to a wine shop).
Looking to make a big splash at your next party? Consider the spaceship-like Soiree, a globular glass aerator that lets your wine breathe while you're pouring.
Bertrand de Fleurian, U.S. president of Laurent-Perrier Champagne, has three definitions of luxury. First is drinking Laurent-Perrier. Second is having the time to do what one pleases. Third is having someone you want to please.
Bobby Flay, the native New Yorker who champions Southwestern cuisine and made his name by elevating chile peppers, cilantro and corn, may put his culinary career on the back burner one of these days, he says.
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.
Listen carefully. That slurping sound you hear is from all the wine tastings -- a score or more -- happening at shops, restaurants and hotels around South Florida each week.
In the rolling hills of Tuscany, where the sun casts a yellow-green glow over the landscape, causing the grape vines and olive trees to vibrate with color, every good-sized hilltop sports an ancient rock castle. In the Middle Ages they were fortresses, grim redoubts from which warriors under siege poured cauldrons of boiling oil down onto enemy soldiers trying to top the walls with scaling ladders.
"You can eat spicy, sir?" Every time I order in a restaurant in this noisy, steamy, teeming, traffic-clogged, friendly and fascinating city, they ask me that. With the sweetest of smiles. But I'm worried. What are they preparing me for? Warning me against? Is there some hidden national conspiracy to fry the foreigner's palate, then protest that they tried to warn me?
High in the Serra de Montsant mountains 100 miles southwest of Barcelona, an intrepid group of winemakers has banded together to take an ancient, fallen wine area and restore it to past glories. It's called Priorato.
New Orleans, "The City That Care Forgot," clings proudly to the cuisine that time forgot, its huge portions, rich sauces and decadent desserts, be they in the Creole tradition of the seafood gumbo at Arnaud's, the Cajun "paneed" (breaded) rabbit at Brigtsen's or the traditional French Poulet Rochambeau at Galatoire's.
A waiter at Picasso, the elegant restaurant in the Bellagio Hotel whose walls boast eight real (if minor) paintings by that fabled artist, reports that one diner recently ordered six $19 servings of foie gras with pear butter and pomegranate -- all for himself. As long as this gambling city attracts high-living high rollers like him, its boom in fine restaurants seems likely to continue.
It's a cool, sunny morning, and the wineries of the Finger Lakes Wine Trail, in the rolling, vine-covered hills that slope down to deep blue Keuka, Seneca and Cayuga lakes in central New York, are pouring samples of their wares for visiting tourists. The wines are surprisingly varied -- both familiar and little-known, tracing the whole history of the American vine: chardonnay and riesling and merlot; baco noir and seyval blanc; catawba, elvira and Delaware.
After stumbling starts, Chile stands ready to make major splash in the world of top-value wines
How could I absorb a country in a week? Especially one as complex and contradictory as this? I couldn't. Dashing frantically from sensation to exotic sensation, at the peak of endurance every 18-hour day, I experienced the trip as a blur.
Flamingo, hippo among rare dishes
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