The indispensable tool for the Massachusetts adult beverage trade.
By

Harvey Finkel

Muy Caliente!

Spanish wines are on fire, and the hottest new restaurant in town is also Spanish. It’s true that wines from all over Spain are better than ever, but that reflects a gradual process. They are, subject to Euro-inflation, no longer so cheap as to engender guilt in the purchasing consumer....
Read More

Kosher Wines

Traditional kosher wine in the United States has been most often based upon Concord grapes grown in New York State, sweetened after fermentation (now often with less expensive corn syrup most of the year, but with cane sugar for Passover wines, because grains are not considered kosher for Passover by...
Read More

Kiwi’s Wine

Kim Crawford, founded in 1996, owns 11O acres of planted vineyard in Marlborough, Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay, of which 15 are in full production. Grapes are purchased in addition to bring total production to 13O,OOO cases, the majority exported to the US. The eponymous Kim Crawford made wine in South...
Read More

It’s A Miracle!

Here is a wine full of flavor and elegance, intense, focused, long in both finish and life span, evoking fruits, flowers, even minerals, yet amazingly transparent and ethereally light. No other wine possesses this combination of qualities, no Riesling grown elsewhere either. Can we explain? Is it the slate-rich soil,...
Read More

Clarendon Hill Reds

Wine production got its start 167 years ago in McLaren Vale, 22 miles south of Adelaide in South Australia. Its ups, of its many ups and downs, can be credited to men named Reynell, Hardy, Kelly, Manning, and Penfold. Now we can add a rather un-Australian name to the illustrious...
Read More

Garden of Robert Eden

Robert Eden paid us a visit, bearing his tasty wines and his biodynamic viticultural beliefs. The wines are produced at Eden’s garden, Chateau Maris, in the Minervois La Liviniere appellation of ancient Languedoc in Mediterranean southwestern France. This is beautiful country, once known for prolific production of bulk wines, now...
Read More

The Original Martini

Once, if one were asked to name a fine Californian winery, Louis M. Martini would be on most lips. Venerable and respected, it stood at the peak, along with Beaulieu, Inglenook and Charles Krug. But then, for reasons both clear and obscure, it fell below the radar. “Martini” would more...
Read More

Sonoma-Cutrer-Timeless

I took advantage of winemaker Terry Adams’s recent visit to Boston to catch up on the doings at Sonoma-Cutrer, whose wines I’ve been drinking since the beginning. Adams has been on hand since the winery opened, initially assisting Bill Bonetti, the founding winemaker, then succeeding him in 1991 when Bonetti...
Read More

That’s Not Very Lady-like

Ladybugs, now becoming a threat to our wine supply, were commonplace when I was a small boy in Brooklyn, even in that urban setting. We naively called them “potato bugs”. I don’t know why. They congregated on the large leaves of the small trees we called, with perfect logic, “potato-bug...
Read More

Of Mice and Men and Fat and Lean

The life-span extending effects of red wine’s resveratrol are being followed up the evolutionary scale by David A. Sinclair’s research group, which now reports positive results in a mammal, the mouse (published in nature November 2OO6). Recall* that prolongation of life had been demonstrated previously in resveratrol-treated yeast, roundworm, fruitfly,...
Read More