Posted 07/31/2008 at 05:26 AM by Cathy
The face of wine's effort to fight global warming showed up at the Masona Grill in West Roxbury tonight, at a wine dinner hosted by BLM Wine + Spirits.The best news is that it isn't the face of an infant, or even a child. It's the face – and an attractive one at that – of a forward-looking youth, with one foot in the techniques of winemaking and the other foot lunging ahead, striding toward what is possible (and not-yet-possible) in the race toward carbon neutrality for the wine industry.The fac ...
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Posted 07/30/2008 at 05:11 AM by Cathy
We would be remiss if we skipped over Facebook in our series about wine on the internet. And we are nothing but duly diligent.So yes, we now have a profile on Facebook. And yes, you are welcome to join the 365daysofwine.com group. And most definitely, we will be utilizing Facebook (and Linked.com) to announce upcoming events we're hosting in and around Boston.What we're enjoying the most about Facebook at the moment are the Applications, like Fine Wines, Wine Beagles, and especially Bottlenotes. ...
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Posted 07/29/2008 at 03:35 AM by Cathy
Ever try a really amazing, new wine somewhere around town, then go so far as to try ordering a few extra bottles of it online, only to find that the winery doesn't ship to Massachusetts? Or, worse, that it doesn't have any distribution whatsoever in the Bay State, meaning that even your local wine shop can't their hands on it?You wouldn't be alone in your frustration. But, whether you've experienced this rigmarole or not, it's helpful as a Massachusetts consumer of wine to know the ins and outs ...
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Posted 07/28/2008 at 07:36 AM by Cathy
Imagine the benefits of an online tasting journal.No more random bits of paper with "2005 Boxler Pinot Gris!!!" scribbled on them. Or "Muscat = spice, apricot." Or "Say wines from Alsace, not Alsatian wine. An Alsatian is a dog."No more standing around a wine shop racking your brain, trying to remember the name of that Napa Syrah that completely threw you for a loop. No more frustrating yourself, or your friendly neighborhood retailer, as you struggle to describe the wine or even its label: "It ...
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Posted 07/27/2008 at 06:15 AM by Cathy
I've done virtual wine tastings on my computer before – Tastoria.com for example, and most recently Bin Ends' tasting on Twitter – but this was literally a virtual wine tasting. Literally virtual... Oy. What had I gotten myself into?I – and some 14.5 million other people – had gotten myself into Second Life. Second Life is a multiplayer online role-playing game. Register (for free), then download the software to your computer (which takes less than five minutes), and you've got access to a "digita ...
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Posted 07/26/2008 at 07:45 PM by Cathy
For a very long time, online social networks gave me the creeps. My perspective was cluttered by sightings of too many people revealing too much information way too soon into a "relationship." Or they revealed too much skin. Or both.Pleh.But once I started looking at online social networks as a business tool for initiating and developing connections and relationships, my perspective changed. Quickly.Within a few hours of activating my account on LinkedIn.com – just one of many online social netw ...
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Posted 07/25/2008 at 06:47 AM by Cathy
"There's so much out there. How do I know what's reliable?"That's the question on people's minds when they look to the internet for information about wine. It's a good question. A Google search for "wine" returns some 318 million hits; Cuil.com, Google's new competitor, returns 325 million hits. (Plus pictures. Plus sub-categories. Check it out.) Google narrows that number to 23 million for a "wine Boston" search, while Cuil lists a mere 1389 hits for the same search.That's a lot of intel. Where ...
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Posted 07/24/2008 at 07:42 PM by Cathy
By Gabriela Cordeiro AntunesLast night at the Boston Wine School, Jonathon Alsop criss-crossed provinces and territories to share – and in many cases to introduce – varietals and wines pressed from the Canadian tundra, er, terroir. From British Columbia to Québec, from Syrah to cider, Alsop demonstrated some of the excellent expressions of wine that Canada has to offer.The 2004 Henry of Pelham Baco Noir Reserve St. Catharines from Ontario, for example, owes its heritage to the hybridizer Françoi ...
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Posted 07/23/2008 at 09:00 PM by Cathy
Drinking wine every day in Boston means getting to know Boston - its people, its spaces, its quirks, its rules, its rule-breakers. But pick anything and do it daily in Boston - wine, bird watching, snapping a photograph wherever you are at 7:37 p.m., whatever - and you've carved out your angle for viewing this city in a very individual way. You'll see what's current and just-now-new. But - and sometimes this is even more int ...
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Posted 07/22/2008 at 11:37 PM by Cathy
Some people came to the St. Francis wine dinner at Legal Seafoods tonight because they always come to wine dinners here. I don't blame them – six wines and five courses at far less than you'd pay if you ordered off the menu. It's one of the best deals going, anywhere in Boston.Some people came to the St. Francis wine dinner because they know the wines and wanted more of them, preferably paired with Legal Seafoods' food. Who could blame them?And then there were the people who came because their f ...
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Posted 07/21/2008 at 07:46 PM by Cathy
By Grace GuI followed the guy with a paper bag about the size of a wine bottle tucked under his arm.Our destination for the night was a blind tasting hosted by thesecondglass.com's very first Expert Wine Tasting, held in a stylish Back Bay apartment. The twenty or so participants were representatives from all corners of the Boston wine world and we had come, as the invitation made clear, "to dork-out a bit and really chat about the vino."The vino turned out to be fifteen foil-obscured wines, and ...
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Posted 07/20/2008 at 12:15 AM by Cathy
They made it sound like it was no big deal.The folks at Lower Falls Wine Co. left a voicemail, or maybe it was an email – they were so casual about it, I hardly remember – saying that my order of wines had come in and was ready for pick-up at any time.It took me a minute before I remembered that the order they were so casual about was the same order (of 2006 Trimbach Muscat, to be precise) that I had been requesting at wine shops around Boston for the past 18 months.I'd seen other Trimbachs arou ...
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Posted 07/19/2008 at 06:35 PM by Cathy
Roquefort with Sauternes. English Stilton with Port. Some classic wine and cheese pairings are classic for good reason.But Tomino in Vinaccia? (That's buffalo milk cheese from the Campania region of Italy, aged 250 days under the lees of the red grape "maima di de concilis.") Or Riesling Sylvaner? (Cow's milk cheese from western Switzerland that's washed with Riesling Sylvaner wine during the cheese's aging process.)Not exactly classic in the Roquefort-Sauternes kind of way, these cheeses instea ...
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Posted 07/18/2008 at 09:48 PM by Cathy
There are times when, for different reasons, you really really want to like a wine. Maybe it's your best friend's favorite. Maybe everyone else at the table is raving about it. Maybe it was a gift from your college roommate who's just returned from two months in Bali and wants to share her escapades over this particular bottle.But – try as you might – the wine just isn't doing it for you.And you do try. You try it at different times of the day. You try it with food. You try it without food. You ...
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Posted 07/17/2008 at 10:30 PM by Cathy
Having friends over to share some wine is a lot like drinking a cup of tea. Neither happens quickly, and no one runs for the door afterward. Especially not after tasting six different wines in less than an hour, as we did tonight for the first online tasting that Bin Ends wine shop in Braintree hosted on Twitter.com.There were many reasons to linger, sip, and discuss. Six wines in under and hour was just too zippy, especially when there was so much new material to work with: with unfamiliar grap ...
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Posted 07/16/2008 at 08:28 PM by Cathy
Tell me about your website, www.passionatefoodie.blogspot.com. What content do you cover? What is your geographical focus??My blog deals with anything related to food, wine and spirits that sparks my interest. It includes reviews of restaurants, bakeries, markets, wine shops, wines, spirits, books, movies and other items. It also includes essays, commentary, upcoming events, recipes, polls and much more. Though my primary geographical focus is on Massachusetts, especially Boston and the northern ...
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Posted 07/15/2008 at 09:57 PM by Cathy
The lounge area at Dante, in the Royal Sonesta in Cambridge, may be the only place in town where popping open a laptop alongside your Sam Adams is acceptable and, dare we say, cool.At cocktail hour Dante is full of twenty- and thirty-something techie types for whom days and nights blur together in their devotion to work that is omnipresent. That blurring – of daytime, nighttime, and everything in between – seems to have flowed over from Dante's cliente to its chef and its bartender.I faced my of ...
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Posted 07/14/2008 at 10:54 PM by Cathy
Maybe they got it confused with Cocktail Week.Or maybe it was me who was confused. Here I was, all along, thinking a Bastille Day celebration would have something to do with France.Either that idea is too conventional for the hipper-than-thou crowd at Cafeteria Boston, or they know something I (and the annals of French history) do not. Either way, the Bastille Day Bash at Cafeteria Boston was not a bash, and it had nothing to do even in passing with Bastille Day.We left early.Here's why, for sta ...
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Posted 07/13/2008 at 10:31 PM by Cathy
You don't have to hit me over the head with a bottle of Ménage à Trois to know that sex sells. But no where does it sell more blatantly and more relentlessly than on the cocktail menu.Sex on the Beach. Between the Sheets. Very Sexy Cocktail. With competition like that, the cocktail menu at Vinalia on Summer Street in Boston – featuring The Flirt and Fallen Apple – seems pretty tame.This week Vinalia's special Cocktail Week menu features A Spanish and Italian Love Affair – that's G-rated, almos ...
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Posted 07/12/2008 at 06:04 PM by Cathy
Vinodivino held a tasting of southern French wines in their tiny but impeccably organized shop in Newton this afternoon. The provenance of three of the four wines was the Côtes du Rhône but one – the 2006 La Sauvageonne Coteaux du Languedoc Les Ruffes – was from the Languedoc. It caught my attention for many reasons.I'm in the middle of a bad streak of wines from the Languedoc. More precisely, it is Languedoc whites that have put the bug in my ear this summer. Reds are another story. For example ...
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Posted 07/11/2008 at 05:42 PM by Cathy
Excelsior's Summer of Lobster promotion is a draw. One and one-quarter pounds of Maine lobster heads the menu – each week it's a different preparation – along with a wine pairing recommendation to match. Later this month you'll find wood-oven roasted lobster tail and a lobster clambake, but tonight's menu featured the lobster with spaghettini Carbonara with pancetta, peas, and parmigiano-reggiano. I dove in. The lobster claw meat was cooked to just the right texture; the tail meat, still in its ...
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Posted 07/10/2008 at 11:22 PM by Cathy
Gordon's Sommelier Smackdown! is good theater.There's drama. Two competing sommeliers (tonight it was Kelly Collins of Rialto and Nick Johnson of Craigie St. Bistrot) taste four courses one at a time, then they have four minutes after each course to case the store and choose their perfect pairing off the shelf.There's live cooking. And the chefs soak up the spotlight indeed.And then there are the curveballs, otherwise known as secret ingredients or culinary enhancements of an otherwise standard ...
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Posted 07/09/2008 at 11:42 PM by Cathy
This week on 365daysofwine.com we're talking about the geography of a wine store. Tell me about how your wine section at Pamplemousse is mapped out. What does it look like, and how do people find their way around??Mapping wine is somewhat difficult, there are so many ways to categorize and space is limited. What has worked for us is to separate Old World wine and New World wines because they usually have different audiences. All of our French, Italian, and Spanish wines are grouped together. We ...
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Posted 07/08/2008 at 11:56 PM by Cathy
A three-man band tuned up in the bar area while we waited for the Red, White and Bleu wine and cheese tasting to start tonight at Les Zygomates.The band's riffs and starts. The brick design detail at the bar. The weathered-by-heavy-traffic hardwood floor. The wine bottle displays stepping up the side walls. The floor-to-ceiling front windows looking out onto the Leather District. It's all of these details that make this wine bar and bistro on South Street a great place to be as the sun goes down ...
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Posted 07/07/2008 at 09:57 AM by Cathy
When it comes to geography there are a few things to notice about the BRIX on Broad wine shop:? It's on Broad Street. Which means the Financial District. Which means deads-ville after 5 p.m. At least, it used to mean that. Now, with BRIX's "Alive After Five" wine tastings every week and their just-announced Saturday hours, there's good reason to go to the Financial District even if you really don't want anything to do with mutual funds.? In terms of the interior geography of BRIX, you won't find ...
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Posted 07/06/2008 at 04:51 PM by Cathy
Cape Ann Liquors on Bass Avenue in Gloucester is not the place to come if you're out looking for fancy wines. Fancy they are not, and neither is their inventory.But what they do have, that I fancy, is the best collection of local wines I have seen in a liquor store so far, including Rhode Island-based Greenvale Vineyards' Rosecliff Pinot Gris, the Greenvale Chardonnay, and the Skipping Stone white, a bottle of which I gladly took home with me.The Skipping Stone is a blend of Cayuga and Vidal Bla ...
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Posted 07/05/2008 at 10:26 PM by Cathy
Hand-written shelf talkers the size of a notepad hover near selections around the Lower Falls Wine Co. in Newton Lower Falls. And they cracked me up. "I had a love affair with this wine last night..." one shelf-talker said. As if the wine were something reciprocal. As if love affairs lasting one night were worth having. Hmmm..."We had an amazing experience at this winery last February and the wines have finally arrived!" another shelf-talker said. As if they were waiting all the while with bated bre ...
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Posted 07/04/2008 at 08:10 PM by Cathy
Samanta Turner's business card points out that Wine-Sense has "0.005574 hectares of meticulously-chosen wines from around the world."(That's 599.980 square feet, for anyone not yet on the metric system.)In other words, it's a really small shop.But what Turner loses in square footage (or hectares, as it were) she makes up for with a very, very carefully chosen inventory.She guided me around the shop like she was introducing me to her good friends at a cocktail party. Like any good host she practi ...
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Posted 07/03/2008 at 09:01 AM by Cathy
Tell me about QRW. What's your intention with the magazine? Who are you reaching out to, and what kind of stories will readers find in your pages? Our intention is to advance the cause of wine and passion about wine. Knowledge about wine is also what I want. I am still a teacher. Why did you start QRW? Because I wanted to write and read and learn. What better way than to start your own publication...How many years has QRW been published? What, in your opinion, are some of the most important tre ...
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Posted 07/02/2008 at 05:19 PM by Cathy
"People drink when the economy is good, and they drink more when the economy is not so good."That's Mike Martin of Constellation Brands being quoted in a Wall Street Journal article today about the alcohol industry's strong showing in an otherwise down economy. Martin also noted that consumers of Constellation's wine, beer and spirits are drinking less in restaurants and bars and more at home.That's good news for wine shops like The Spirited Gourmet in Belmont and BRIX on Broad in Boston, who bo ...
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Posted 07/01/2008 at 05:42 AM by Cathy
Twenty-seven years ago the Napa Valley Vintners established Auction Napa Valley, a philanthropic venture designed to celebrate Napa's collaborative tradition and to give back to the community at large.I don't know whether any Boston area wine lovers participated in the first auction 27 years ago, but I do know that they showed up, with bells on, for the 2008 auction a few weeks ago.Mike Gruber of Lexington, for example, has been attending the auction for the past five years. "We just go because ...
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