Latest Posts
Best in Glass Month Kicks off With Big Sips!March 14, 2012
This week we begin Best in Glass month - a great prelude to the Miami Wine & Food Festival. I'm starting making my rounds of participating restaurants for wonderful wine tastings. The participating restaurants are all featuring Gold Medal winning wines from the Best in Glass Challenge and there are some great deals to be had. I'll keep a travel and tasting journal here in the coming days. I'm off tomorrow to two restaurants in Ft. Lauderdale, the Wine Room at the Ritz-Carlton and Market 17 so keep an eye open for some tasting notes on a lovely Sangiovese/Syrah blend...Read More
A Letter from ParisDecember 26, 2011
For a wine lover, a journey to France is a pilgrimage. Despite the development of a thriving wine industry in the United States, it’s a widely held view among wine lovers that France remains the nexus of all things wine and my December voyage did nothing to dissuade me from that view. It rained nearly every day but that only served to give the City of Lights a bit of a glow, and fueled my quest for wine breaks in the midst of chilly perambulations through museums, parks and ancient neighborhoods It may be obvious, but it’s still...Read More
Celebrating the HolidaysDecember 20, 2011
With the gift giving holidays just around the corner, I figured it would be useful to offer some thoughts on gift ideas that will please anyone who loves wine. Gifts that encourage the recipient to share some wine with you are even better. Following the logic that if you give someone a bottle they can share it once but if you give them ways to find many bottles, there’s more for all of us, I’ll start with a great book idea (I've included links to most of the gift ideas below - just run your cursor over the...Read More
Holiday LeftoversDecember 2, 2011
Leftovers - every holiday has them and for a wine lover, they are either a bonus or a problem. Turkey can be made into sandwiches, casseroles and burritos, and I love them all, but I have horrifying memories of recycled vegetable leftovers in my childhood. As an adult, I dread wine leftovers, but they exist - you have some friends over, everyone brings a bottle and in the scramble to taste a bit of everything, you end up with a lot of bottles, each with a glass or two remaining. Despite the belief of many of my friends to the...Read More
Good Glasses Improve Your Wine VisionNovember 21, 2011
We all know (especially after a certain age) that glasses help us see better. Can they help us smell and taste wine as well? Enhancing the wine experience has been the mission of Austria’s Riedel family for generations. Today, Riedel glasses are icons in the wine world and the number of glasses available has grown to absurd limits. When I first met George Riedel 20 years ago, practically no one knew the Riedel name and he was working 16 hour days to persuade people that the shape of a wine glass has a significant impact on how a wine smells and...Read More
Putting Wine FirstNovember 12, 2011
Welcome to our new website! The United Way Miami Wine & Food Festival has been around for 17 years, but a new website gives me an opportunity to give a fresh welcome to everyone who shares our love of wine and food, and especially for how the two go together. This is also a good time to point out that we put wine first – it is, after all the Miami Wine & Food Festival and not the other way around. Over the years we’ve added spirits and just last year craft beers to our mix, and extended the festival not...Read More