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What Is This Thing? Buzzballz Choco Chiller
Welcome to another edition of What Is This Thing?, in which your intrepid wine blogger reviews wine-adjacent, wine-ish, and not-quite-wine products. Fact: Despite their liquor-shooter appearance and sexually suggestive names, Buzzballz Chillers are technically wine. “Orange Wine With Cream & Natural Flavors,” to be precise. It’s all part of Buzzballz’s unique genius, and one of…
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Pour one out for Trova Wine Market as Dallas beverage scene continues a string of closures
CultureMap Dallas reports that Trova Wine + Market is closing next week, on January 18, 2025. It’s the latest in a series of sales and closures as Dallas’s wine and beer venues continue their rapid churn. Since 2020, the bar, bottle shop, and gourmet food market has offered wine and nibbles to a ritzy clientele…
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Don’t Napa my Fredericksburg: Can Texas wineries stay affordable?
The Californication will continue until morale improves! Yes, it’s true: Tech and finance dollars–combined with voracious agrotourism–are coming for Texas’s wine industry. The great relocation of California residents to Texas has kept up its pace, remaining the largest state-to-state migration pattern every single year since 2020. We’re all feeling anxious about it. “Don’t California My…
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How to conquer the wine list: 7 tips for ordering like a pro
“Have you had a chance to look over the wine list?” It’s a simple question that strikes panic in the wine beginner’s heart. There’s a double-sided piece of paper (or maybe it’s an entire binder) in your hands and there’s all these foreign words and what seems like random prices. You want to find a…
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Book Review: Oz Clarke’s Story of Wine (2024)
Think about the first wine you ever tasted. Can you remember the flavors, the label, the people who were with you? Place the bottle, in memory, on the left-hand side of a vastly wide, hypothetical shelf. Now think of your most recent wine–the one that’s still open in your fridge, or whose empty bottle may…
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The 6 biggest wine stories of 2024
Happy New Year from The Wine Fairy–and for bloggers and scrollers, a very happy List Week! This is the time of year when all of our favorite wine critics are posting lists of their top bottles of the year. We didn’t keep good enough tasting notes in 2024…so yeah, we’re not doing that. Instead, our…
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“Flabby,” “smooth,” “precise”? These 7 wine words are past their prime
When I read too many wine reviews, I feel like I’m getting smarter and dumber at the same time. On the one hand, I’m learning to talk about wine like the pros do! On the other hand, I’m ingesting a florid word salad that leaves me even more confused about what’s in the bottle. In…
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Hold the wine diamonds, please! A hot take on cold stabilization
One Thursday afternoon, not too long ago, I was sitting at a local sports bar enjoying a whiskey and a Mavs game. My companion, perhaps against her better judgment, ordered the house red, a Pinot Noir. Out came the glass: Pigeons-blood ruby, filled a half-inch from the brim, and speckled with shards of a glass-like…
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There’s tomato wine, who knew?
Last week, Pizza Hut dropped a product on the world that we didn’t know we needed: Pizza wine. Not wine to pair with pizza (although you could, I guess) but pizza-flavored wine. Made from tomatoes. It comes in a 375 ml bottle for $25, and there’s also a gift set ($60) with two stainless steel…
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Five wine trends I can do without
Wine trends come, wine trends go. But grumpy listicles (like this one) are forever. Which recent wine trends are truly bad, which are merely overexposed, and which are we picking on just to get some easy contrarian clickthroughs? Time to get grumpy and hurt some feelings! Let’s go! Wine Trend I Can Do Without #1:…
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Total Wine’s Grand Reserve status: Worth it?
Today’s blog post combines two of my very favorite topics: Wine (or course) and rewards points/churning. Total Wine is one of the nation’s largest wine retailers–and if you ever shop there, you may know that they have a tiered status/rewards system as part of their loyalty program. The program is officially called “&More Rewards” and…