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 …

Tonight’s wine has a very special purpose: It’s my chaser for what I assume will be a sobering State of the Union address, the first given by President Barack Obama. Perhaps I should have chosen a domestic wine, but I chose to go with the other America instead, picking a Carmenere from Chilean maker Root: 1.
I’ve had the Root: 1 Cabernet Sauvignon before and I found it to be a very nice entry-level Chilean cab that had a bit more balance than Los Vascos, the bottom rung, fruit-forward label from …

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. …

After  much internal debate, I’ve decided to use this Web site to chronicle another passion of mine. At first I thought I’d keep this a place for my artistic expressions and once-in-a-while personal rants. But wine is personal to me, so its time I start adding my reviews here.
I’m a wine geek. It’s something that happened almost a decade ago, when after I just graduated college I decided to take a job in a wine shop, something simple that would give me plenty of time for writing. Before that, the …