A cool concatenation of circumstances are happening this week and next. Anne is attending the Television Critics Association Press Tour, because Anne has another life as a TV critic (you can check out her TV blog at YourFamilyViewer.com). So, in honor of the OddBallGrape Wine FAQ contest, she’s asking some of the actors she’s hanging around their Wine FAQ.
Up today is Kunal Nayyar – Raj on The Big Bang Theory on CBS. (Anne did get a chance to interview Jim Parsons – aka Sheldon – but didn’t remember the
For some reason, we haven’t gotten very many entries in our Wine FAQ contest. We hope you guys are just waiting until the August 9 deadline to submit your questions.
Things got a little surreal last week. Technically, we were supposed to be taking a mini-vacation with Anne’s parents, tooling around the Santa Rita Hills and the Santa Ynez Valley. Okay, if part of your business is writing about wine, and you’re taking notes and pictures for your blog, it’s kind of hard to call what we were doing a vacation. Except that the better part of the experience was sharing something we love and are passionate about with folks we love and cherish.
BLD Restaurant in Los Angeles not only has a great menu and is fairly reasonably priced for the neighborhood, their wine list is something we’d like to see more often.
It’s not the selections – although they are very nice and interesting, as well. There aren’t too many, either. The list is comprehensive, but not overly long, so you’re not drowning in options. But that’s not what got us excited.
It’s how the wines are grouped – by characteristics.
Check it out here: BLD_Wine (or go to BLDrestaurant.com and click on Wines near the top).
Type: Dry red.Made With: Syrah.Plays Well With: Meat, meat, meat and more meat.
Look at the deep red color of this wine – it even looks rich. The nose is full of berries. And you can catch some of that same fruit in the flavor, even though it’s dry. Bone dry. As in no sweetness.
Add to that flavor some earthiness and you’ve got a wine that is made for something deep and hearty, like a slow-cooked beef brisket without the sweet sauce. Or a pile of garlic-stuffed olives, some good
We recently uncovered some tasting notes from a trip up north and found that we had written up a couple of wines from Summerland Winery.
It was one of those, “Oh, what the heck, let’s stop.” kind of things. The winery’s tasting room can be seen from the 101 freeway and we’d passed it any number of times before we decided to investigate.
The crucial point here was that we weren’t intentionally working at the time. Yeah, we really do go wine tasting just for the fun of it. So
A few weeks ago, Anne spoke at an alumni event for Northwestern University (she got her journalism degree at the university’s Medill School of Journalism). Afterward, we went out to dinner with some of the event organizers and fellow speakers. Since this blog was part of the panel discussion that Anne participated in, it’s pretty obvious we’re wine geeks.
So, naturally, we were asked to select a bottle of wine for the whole table. Figure ten different people, twelve different conversations going on at any given time and everyone is eating something different. And the idea is that you’re
Type: Dry red wineMade With: Pinot Noir grapes out of Santa Barbara County.Plays Well With: Grilled red meats – maybe a burger with some blue cheese.
Michael tasted this at the Pinot Days tasting in Santa Monica, California, earlier this year, and he caught something funny at the time. It was a slight funk in the glass.
How to describe funk? It’s one of those you know it when you taste it kinds of things. Something not fruity or other pops up and it doesn’t smell or taste good. Michael thinks this one could have been due to cork
