Finger Lakes Region Wine Excursion – Quality Wine Tours

A while back, darling StB and I were chatting about taking a brief weekend trip with the girls to taste wines in the Finger Lakes region.  After a bit of back and forth, I managed to pull together 7 girls to rent a house in Penn Yan.  I rented a ginormous SUV – consider that I currently drive a small Japanese car – and managed to figure out how to drive it.  Sort of.  That thing was heavy… no acceleration whatsoever!  While we were up there, I wanted to go wine tasting, but I didn’t want to be or need a [...]

Ridge Winery Tasting Night

Good friends are friends that host a little dinner party once in a while. Great friends used to work at a world-class winery and were gifted bottles of experimental wines that they held onto for years, waiting for the perfect opportunity to uncork and enjoy. So it was that two friends, about to give up on New York for a ’round-the-world adventure, had a few noted snobs and budding wine enthusiasts — and me — over for a night of indulging. E worked at Ridge Winery when she and S lived in the Bay area, and as a gift from [...]

Motorino

After the success of an all FBM girls’ dinner for the cookie swap, we decided we should try to meet once a month for dinner, chatter but mostly… food!  This month’s pick was pizza – we’re trying to keep it moderately priced, with some of us planning weddings, or being students, or just not wanting to spend a lot of money – and Motorino was chosen, though KC had been there before because she’d really liked it.  We decided to split a bottle of ‘the perfect pizza wine’ as the menu called it.  A semi-sparkling red served in juice cups, this [...]

Olivier Leflaive White Burgundy

I’ve attended wine tastings, but never one conducted over the Internet. Frederick Wildman, wine merchants in New York who invited me to a Trapiche tasting previously, added me to the shortlist recently to sample a variety of high-end white burgundies from a premier winery. Olivier Leflaive set up his winery in 1984, and through the past three decades has seemingly refined his ability to bring out the best in his Chardonnay grapes, expanding his holdings through the years to cover many villages and appellations in France to produce a wide range of high-end Burgundies. The evening tasting covered white Burgundies, [...]

Trapiche

The largest of the malbec producers in Argentina, Trapiche, sent winemaker Carla Castorina to visit their importers, Frederick Wildman and Sons, Ltd. I was fortunate enough to be invited to meet with her, along with several other beverage-type writers from blogs and newspapers and wine sites. Frederick Wildman redid their offices when they moved here decades ago, and the tasting room looks convincingly like a wine cellar — except for the sunny south-facing windows, granted — with a rounded ceiling (covered in stamped metal with a grapevine motif), brick wall behind the library of books in the picture above, and… [...]

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