Spanish Rioja is One of the Best Wines in the Air–Here’s Why.

When I discovered in my work choosing wines for Delta Air Lines how incredibly well they show in-light, my respect for the region reached a whole new level (or, perhaps I should say altitude?). Here’s what makes drinking a Rioja flight when you are in-flight so fantastic.

Napa Harvest – Picking and Pressing Sauvignon Blanc (from our own vineyard!)

Napa Valley harvest: it’s not merely picking the grapes. In these videos you’ll see how, when and what’s next, all of which are crucial keys to quality.

How to Handle a Big Wine List (Without Having to Stick to Beer)

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How do you handle a big wine list (without having to stick to beer)? It can be intimidating for both the waiter and the waited on. Here are some great tips and tricks to help both sides of the transaction. At Windows on the World where I worked, we had over 2000 selections. Here’s how we made that accessible for everyone.

Blind Tasting – It takes skill and will (including the willingness to be wrong sometimes:)

Why even bother to blind taste? The greatest value to the exercise is to assess a wine’s quality without having your impressions–positive or negative–influenced by the label. So I often blind taste multiple wines of a category, say New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, or French NV Champagne, so that only what emerges from the glass (not reputation, a critic’s high score, or price point) drives my conclusion. It’s always fun, often surprising, and occasionally, when upstart or value wines make the top of the heap, a really great day.

Gridiron Grilled Cheese Bowl 2015: The winner is…

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America’s “cheese coach” Laura Werlin has spoken, and the winners of the Gridiron Grilled Cheese Bowl pairing contest have been chosen

Gridiron Grilled Cheese Bowl: Be a winner with the Ultimate Super Bowl XLIX Sandwich Pairing

Blind Wine Tasting Tips from Top Sommeliers of the Rudd Roundtable

The classic wine grapes and regions all have a “tell”–a set of sensory traits that help wine pros ID them blind. Here are some of the blind tasting clues this bad-ass group of somms shared during a recent blind tasting practice at my house–following an intensive day of testing wine theory, blind tasting and service at the prestigious, invite-only Rudd Roundtable.

My Search for the Holy Grail of Wine (Seriously Spoofing the Monty Python Classic)

It was my husband John’s idea to spoof Monty Python and the Holy Grail because he, like many guys, is a “can-quote-every-line-by-heart” fan of this classic, and could never get enough of it. And, as they say in the movie: “We’ve already got one”–actually, two–holy grails of gastronomy in my home region of the Napa Valley: The French Laundry, and our world class Cabernet Sauvignon, both of which make cameos. The fact that we’ve also “already got one” full-on medieval castle, the Castello di Amorosa winery, clinched the deal.