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Costco Advent Calendar Wine #23: Once Upon A Time Chocolate Red (France)
Every Wine Person (every Wine Person that I respect, anyway) has the same motto: Drink what you like. It’s true that learning is useful and exploring is enlightening. Wine tastes often drift over time, and they tend to evolve in a predictable way–often away from sweetness and toward nuance and complexity. But it’s dumb and…
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What Is This Thing? Fratelli Alessandria Barolo Chinato (NV)
It’s a wide, wide world of wine out there and there’s no way to taste it all in many lifetimes. I’m basically resigned to that fact. But even so, a completionist impulse lurks within the heart of every wine lover. So if I see something novel on a wine list or back bar, you can…
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Costco Advent Calendar Wine #2: El Campeón White Sangria (France)
Round Two of the Costco Wine Advent-ure is about to begin: El Campeón White Sangria. But is this bottle a champion, my friends? We’re about to put it to the test and find out. “Grape Wine with Natural Flavors” reads the back of the label…and that’s usually not a marker of a wine of quality.…
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A taste of heaven at Eden Hill Winery (Celina, TX)
Just north of Dallas, where the tollways end and the cornfields begin, is a little slice of wine paradise. Towering vines, friendly staff, and distinctive wines make Eden Hill Winery a delightful day trip from anywhere in the Metroplex. The 10-acre property is equipped with a tasting room, wine-making facilities, and two acres planted with…
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Texas wines and good times at Salado Winery Co. (Salado, TX)
Texas country highways in the springtime are idyllic, all blankets of wildflowers and baby cows. The April rains have made the grass tall and green. The smell of hickory and mesquite smoke hovers faintly in the air. And if you tire of the ever-thickening traffic as you pass through growing cities like Temple and Waco,…
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Review: Don Benigno Amontillado Sherry
Sherry is not easy to come by in this town, folks. (“Cherry? Yeah, we have cherry vodka.”) If you’re seeking Sherry (and you’re lucky), the liquor store person will lead you to a dusty shelf over by the jug wines, where approximately 95% of the fortified wines will be syrupy sweet and/or flavored. Even my…
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Review: La Tour Blanche “Emotions” Sauternes (2018)
Are you sweet on Sauternes? I certainly am! Sweet wines a usually get a bad rap in the wine world. Beginning wine drinkers tend to prefer sweeter tastes–a fact that causes many intermediate wine drinkers to assume that sweet wines must be basic or bad. But the nobly-rotted white wines from Bordeaux have a long…
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Review: Sandeman “Character” Medium-Dry Amontillado Sherry
Guess what? We are Sherry fans on this blog. Get us slightly tipsy at a wine bar, and we will never shut up about how delicious the aged, fortified wines from Jerez are. My readers are lucky that The Sherry Fairy is an even dumber name for a website than The Wine Fairy, or else…