Book Review: Inside the Bottle
Arthur Shaprio is a legendary wine and spirits industry maven who has seen every trick in the booze industry marketing playbook. He is also the author of Booze Business, an exhaustive blog dissecting both the history and the current trends in the industry, and Inside the Bottle is his book. I should, perhaps, clarify: Inside the Bottle…
Review: Flora Springs 2015 Soliloquy, 2013 Holiday Blend, and 2014 Trilogy
Napa’s Flora Springs has been making wine since 1978. Here are three new releases from the company (all late 2016 launches that you should be able to find on the market today, with the possible exception of the Holiday bottling). Thoughts follow. 2015 Flora Springs Soliloquy Sauvignon Blanc Oakville – Surprisingly honeyed for a sauvignon…
Review: Antech NV Brut Nature and 2014 Emotion – Sparkling Limoux Wines
Limoux is a region within the Languedoc best known as the most likely birthplace of sparkling wine. Records dating back to 1531 show that local monks had developed the technique that closely resembles that of Prosecco. Today, Limoux wines are the second most imported French sparkling wine, after Champagne. Limoux sparkling wines come in two…
Do Sulfites in Wine Give You Headaches?
For many wine drinkers, one of the first things they consider when buying wine is whether their bottle contains headache-inducing sulfites. But are sulfites as bad as they are painted out to be? Do they really cause headaches, and if so, how does one avoid them? The term “sulfite” refers broadly to a group of…
Review: Santa Fe Spirits Colkegan Single Malt Whisky
A name like Colkegan may evoke Ireland, or perhaps Scotland… but not exactly New Mexico, does it? Nevertheless, here we are with a distinctly American single malt — its barley dried not with peat but with mesquite — double pot-distilled, and aged (time unstated) in casks at 7000 feet above sea level (yes, in the Santa…
Review: LIQS Ready To Drink Whiskey Fireshot
A late addition to the (reformulated) LIQS ready-to-serve shot lineup is this, a creamy “whiskey fireshot” made up of whiskey, cinnamon, and vanilla. The name is a bit misleading, because while this creamy concoction may have a fiery cinnamon kick up front, it’s quite cooling thanks to Irish cream consistency and heavily vanilla-chocolate finish. That said,…
Recipe: Homemade Beer Cheese
Many of us had our first taste of beer cheese at the local brew-pub. But it’s easy to make your own at home! We picked up this beer cheese recipe from HomeBrewChef and cooked up two variations. The beer we used for the first batch was Armstrong Stout from Fogbelt Brewing Company. We added bacon…
Review: Gem&Bolt Mezcal
Gem&Bolt? Such a bizarre product name doesn’t come our way too often. In this case, one has to surmise, the Gem refers to the mezcal base of the product, and the Bolt is the little something extra added — Damiana, which is a popular herb in Latin America and which is sometimes used to make…
