Tag: dry wine

How Sweet It Is! 

The wine shop clerk told me the wine was very dry, but when I took my purchase home and pulled the cork, I found it to be too sweet for me. Yet again, I learned that taking the advice of wine store clerks can be a mixed bag, and often leads to an inappropriate purchase—…


Fourth of July Wine Sparklers Are Fun and Festive

Fourth of July recipes can be so fussy, instructing you to carve watermelon baskets, make precise stripes of fruit on flag-shaped desserts, and whip up elaborate, food coloring-tinted layer cakes. Yeah, definitely not my thing! Enter these spritzers…er, sparklers. (See what I did there?) A cocktail with two ingredients, made right in the serving pitcher,…


Wine and Food Pairings

I believe far too much is made of the “proper” wine and food pairings. I realize that many people have made their life’s work all about telling others which wines go best with which foods, but there are rarely perfect answers here, and even though certain basic guidelines are applicable, even the most authoritative experts…


Sweet or Dry — or Flabby

Decades ago, a German winemaker pulled a label-less bottle of riesling from a fabric bag, pulled the cork, and asked me to taste it. It was a time when most imported German rieslings were sweet and the winemaker asked me, “How much sugar do you think this wine has?” The wine was tart, but I…


Obscure Grapes

In early June, I will be a speaker at an industry technical conference in Geneva, New York, on a grape variety that, chances are, you have never heard of before, though it’s one that makes extremely nice red wines. Bryan Ulbrich, winemaker at his excellent winery Left Foot Charley, and I will explore the grape…


Pink Takes Its (Rightful) Place

There was a time not terribly long ago when winemakers had a deep, dark secret: The wines they were drinking were made just for themselves. One man, who had made some pretty beefy and concentrated red wines, told me in 2007 that he made a light rose just for himself. He laughed and called it…