• Bottles and corks from 2011 Foxtrot Pinot Noir.
    Food and Wine Pairings - Pinot Noir/Nero - Varietals - Wine Tasting Notes

    Canadian Wine for Our American Holidays

    December 7, 2015 - By 

    Every year for the past 16 years, Julie and I have hosted a “Sunday Before Thanksgiving Thanksgiving Dinner.” Billed as a pre-Thanksgiving event for our friends who have become our extended family, the event has grown with the square footage of the house and the capacity of the kitchen. From a relatively modest dozen-or-so guests at the inaugural event in 1999, we had 40 guests this year, a near capacity crowd. The menu is steeped in holiday tradition, with a little variation around the edges, and wonderful wine. It has always been a protein-and-dessert-fest, featuring a very large, traditionally-oven-roasted turkey…

  • Ohio Wines - Pinot Noir/Nero - Wine

    Wayda’s Wine of the Week from Ohio’s Grand River Valley

    November 20, 2015 - By 

    It has been several weeks since I have published here because I have been wine traveling and hosting large food and wine parties – but I am back! Julie and I took a long, fabulous wine tasting trip in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, which you will be reading much more about in the next couple of weeks. We also have been entertaining this fall on a large scale, featuring some of our trip’s most interesting wine and food experiences, which I will write about as well. Great wine and food make for great parties. Now, as we prepare…

  • Cabernet Sauvignon - Varietals - Washington Wines - Wine Tasting Notes - Wineries

    Quilceda Creek: An American First Growth Wine

    October 1, 2015 - By 

    In the mid-1990s I was first introduced to the wines of Quilceda Creek, one of the early producers in Washington’s Columbia Valley. Julie was representing a client in a case in Seattle and she brought home a bottle. We just did not understand what we had. A year or two later, our friend Steve Hamm, a wine professional for 35+ years who I have mentioned in previous articles, hosted a ten-vintage vertical tasting of Quilceda Creek. None of us who were there, including Steve, can put a finger on exactly when the tasting was or which vintages were involved. But…

  • Wine - Wine Aging - Wine Storage

    Time in a (Wine) Bottle

    September 10, 2015 - By 

    What makes a wine special, and when should we drink those special bottles? You do not have to be a wine collector to have a collection of wine. We may think of the “serious” wine collector as someone with several hundred to several thousand bottles of wine preserved in some climate controlled space in a specially-designed room or a series of multi-thousand dollar specialty wine refrigerators. But I also know a lot of people who have just ten or twenty bottles of wine in a rack from Bed, Bath and Beyond that they keep in the basement. These many types…

  • Food and Wine Pairings - Wine

    Food and Wine Pairings: Barbecue & Wine

    August 18, 2015 - By 

    Sixteen years ago some friends of mine had a dream. They were all professionals, but they were also amateur foodies who, along with another friend of ours, had formed a competition barbecue cook team called the BBQ Boys. In 1998, the BBQ Boys shocked the barbecue world by winning the brisket competition at the American Royal barbecue competition in Kansas City. “Shocked” is a fair assessment. The BBQ Boys had not been doing barbecue competitions for very long, and they were cooking on a giant Weber kettle, not on some massive, towed, industrial smoker like most of their competition. Yet…

  • Ohio Wines - Varietals - Wine News - Wine Tasting Notes

    Promise and Challenges of Ohio Wine (Part 2)

    August 3, 2015 - By 

    Wine grapes, like Goldilocks, like it to be not too hot and not too cold. Growing grapes for fine wine requires avoiding temperature extremes. That is why most wine grapes in the world are grown between 30 degrees and 50 degrees latitude in both the northern and southern hemispheres. Those are the temperate climate zones, providing on average enough sun and a sufficient number of warm days to allow vinifera grapes to grow and ripen. It is not just about latitude. Microclimates can alter the average temperature and rainfall within a larger zone. Many of the most prestigious wine regions in the world…

  • Varietals - Wine News - Wineries

    Promise and Challenges of Ohio Wine (Part 1)

    July 15, 2015 - By 

    This is the first of a two-part series on Ohio wines, featuring last weekend’s North Market Ohio Wine Festival in Columbus, and some of my Ohio wine travels. There is so much history, and so many questions yet to be answered about where Ohio wines are going that this piece would be too long if I were to include it all. This article will look more broadly at the industry that is Ohio wine. Next time, I will review a number of Ohio wines that I would gladly recommend. __________________________________________________________   For a long time I have believed that there are…

  • Food and Wine Pairings - Personal - Restaurants and Wine Lists - Wine

    Guest Sommelier: First Time Selling Wine

    June 30, 2015 - By 

    When you get to the point as a wine lover that you know a little more than the average wine drinker, you get used to being asked to make wine recommendations. Your friends tend to hand you the wine list in restaurants or they call to ask what they should buy to drink for a special occasion or for no occasion at all. I have made choices of what to serve to many people at my home for one event or another. As I related in the last issue of this publication, I have also acted as the Wine Ombudsman…

  • Education - Wine Ombudsman - Wine Tasting Notes

    Introducing the Wine Ombudsman and Four Wines Under $15

    June 15, 2015 - By 

    In a technical, legal sense, an ombudsman is often a corporate or government official whose task it is to investigate allegations of wrongdoing against members of their organization. In a broader sense, however, an ombudsman functions as a trouble shooter and a problem solver, a go-between that seeks to address the needs of the public. That more general meaning was what I had in mind when I first conceived of the name “Wine Ombudsman.” It began simply as a way to help a friend who was organizing a fundraising event for the Alzheimer’s Association of Central Ohio. After the inaugural event…

  • Oregon Wines - Pinot Noir/Nero - Wine Tasting Notes

    Celebrating Oregon Wine Month with Thomas Pinot Noir

    June 1, 2015 - By 

    The month of May was Oregon Wine Month, and while I am not sure by what authority that designation was made, I nonetheless enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to drink more Oregon wines. In honor of Oregon Wine Month, I thought it would be fun to put together a tasting of one of the best, but also one of the least-widely known, Oregon Pinot Noirs. Several weeks ago, I invited a handful of central Ohio’s accomplished wine and food professionals to join me in tasting six vintages of the John Thomas Dundee Hills Pinot Noir. We tasted and evaluated the 2007…