A Visit to Berkeley’s Broc Cellars
All Photography by Leila Seppa. Chris Brockway, originally a Philosophy major from Nebraska, has built a chic city winery, complete with spacious tasting room, in the industrial lands of West Berkeley. One side of Broc Cellars is filled with tanks, barrels, and wine being made with fruit sourced from twelve different California vineyards. The other…
Tasting Chardonnay with Wente Vineyards, 2018
In honor of the recent National Chardonnay Day (May 24), our friends at Wente organized an interesting tasting: A horizontal lineup of five of its chardonnay wines, all from the 2016 vintage. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of Wente — which is the oldest continuously-operating winery in the state — to the California winemaking…
Review: Hine Rare, Homage, Antique, and H by Hine (2018)
While we’ve previously looked at a couple of special bottlings from Cognac’s Hine — the Domaines Hine single-vintage 2005 and 2006 releases — we haven’t done a deep dive into its more readily available expressions. This includes three brandies in the “great classics” line, plus the forward-looking “H by Hine,” a VSOP brandy designed primarily to…
Review: Smooth Ambler Big Level Wheated Bourbon
It’s been a few years since we last checked in with West Virginia’s Smooth Ambler, one of the best-known and longest-lived craft whiskey producers in the U.S. (And now owned by Pernod Ricard.) Smooth Ambler’s latest is a wholly new product called Big Level, a wheated bourbon made entirely on site (with no sourced whiskey…
Tasting Report: WhiskyFest Washington DC 2018
As with each of DC’s past three WhiskyFests, everyone in the room looked like they could use a few drinks. Thankfully, there was no shortage of unique whiskey options, from Knob Creek Single Barrel samples that were pulled directly from the barrel(!) to a young Tennessee whiskey whose distillery still doesn’t have a name. I…
Review: Bogart’s Irish Whiskey
John Wayne got a posthumous whiskey named after him, why not Bogie, too? Humphrey Bogart gets not just a whiskey, but a gin, vodka, and rum, so the man can totally dominate your bar. The whiskey, the only spirit we’re reviewing here, is Irish in origin — even though from what I can tell Bogart’s…
Review: Hotaling & Co. Genevieve Genever and Barrel Finished Genever
Those who say “genever isn’t gin” need to let the folks at San Francisco’s Anchor Distilling — now known as Hotaling & Co. — know. Here, their Genevieve is formally known as “genever-style gin,” and for good reason. While this genever is made from a mash of wheat, barley, and rye malts, distilled in a traditional…
Review: One Eight Distilling District Made Straight Bourbon
We reviewed a handful of products from Washington, D.C.-based One Eight Distilling late last year, including Rock Creek Rye, which was the first whiskey to be distilled, aged, and bottled in the District since Prohibition. But the distillery hasn’t let off the gas, delivering D.C.’s first straight bourbon not long after those reviews. Now with…
