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Less chic, less compact, it sprawls over a much larger area of bewilderingly diverse terroirs, which, when properly fit with grape variety and growing methods, yield wines as fine as anywhere. Sonoma County, now with more than a dozen appellations, can offer cool sites suitable for sparkling wines and delicate... Read More

Then I grew up and had a beer, and ran into porters and stouts. The relationships of these beers makes for one very, very messy Venn diagram, with more circles than a UFO nut’s cornfield, a lot of scratched-out lines and erasures, and some really odd intersections. Porter definitely came... Read More

HOPEFULLY by the time this article is published the sun will be shining and Jack Frost will have been put to bed for another year. Spring has finally sprung in New England and it’s time for a little “spring drinking”. Our clients’ palates are changing once again from mostly heavy... Read More

Some of my fondest earliest experiences as an entry level drinker, many decades ago, centered on a broad variety of rum cocktails – from Frozen Daquiris and Zombies to a fabulous concoction that my late, great rum-loving father created with an antique shaker. Just watching my Dad’s ceremonious preparations was... Read More

JULIO & JULITO VIOLA • 51 & 25 • Winery Impresarios • Bodegas del Fin del Mundo • Patagonia, Argentina Founders of a handsome, high-tech, space age winery, and developers of two (and counting) turnkey satellite wineries for investors, the Violas are riding the gold rush wine wave in Southern... Read More

Let’s examine whether an increase from the 12 or 13 percent, to which we have been accustomed in table wine, to 16 or 17 percent is likely to influence either the adverse or beneficial effects of wine upon health. To ask a question whose answer seems obvious, what has changed... Read More

Starting with his eponymously named pub in Baltimore, he has actively worked in the business since 198O. In the mid-nineteen eighties, Sisson decided he wanted to add a brewpub to his restaurant. After determining that Maryland law did not allow for on-premise brewing, Sisson and others petitioned the state legislature... Read More

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

Massachusetts has always known a thing or two about astonishing history-making upsets against seemingly impossible odds. In 1775, it was all about a ragtag militia group of passionate guerilla-like Minutemen routing a mighty and well-trained superior fighting force of British Red Coats from behind the stonewalls of Lexington and Concord,... Read More