I’ve always suspected it would be a song that transforms this often barbaric and brutal world into a kinder one where humankind can’t help but be decent to one another. I just never realized it had been recorded more than 45 years ago.
Last Sunday I brought a copy of Jimmy Smith’s The Sermon to Roanoke Vineyards, where I was scheduled to work for the day. I’d been bringing a few discs from my jazz collection to the winery, all with the hope of keeping the North Fork swinging at all …

Working part-time in a Long Island vineyard and connecting with fellow Long Island wine lovers is giving me a great opportunity to engross myself in what is my favorite part of the region, an agricultural paradise that erases the stain left by the emptying strip malls and boarded-up gas stations that litter this suburbia.
So, let there be local wine.
Since Roanoke Vineyards contracts Roman Roth, winemaker for Wolffer Estate, to make its wines, it also sells some Wolffer wines in its tasting room. And since Wolffer is one of the few …

For the second time, I participated in Twitter Taste Live, an especially fun wine tasting for geeks like me that combines wine love with social media overkill. (Ah, geekdom, I sing your anthem proudly through purple-stained lips.)
While last time I got to taste a series of Finger Lakes cabernet francs, which were as a whole quite good, this time my cohorts and I tasted sparkling wine made in the upstate New York region. I’d never had a bubbly from there, I didn’t even know they were making them in the …

It usually around this time of year, where the coziness of winter hasn’t completely morphed into the gray loathing for the end of the cold, that I turn to my favorite of fruit bombs.
I usually don’t like fruit-forward wines, especially made from varietals like merlot, cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, pinot noir and syrah. Balance, backbone, a little spice, some earth, smoke, tannin, that’s usually what I want. But there’s one grape I believe does best when it’s used to make a deep fruit explosion in a glass, and that’s zinfandel. …

Last week I was invited to take part in Twitter Taste Live, an event sponsored by the Finger Lakes Wine Country where various wine bloggers around the country taste the same four Finger Lakes wines and share their notes on Twitter using a common hashtag, in this case #flxwine.
I spent the night with the event host, Lenn Thompson, who runs the New York Cork Report, a dynamite blog focused on New York Wines, and Michael Gorton, a Long Island native whose love of the local juice he documents on his …