If you were to drive through West Texas, the last thing that you would expect to find would be vineyards.  The whole area is one big dust bowl, brown and vacant.  The only interruption to the staked plains is the occasional field of cotton.  That is slowly changing. I have several friends who have farmed in this area for a [...]

Great post from the Broke Wino blog with some suggestion on finding good, cheap wine.  I think that his location suggestion is a great one.  There is definitely better value to be found in certain areas than others.  I have found 2007 Cotes du Rhone for $9, which for a good vintage of French wine is pretty good.  Certainly it's [...]

I always love to get recommendations from friends about new wines to try out.  One of my friends told me that I should give the Marietta Old Vine Red that our local grocery store has been carrying recently.  He said that this was a great $12 Zinfandel, so when I decided to grill some steaks this weekend, I thought I [...]

I was listening to the Wine Biz Radio podcast the other day and they mentioned a great blog post from the 1WineDude blog about rapid fire wine assessment.  This post made me hang my head in shame.  I am super guilty of this.  I often try to nail down my feelings on a wine in the first couple of minutes.  [...]

Around this time of year, everyone is talking about what they are thankful for.  It is really easy to just breeze past this and not really think about what you are genuinely thankful for.  I was thinking about it, and this year I really do have a lot of things to be thankful for. On the top of my list [...]

My wife has long suffered in silence from the ravages of wine headaches.  Ok, so maybe it wasn't really in silence, but the suffering was really there.  Her belief has long been that these headaches were due to added sulfites in the wine.  There are tons of posts on wine blogs about whether or not sulfites really can cause headaches, [...]

When you first get into wine you find that there is a lot to know. What's the difference between Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc? Why don't French wines have the variety on the label? How can a guy describe a wine as "poopy", but rate it a 95? Well, fear not, there are a lot of really good resources online [...]

I talked with a friend this week about playing around with taking some wine photos this weekend.  I had a few bottles of red wine, but wanted to grab a bottle of white to give us a little variety to work with.  Since this was really a last minute call, I decided to run over to a liquor store down [...]

We all have our wish lists.  For some of us it might be something simple, like a certain variety of wine that we have wanted to try.  For others who have more specific desires, it might be a pricey bottle of Rothschild.  Maybe it's just a grocery store favorite.  It's different for everyone.  Whatever your criteria, what bottle of wine [...]

This is usually the first question that a person asks when they hear some critic going on about the bacon that they smelled in their Malbec, or the starfruit in their Chardonnay.  I know that it was for me.  After starting to have my own experiences with identifying flavors and aromas in wine I started to think that Robert Parker [...]