Bigger Than Your Head
July 29, 2010
15:49
Awesomest Sammich!
O.K., on the left side of the plate, a slice of olive-oil toasted bread piled with marinated red onions, roasted red peppers, roasted eggplant, roasted Portobello mushrooms and arugula; on the right side of the plate, another slice of olive-oil toasted bread with match-stick slices of hard salami and shredded feta cheese. Slap ‘em together, [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
July 27, 2010
22:20
Root Beer Journal III: Frostie, a Soft Drink Meltdown
Let’s just get this said right up front: Frostie Root Beer is terrible. Certainly it’s a well-known brand, with its jolly, frosty little elf on every bottle. The brand was created in Catonsville, Maryland, in 1939. It was sold to Monarch Beverage Co. of Atlanta in 1979, purchased by Leading Edge Brands of Temple, Texas, [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
01:07
Wine of the Week
How much would you pay for a bottle of Prosecco? You’re thinking, $18, $20 tops, right? Or even less? What if I told you that there is a segment of Prosecco that is positioning itself to compete, price-wise, with sparkling wines in the $30- to $45-range? These products are from a small area within the Valdobbiadene [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
July 24, 2010
22:53
Chenin Blanc, Pinot Gris & Summery Dinners
We continue to work our way through one of our favorite cookbooks, Jamie’s Italy (Hyperion, $34.95), by British chef and cooking personality Jamie Oliver. Many of the dishes he presents are eminently suited to the ferociously hot weather we’re enduring, that is, cooking is at a minimum (well, risotto takes some time at the stove) [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
July 22, 2010
16:03
What If You Think You Got the Wrong Glass of Wine?
July 14 being Bastille Day, we went out to eat steak frites. Completely logical, mais non? Somewhat illogically, the restaurant which we went to, while having a French chef and serving mainly Euro/bistro-style fare, features almost all California wines on its list. The chef told me, in an interview at the beginning of this year, [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
July 19, 2010
21:29
Wine of the Week
Judy Jordan, daughter of Tom and Sally Jordan, owners of the well-known Jordan Vineyard & Winery in Alexander Valley, could have stayed in the family business, but elected to start her own winery in 1986. While Jordan concentrates on cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay, Judy’s idea was to stay in Sonoma County but focus on the [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
July 17, 2010
20:46
Omelet aux fines herbes & J.M. Broillot “Chatalienne” Rully 2007
LL visited one of our favorite restaurants last night, sans moi, but with colleagues from the university and a visiting curator. So, left to my feeble devices, I conjured an omelet aux fines herbes, with minced fresh oregano, thyme and tarragon and two chopped black olives. I dribbled olive oil on a couple of slices [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
July 16, 2010
20:36
Cold Tomato Pasta & Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais-Villages 2009
Last night we made one of our favorite warm — make that brutally hot — weather dishes, the pasta with cold tomato sauce from a book we have been using for years, Sally Schneider’s The Art of Low-Calorie Cooking (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1990, large-format paperback edition, 1993). Our well-used copy of the book is [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
July 13, 2010
20:04
What’s So Fine about Fine Wine Anyway?
Many issues confront writers about and consumers of fine wine at this point in space and time, shifting entities worthy of debate themselves. The very concept of writing about wine and the differences among writing, criticizing and reviewing are subjects of a great deal of discussion on the world’s wine blogs, along with the efficacy [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
July 12, 2010
20:54
Wine of the Week
The venerable and extensive Badia a Coltibuono estate in Tuscany goes back a thousand years, to the time of patient, tireless monks toiling in the hillside vineyards. The property, now almost 2,300 acres, is owned by the Stucchi Prinetti family, descendants of Florentine banker Guido Giuntini who acquired the estate in 1846. In addition [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
July 10, 2010
19:27
A Lovely Kabinett
LL seared a fillet of salmon, just with salt, pepper and lemon juice, and braised baby bok choy with garlic and, um, other stuff, while I made sweet potato oven-fries dusted with cumin and chili powder. A simple and delicious dinner. I opened a truly lovely German wine from the Nahe region, the Kruger-Rumpf Münsterer Rheinberg [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
04:16
Root Beer Journal II: With a Name Like “Natural,” It Has To Be Good
Natural Brew Draft Root Beer is made by Smucker Natural Foods, Inc., of Chico, Ca., a division of The J.M. Smucker Co. The well-known parent company, a producer of jams and jellies, peanut butter and other products, was founded in 1897 by Jerome Monroe Smucker; it is operated by the family’s fourth generation and headquartered [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
July 6, 2010
18:13
Wine of the Week
You may have to do a little ferreting around to find this wine, but it will be worth the effort, I promise. It’s the Dominique Cornin Mâcon-Chaintré 2007, a 100 percent chardonnay wine made in the Mâcon-Villages appellation in the southern part of Burgundy. The domaine is run by brothers Dominique and Romain Cornin and [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
July 5, 2010
23:29
How about Some Independence on Independence Day?
July 4 is our country’s Independence Day. How about on July 5, we declare independence from oak. Yesterday, as befits a patriotic mood, I made a tomato salsa and then fired up the old Weber and grilled some split-open bratwurst and wedges of baguette; LL made potato salad. Voila! A very nice Fourth of July supper, [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
July 4, 2010
20:04
100 Wines: A Chronicle, #38 and #39
Rodney Strong planted vines in Sonoma in 1959, when the county could claim only a dozen wineries and the primary crop was prunes. Originally from rural Washington state, Strong improbably became a dancer and choreographer, performing on Broadway and in many theaters around the world. He discovered fine wine in Paris, and when he decided [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
July 3, 2010
22:27
So Tired of the Samo-Samo
So I open this nifty bottle of $20 cabernet from, say, Napa Valley and, let’s see, the alcohol is 14.5 to 15 percent, it has dollops of merlot and cabernet franc and a touch of syrah — people are so clever nowadays! — it smells like vanilla-laced, toasty oak and cassis and, you know, it’s [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
July 1, 2010
19:48
Root Beer Journal I: Dad’s Old Fashioned® Root Beer
I have loved root beer since childhood. Though the national and indeed international realms of soft drinks are dominated by the cola-type sodas manufactured by the conglomerates, root beer holds a place in the hearts of many Americans, not only because of the beverage’s individuality (and its appeal to fans of handcrafted techniques) but because [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
June 30, 2010
21:58
Two Great Wines: Second Quarter of 2010
We continue with a series that presents two great wines that I tasted within the last three months — April, May and June for this post — but didn’t get an opportunity to write about. These wines were samples for review. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The “regular” bottling of Renaissance Winery’s Roussanne 2006 was released early in 2009. A year [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
June 28, 2010
20:32
Wine of the Week
Every print and online wine publication in the Northern Hemisphere has been promoting what we’ll call Wines for Summer Sipping lately, and here at BTYH we’re no different. Few activities are more relaxing than sitting on the porch or patio, lounging by the pool or gamboling in forest cool and dim or meadow wide and [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
June 27, 2010
18:11
Bigger Than Your Head Wins Again
Dear Readers … I learned yesterday that this blog — affectionately pronounced “Btyh” by its many fans — won the “Best Wine Reviews” category in the 2010 Wine Blog Awards now operated by Open Wine Consortium. The awards were announced Friday afternoon at the annual Wine Bloggers Conference, held this year in Walla Walla — [...]
Categories: Wine Blogs in English
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