Cupid’s holiday has always been a day of wine and roses. I can’t help you with the flowers, but some wines are better suited to Valentine’s Day than others.

Marc De Kuyper, 11th generation of the Dutch family that produces a rainbow of popular hard-partying liqueurs, didn’t exactly have a free ride into the business. He had to get the right degrees and succeed at several other jobs first. Finally, with an impressive resume in hand, he had to go through a series of formal interviews, business exams and psychological and IQ testing at De Kuyper Royal Distillers, which was founded in 1695 and has always been run by the family.

Wow. The street price for a ticket to Super Bowl XLV is reportedly $2,000 and up. Way up. And an RV parking space for tailgating at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, where the average February high is 40 degrees, is $900.

Ask any good cook: When you make a complex dish such as curry chicken, you’re blending a dozen or more flavors — cardamom, turmeric, cumin, chilies, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, coriander, mustard, garlic, fennel, black pepper and others. Oh, and chicken.

Snow and cold weather blanket the Midwest and Northeast, and Miami is having its version of a cold snap, with daily highs barely in the mid-70s. It’s time for comfort foods – beef stews, macaroni and cheese, tuna casserole, chili.

It used to be that when winemakers blended two or more grapes into a wine, it was so the strengths of one could make up for the weaknesses of the others. France’s Bordeaux red had cabernet sauvignon for flavor and structure, malbec for its inky color, merlot for sweet and fleshy fruit.

It’s not easy being Alessio Planeta, traveling the world to sell the wines of his native Sicily.

It’s been a fabulous year for wine. Fans of the grape, whether Tea Party types or Occupy Wall Streeters, revolted and demanded cheaper wines. Sellers cut $90 wines to $50.

Beer for the holidays? Why not? It’s certainly in the right spirit. Kindly old Ben Franklin once said: “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

Wines and beers with South Florida ties make gifts in good taste

As New Year’s Eve approaches, the question arises: Where do the bubbles in bubbly come from?

Alex Elman cried every night.

Wine’s a great holiday gift. Most people appreciate it, for their future guests if not for themselves. At worse, it’ll be an elegant re-gift next season. You can bet your giftee will not be taking it back to the return counter.

Your friend/lover/colleague/boss is seriously into wine. He/she has so many bottles there’s no point in giving another. So what do you give this holiday season? A book about wine. There are lots of good ones out there. Here are a few I’ve come across:

What’s the most important thing about the day after Thanksgiving?

Take a chocolate-covered cherry candy, turn it somehow into a red wine, and you’d have malbec — maybe the world’s most user-friendly red wine.

Miami trial lawyer Mark Tobin is a weekend winemaker with a growing reputation

Suddenly, moscato is hot. Young wine fans who didn’t get the memo that sweet wines are uncool are drinking it as an aperitif and with mild cheeses, fruit and fruity desserts, even with spicy Thai, Szechuan and other Asian dishes.

Over three busy days last month, I was one of 25 judges from around the country who tasted more than 1,000 wines from more than 150 vineyards at the Sonoma Harvest Fair Wine Competition in Santa Rosa, Calif.

France’s Loire Valley is its own little 300-square-mile wine country, going its own way and doing very well at it.

It’s a bitter world out there judging from the growing tide of cocktail bitters, digestifs and aperitifs.

Austrian wines have had their ups and downs. Grapes were planted there in 500 B.C. by Celtish invaders, destroyed in 300 A.D. by barbarian hordes who didn’t appreciate a good glass of wine and restored in 700 by Charlemagne, who did. Then, in 1985, production dropped by 80 percent after a scandal in which a few winemakers illegally sweetened their wares with an illegal additive.

Labor Day’s over. The kids are off to school or college. Suddenly we’re empty-nesters — at least for part of the day. It’s time for some mommy-and-daddy fun.

Revenge is sweet. In the past few weeks I’ve written about sweet white wines and sweet red wines — not supersweet dessert wines, but semisweet table wines to have with lunch or dinner.

If life’s too short to drink bad wine, it’s also too precious to drink the same wine day in and out. Even if you like it.

Last week I wrote about sweet red table wines, then cringed awaiting the disapprobation of discriminating wine fans who find them not up to the fine standards of dry wines.

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?

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.

Standing atop the stone staircase on Cerro Santa Lucia, the hill on which this city was founded in 1541, looking east past the verdant vineyards that dot the suburbs, you can see the dramatic, snow-capped Andes.