Beverage News
Mr. Alice, Sir: I’ve never seen you or anybody else for that matter take on this situation. Maybe the answer is too obvious, but I don’t understand how. I like frequenting upscale bars and mingling …
“I’m not drinking any fucking Merlot!” — Miles, a Pinot Noir fan, in the film Sideways. Miles was that reviled thing: a tremendous, unabashed wine snob. And yet, people listened. Pinot Noir sales in America …
For Rob Barnett, the long and winding road to VinVillage is finally coming to an end. The technical snags for his wine-based social-networking site — devoted to “creating locally based social wine groups and connecting …
“Before brewers became cognizant of microbiology and sanitation, I imagine there were a lot more sour beers,” says Mitch Steele, head brewer for Stone Brewing Co. “It’s not only bacteria but wild yeast as well …
The San Diego winemaker tour continues. This month, Costa Brava in Pacific Beach played host to Spanish winemaking icon Alejandro Fernández and his representatives from Classical Wines. “I was working as a retailer in the …
The fluorescent light from the Budweiser lamp made the cigarette smoke appear as if it were dancing in the back room of McMurphy's Pub in La Mesa. By the end of league night, puddles of …
San Diego’s social status is ascendant. Of course, you knew that already — you live here. You’ve eaten in the new restaurants, drunk in the new nightclubs, partied in the new hotels. I mention it …
Heymatt: My friend drinks Red Bull and vodka. He says he doesn’t get drunk that way. How does that happen?— Norma, via email Well, it doesn’t happen. He just thinks it happens. Energy drinks don’t …
There is perhaps no finer marketing machine in all the wine world than the one that operates out of Champagne. (You don’t get to be the world’s official party wine without doing something right.) And …
The La Mesa library recently placed California Wine a Sunset Pictorial, published in 1973 and edited by the estimable Bob Thompson, in a cardboard box outside the building’s front door. A visual history of the …
Erica Martenson is not a scientist. Rather, she is a gardener. In her big backyard in Napa, she says, she has “several fruit trees and a small area where I have a vegetable garden. At …
Yuseff Cherney says his revered and super-bitter Dorado Double India Pale Ale has become too expensive, if not impossible, to make. Cherney is head brewer at Ballast Point Brewing Company, which has breweries in Linda …
File Under: Fiction Is Good for You. I was reading Peter May’s crime novel The Critic, which took as a dramatic starting point the murder of a famous wine critic, one Gil Petty. The hero, …
‘When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” That line, from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, serves as part of the epigraph for Peter May’s crime novel The Critic. The novel …
“When I was a child in Mayo,” said my Irish mother as we drove along the Embarcadero, “my aunt used to send me down to the village pub to buy ‘a pint for the washing.’” …
Oh, now this is a fun idea for a story: an American wine critic — one of those make-it-or-break-it critics in the mold of Robert Parker — winds up murdered, pickled in a vat of …