Review: Bulleit Rye
Tom Bulleit‘s “frontier” Bourbon has near-cult status among his admirers, and at long last the man has decided to branch out into a second product. That product is Bulleit Rye, “the worst kept secret” in the whiskey world and a smashing way for Bulleit to double its shelf space. Now this isn’t as big a…
Book Review: The Ultimate Wine Companion
For a book purporting to be the “ultimate” wine companion, this tome is awfully slim. No judgments, really, but anything claiming “ultimate” status always makes me wonder about where a writer’s bar of excellence may lie. Like the previously reviewed Whiskypedia, The Ultimate Wine Companion is not the work of one writer but rather a…
Review: 2008 Foppiano Estate Petite Sirah Russian River Valley
A notoriously tricky grape that makes often unpalatable wines, Foppiano proves it has the chops for handling Petite Sirah with aplomb. Aplomb to spare, even. The nose says plum and violets, but the body takes us to the woodshop: Fresh cut lumber, sawdust, and steel, plus underbrush, chocolate, more plums, and a tightly wound core…
Review: HelloCello Limoncello and BelloCello
Limoncello is a staple — literally, like bread — in Italy, and every tourist who visits seems to come back with an artisanal bottle or two. HelloCello is a new company based not in Firenze but here in the U.S., in Sonoma’s wine country, actually, where they make, technically, flavored brandies. We tried both the…
Tasting Report: Wines of the Santa Rita Hills 2011
Made famous by its appearance in the film Sideways, the Santa Rita Hills area near Santa Barbara is still riding high, thanks to a continued focus on quality winemaking, particularly in the realm of its storied Pinot Noirs. Recently a dozen or so wineries from the Sta. Rita AVA trekked up to San Francisco to…
Review: Deep Eddy Sweet Tea Vodka
I’ve never met a tea-flavored vodka I didn’t like, because I don’t think it’s possible to make a bad tea-flavored vodka. At popular request I sought out a bottle of Deep Eddy Sweet Tea Vodka, which is distinguished by its all natural ingredients, 10-times distillation, and sweetening that uses clover honey instead of high fructose…
Tasting Report: Tre Bicchieri Italian Wines – Chicago 2011
This year I bypassed the San Francisco Tre Bicchieri event — a celebration of the best in Italian wines, many of which aren’t available for sale in the U.S., hosted by Gambero Rosso — and took a quick trip to Chicago to experience Italian vino amidst the bitter cold and hospitable people of the midwestern…
Review: Macchu Pisco “La Diablata” Pisco
A new entry from Macchu Pisco (one of the bigger distributors of this Peruvian brandy worldwide, but whose standard product we’ve never reviewed), La Diablata is an “acholado” style pisco — a blend of three grapes: Quebranta, Moscatel, and Italia — which puts it in the same wheelhouse as Encanto. La Diablata, as the name…
