Return to Bourbon & Branch
Finally I got a chance to visit the “big boy” room at Bourbon & Branch, after two trips to the Library for private events. Night and day, folks. Literally, night: It’s pitch dark inside B&B. We went in at 6 and came out around 8:15 while it was still light out and felt like zombies…
Tasting Gallo’s Gold Medal Awards, 2008 Releases
For three years now, the good folks at Gallo have hunted for the best artisan foodstuffs to pair with their wines. This year, seven winners were chosen, and the company was good enough to send some samples along with a bottle of their 2006 Gallo Family Sonoma Reserve Pinot Gris as a pairing. Both snacks…
Review: X-Rated Fusion Liqueur
Club drinks are a mixed bag, but in a canon that includes some awfully weak entries, X-Rated is possibly the best thing going. At 34 proof, it’s light enough to go down easy on its own. Almost too easy, really. It’s sweet, light, full of fruit, and so hot pink you’ll think you were drinking…
Review: Mascarade Liqueur
On paper, Mascarade sounds pretty interesting, as fruity mixers go, I mean: Peaches and apricots from France, Armagnac, and vodka. Not sure about mixing Armagnac and vodka but, sure, maybe this is just the upscale alternative to Southern Comfort that the market needed. I wish it was so. Mascarade just didn’t work for me. On…
Review: Cirrus Vodka
With its sun-and-cloud logo and baby blue color scheme, what would you expect from the 80-proof Cirrus Vodka? Something light, summery, perhaps partly cloudy even. Well you can’t judge a book by its cover nor a vodka by its bottle: Cirrus is serious stuff, heavy duty vodka that, if I didn’t know it was from…
Book Review: Peñín Guide to Spanish Wines 2008
José Peñín’s pets probably know more about Spanish wine than I do: It’s a complicated region to get a grasp on, hindered by a difficult-to-understand collection of wine regions (68 of them are formally recognized, and there are dozens of lesser regions, too), a variety of grapes not widely grown elsewhere, and the fact that…
Review: Rain Vodka
Another entry into the organic spirits universe, Rain (a product of Kentucky’s Buffalo Trace Distillery) is a widely available vodka that few will have trouble finding on store shelves. Pull that eye-catching blue stopper from the raindrop-shaped bottle and a sweet, perfumy aroma fills the air. Rain’s odor gave me much promise, but the taste…
Has California Wine Gone Off?
Alice Feiring writes today in the Los Angeles Times that she’s quit drinking wine from California because, in her mind, the wines have become “overblown, over-alcoholed, over-oaked, overpriced and over-manipulated.” It’s an old story, really: Some folks in the biz feel that certain critics (specifically Robert Parker) are being pandered to by winemakers who know…
