Review: Tequila Zarpado Blanco
Latitude Beverage — which markets Hunt & Gather and Wheel Horse Whiskey — is getting into the tequila business. Tequila Zarpado is made in Jalisco at the Cavas de Don Max distillery, which I’m not familiar with but which has been around for decades. This is a low-cost, 100% agave product available exclusively as a…
Review: Wines of Unshackled, 2021 Releases
Unshackled is a new series of wines from the folks behind The Prisoner, a no-frills collection of California-designated wines with a clever, Enigma-style label design. At least four expressions are available; we received all but a rose. Let’s try them. 2020 Unshackled Sauvignon Blanc California – This exuberant expression of sauvignon blanc feels designed for…
Review: 2018 Colomé Malbec Estate
Prior to suggestion from a friend working with South American winemakers, I was tragically unfamiliar with this vineyard. It was a grave misstep on my part, as Colomé wines appear to garner high praise and consistently place on top 100 and best-of lists from our publishing colleagues. Let’s see if this 2018 Malbec meets high…
The Top 10 Wines for Winter 2022
Whether your summer was blazing hot and smoky or underwater thanks to hurricanes, you are probably, like us, welcoming the arrival of cooler months. This is our third annual Top 10 Wines for Winter writeup, and as usual we’ve scoured our archives to find 10 bottles that should serve you well as the double whammy…
Recipe: Smoke & Whisper
Part of the “modern classics” canon along with the Bramble and the Paper Plane, the Penicillin cocktail is another creation of New York’s Milk & Honey, dating back to somewhere in the vicinity of 2005. Unlike those cocktails, however, bartenders around the globe have taken the basic recipe and tweaked it this way and that…
Book Review: Spirits of the Otherworld
Allison Crawbeck and Rhys Everett are the proprietors of the Last Tuesday Society’s Cocktail Bar, which is part of the Viktor Wynd museum. A quick search into Viktor Wynd reveals Vik to be a “pataphysicist, writer, curator, collector, dilettante, naturalist, and antiquarian… [who] has put on over 500 literary salons, curated over forty art exhibitions…
Review: The Glenlivet Illicit Still 12 Years Old
The Glenlivet’s latest single malt is a 12 year old expression called Illicit Still, in honor of founder George Smith, who illegally distilled his whisky in handmade copper stills secreted away in the Glenlivet valley near the river Spey. The first release in what the distillery is calling its “Original Stories” series, Illicit Still is…
Review: 2019 Real del la 8 Rioja Tinto
Alberto Ore should be a name familiar to fans of Spanish and Portuguese wines. His Sierra de la Demanda Tinto and Escalada Do Bibei labels were reasonably smart purchases a few years ago, and I still have a bottle or two hanging back waiting to be poured in a year’s time. Expectations ran high when…
