Back in roughly 2012 when I was a dozen years younger and two dozen pounds lighter I had decided it would be fruitful to take a series of courses at the Philly Wine School. This was back in the days when they were up on Fairmount Ave and I was parking by the Eastern State…

I’ll tell you something, it’s been a heck of a weekend, and a heck of a Monday, and coming up with a new article every week can be tough. So this week we’ll be revisiting an essay from the Annals of Wine Writing on a topic covered almost a year ago to the day that’s…

About ten or so years ago, maybe 2012-ish, man of mystery and friend of the store Frank opened a bottle of wine with some of us back at the bar on a quiet weekend evening. This wine was a humble Cotes-du-Rhone Rouge by Domaine Charvin, in fact it might have even carried an even less…

Have you ever purchased a bottle of white wine and you notice what look like little crystals at the bottom of the bottle? Or opened a nice 20 year old bottle of Barolo from your cellar and noticed as you pour the last glass out of the bottle that there are gritty bits in the…

It’s an iconic scene, a server at a restaurant pours about an ounce of wine for the person who ordered wine for the table. The diner looks at the wine in the glass, swirls it, sniffs it, takes a small sip, and quietly nods. The server pours a glass for the other guests, and finally…

Over the weekend friend, and long time customer, Chris was in the store and we got talking about some wine literature that we’ve read. One of the books Chris had recently read referenced phylloxera, and it occurred to me that it’s a subject that comes up frequently at tasting events and in wine writing, but…

After last week’s column on sherry, two events of relevance happened. Item one, of course somebody came in looking for dry sherry to cook with, and of course the recipe didn’t specify what kind of dry sherry. Item number two was an email from Ian, one of our readers, who asked about the topic of…

People of a certain age may recall a time when Fraiser Crane would turn to his brother Niles and offer him a glass of pale colored sherry from their decanter. When I was younger and watching this show in syndication the decanter of sherry just signaled to me as a sign of sophistication. As I…

I’ll start by getting out ahead of myself and admitting, yes, this is going to be something of a “in my day,” sort of opinion peace… because in my day, the kids were all drinking Burgundy and joyriding around town in Bonneville convertibles, listening to rock and or roll! Ok, I’m not that old, but…