Who is man enough for an impossible food-wine pairing? Well, for those with a set of steel, head on over to the seventh (!) annual World Testicle Cooking Championship in Serbia. There, the AP reports that chefs prepare bull, boar, camel, ostrich and kangaroo testicles in such dishes as testicle pizza and testicles in bechamel sauce. Outback oysters! Needless to say, the AP ensures us that “visitors eat the dishes with plenty of wine or... 

A couple of years ago, I had an op-ed in the NYT arguing for wine in a box. Since then, box wine sales have skyrocketed and many more selections, both foreign and domestic, have come on the market. But one category that seems woefully underrepresented stateside is rosé. Given that it is perhaps the quintessential “here today, gone tomorrow” kind of wine, it seems particularly well-suited for the bag-in-box format. Fridges across... 

How often is the alcohol level stated on the label consistent with what is actually in the bottle? Wines are allowed a certain fudge factor between what appears on the label and what is actually in the bottle. For wines under 14%, the wine can fluctuate by 1.5 percentage points, which explains why so many wines have traditionally been labeled 12.5% since that gave the maximum flexibility. Above 14%, the producer must pay a higher tax ($1.57... 

Chilled red. It sounds like an oxymoron. Or something that would get your membership revoked at the club. But, in fact, it works. The key is to choose a red wine that is low in tannin, which explains why Beaujolais from the thin-skinned Gamay grape, often is the prime red candidate for chilling. Bringing the wine’s temperature down to say 55 degrees, gives the wine an added refreshment value (you can slip one of those ice…  Read More →

SIPPED: X-Ray vision for wine lists? The above image comes from wondertonic.tumblr.com SIPPED: satire HoseMaster continues his discussion of Carbon Footprint wines, including “Creeping Deforestation” & “Screw the Ozone” [ HoseMaster of Wine ] SIPPED: dug up from the cellar “Perth Pink….This is not a wine for drinking, this is a wine for laying down and avoiding.” An old Monty Python wine sketch... 

A few weeks ago I mentioned my sordid past, I mean, my previous career as a wine maker . To be honest I don’t really miss my days treading on grapes and playing with yeast and barrels. Sure it was fun and I did get to work with some very talented and entertaining characters, but the truth is…. the best thing about wine is drinking it . And I still get to do plenty of that. When stonesoup readers Erin S. and Marie both requested I... 

Eric Asimov discusses Txakolina, Txakoli or Chacoli, wines of Basque Country.  Read More →

The world wine glut just found a new category of consumer: cows. A farmer in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley is feeding her cattle red wine for the last 90 days before slaughter. According to the Vancouver Sun , Janice Ravndahl of Sezmu Meats stumbled on the idea while watching chef Gordon Ramsey feed beer to pigs on his show, The F Word. Because she thought her Angus would get bloated from the carbonation in beer, she started feeding... 

SIPPED: jug wine A sports bra modified to contain 25 ounces of wine and fitted with a nozzle is making the rounds again . Dubbed the “Wine Rack,” it is the companion to the “ Beer Belly ” for men. SPIT: New York wine An Albany blogger throws a flag on the new Jets wine play for not being a wine from New York State, especially after state funds subsidized their pre-season training. SPIT and a SHRUG: leafroll virus The... 

Wine writers, already about as endangered as the Iberian lynx thanks to the sagging media world (not screwcaps), have something new to fear– automatically generated tasting notes ! Have a taste of what the site spits out: Fully refined almost corpulent Chenin Blanc. Hits you with sage, boggling cardboard and bashful mint. Drink now through 2009. Now, a sample of “extra silly:” Neo-classic but equally longingly elegant Zinfandel.... 

Aria wine bar, opened last month in the West Village, emphasizes wines made using organic using biodynamic methods as well as wines made by women . Christy Frank , who owns a small wine shop downtown, tweeted that she was heading there last week to sample the all-women wine list, seeking out “ Brix by chicks ” (geek alert: Brix are a measure of sugar in grapes). Eric Asimov chimed in : “No pricks?” I asked Christy on... 

SPIT: en primeur scores? James Suckling is retiring from Wine Spectator after 29 years. An announcement states that reviewers James Molesworth and Bruce Sanderson will assume the duties for Bordeaux and Italy respectively. Further, “The wines will be reviewed in our standard blind-tastings in the company’s New York office.” Given that Molesworth does not rate barrel samples, is the the end of the magazine’s participation... 

A pair of simple, delicious French recipes this week—Mussels steamed in wine with shallots, garlic and lots of parsley and oven-fried pommes frites flavored with herbes de Provence. Lafayette, we… [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]  Read More →

The British tabloid The Sun reports on wine fraud at a British supermarket: a wine consumer in Britain says he bought an obviously fake bottle of Louis Jadot Pouilly-Fuissé on closeout at Tesco. The consumer says that the label was so bad that it “looked photocopied” and had a screwcap instead of the normal cork closure. Moreover, he told The Sun , that it didn’t pass his taste test at home: “Instead of a nice French Burgundy,... 

Have you ever looked at a wine list and wished that you might want to try a half a bottle of one wine and a half a bottle of another wine? At Bar Henry, that dream can become reality. John Slover, who previously worked at Cru, has assembled a wine list with 116 wines on the “market” list. Order any wine off this list and they will pour off half of it and charge you–gasp!–half the price of the full bottle. The remaining...