Author Michelle Locke

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Michelle Locke
Michelle Locke is a San Francisco Bay Area-based freelance writer who writes about food, drink and travel for national newspapers and magazines. She blogs at www.michellelocke.com and tweets at @Locke_Michelle.

Gin with a Scottish accent

Michelle Locke
Features
4 min read
It’s a sunny Sunday morning in Edinburgh and I and some like-minded souls are gathered together in a dim basement, paying reverence to matters of the spirit. Which is to say, we’ve all got a G&T in hand having reached the sampling part of a tour of the Edinburgh Gin

Cariñena Campaign

Michelle Locke
Features
5 min read
Unusual winter rains turned the Cariñena vineyards in northeastern Spain into a technicolor swirl this spring, the variegated soils glowing red, yellow, orange under windswept skies. It was a moment of glory for a region which can get overlooked in the busy category of Spanish wine. After all, many consumers

Best of 2016: Hooked on Haggis

Michelle Locke
Features
2 min read
I was in Cognac one hot summer day, trying to make conversation with a producer who spoke about as much English as I do French, and the situation was getting  sticky in every way when he suddenly asked me whether I had been to Scotland. Yes, I had. Well, then,

Prosecco Progress

Michelle Locke
Feature Stories
3 min read
It’s lunchtime at the San Simone winery – a homey spread of cheesy mushroom and spinach pastas – and the Brisotto sisters, fourth-generation vintners, are explaining the everyday appeal of Prosecco. A good bottle, they say, is like a good pair of jeans, fuss-free style that goes with everything. True enough,

Hooked on Haggis

Michelle Locke
Features
3 min read
I was in Cognac one hot summer day, trying to make conversation with a producer who spoke about as much English as I do French, and the situation was getting  sticky in every way when he suddenly asked me whether I had been to Scotland. Yes, I had. Well, then,

Puttin’ on the Spritz

Michelle Locke
Features
2 min read
What do you drink when you’re sitting on the Sound of Music lakeside terrace?  An Aperol spritz, naturally. At least, that’s what I drank when I visited Salzburg recently, channeling Baroness Schraeder for all I was worth. (Sorry, Maria fans, I’m not really a tea-with-jam-and-bread kind of girl.) Turns out

Conservation with Condensation

Michelle Locke
Features
2 min read
It’s not every day you walk into a vodka tasting and find winemaker Randall Grahm sitting at the table. But then, it’s not every day you taste vodka that’s been distilled from wine (Grahm’s Bonny Doon, naturally) and cut with water captured from real, live San Francisco fog. That’s the

A Ruffino Retrospective

Michelle Locke
Feature Stories
4 min read
Looking back, and ahead, with the iconic Chianti producer Lined up on the white tablecloth, the vertical Chianti tasting is a study in scarlet, from the deep ruby of the 2011 to the brick red of the 1977. It’s not every day you taste a nearly 40-year-old wine – for many