Bitters and the mystery of blending

Erika Szymanski
Features
5 min read
I had expected great things from my first experiences with cocktail bitters. Bitter flavors are great, and so are condiments. Make me a kale and radicchio salad spiked with anchovies, garlic, and mustard and I'll nosh contentedly. So I was surprised, when I splashed some of the classic Angostura on

Vintage Ports for the 21st Century

Roger Morris
Feature Stories
4 min read
Unless you hold a degree from Oxford or Cambridge, chances are your university drinking experiences did not extend to the consumption of vintage Ports sipped on fire-lit winter’s evenings as you pored over reference texts.  Fine Ports, like youth, shouldn’t be wasted on the young getting wasted. But a word

Trending: What to drink from Italy

Becky Sue Epstein
Features
2 min read
We are seduced by the Italian lifestyle – which is one of the main reasons we in the U.S. import the most Italian wine of any country in the world. And because of this, I got to hang out with a lot of Italian winemakers during VINO 2016 (aka “Italian

Beyond Bordeaux in Hong Kong

David Rogers
Features
5 min read
Hong Kong. A city of more than 7 million people shoehorned into a small parcel of land on China’s southeastern coast. This is an Asian city with a growing Western influence, with food and drink a central cultural tenet. Despite a rapid growth in middle-class incomes since the mid-1990s, the

Undiscovered Uruguay

Michelle Locke
Feature Stories
4 min read
Harvest is under way and internationally known enologist Alberto Antonini is giving a master class on the coming vintage. Behind him, framed in the large windows of the new winery, a landscape of terraced vineyards unfolds under a lacy blue sky, a view reminiscent of his native Italy. But these

The world’s most pathetic wine grape

W. Blake Gray
Features
6 min read
This story is about the world's most pathetic wine grape. Its history is exaggerated. It was used for a few decades to play one role that is no longer needed, yet still people grow it – though even its proponents don't think it has much virtue. It reminds me of the