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Practical Wine Advice

A collection of 20 issues

How to Serve Your Wines at the Proper Temperature

[Editor's Note: This is a version of an article that appeared as part of the Paso Uncorked educational series coordinated by the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance. If you haven't checked out the other articles in the series, they are highly recommended.] If I'm

Worried about preserving an opened bottle? Just stay cool.

Over recent weeks, I've received several questions from people wondering how to best preserve a partial bottle of wine for future consumption. Typically, they're wondering if they should invest in a system that replaces the air in the bottle with an inert gas, or in a

Can I get an ice bucket for my red?

If I'm in a restaurant and ask for an ice bucket, you're much more likely to see a bottle of red on the table (and a surprised server) than you are to see a white. And I'm likely to wave away the proffered ice

When wine tasting, step away from the carafe

I spent most of the last week on the road, making stops in New York, Portland, and Seattle. At each stop, I found myself confronted with tasters whose first action upon reaching my table was to pour water into their tasting glasses so as to rinse out whatever was in

How (and Why) to Decant a Wine

One question we get fairly often is whether to decant one of our wines. My typical answer is that most of our wines will benefit from some air when young, though it's more important for some wines than others. And a few of our older red wines have

What's that in my wine: tartrate crystals

A few weeks ago, we received the following email from a customer (edited to protect identity): Not the most pleasant of emails to receive. And I'm sure that to the customer who wrote, the surprise at the end of the bottle colored his experience of the wine he&

Terroir, Then and Now

Recently, along with Randall Grahm, Neal Rosenthal and Alice Feiring, I participated in a seminar at the Santa Fe Wine and Chile Festival on the subject of wine quality entitled, “The Winemaker, the Owner, the Merchant and the Author”. Greg O’Byrne, maestro of the festival, chose the participants to

Please DO sniff the Cork!

So, I've seen a proliferation of articles recently that promise to educate wine novices to not come across as novices. Whether this is a good thing is debatable; wouldn't you want an expert to explain things to you if you didn't understand how they

Sulfites in Wine - What's Causing my Headache?

In my recent post on lessons I've learned from blogging I recommend that bloggers write about the questions they find themselves asked all the time. Following my own advice, I realized I've recently answered several questions about sulfites in our wines. There are two phrasings to

Corks and Screwcaps: Not an open and shut case

I came back from a tasting today (the always excellent Central Coast Wine Classic) having again had my third discussion in a week with a consumer who was confused as to why we bottle some of our wines in Stelvin screwcaps, and others in cork. She asked if it was