I keep waiting for Apple to come out with a crystal ball — call it the iBall. Sadly, I’m still waiting. In the meantime, I have to predict the future the old-fashioned way, with Tarot cards, tea leaves, and a lot of wine. After a marathon session of divining and…
The end of the year is nigh — presents are unwrapped, recycle bins are overflowing, bellies are bulging. I’m jumping on the bandwagon of ubiquitous end-of-year reflections. It’s as good a time as any to take a look at 2013 in the world of wine. Some really great things happened…
Thank you, pink zin. If you are still reading you are probably looking for some seriously sarcastic snark. Sorry, that’s not what’s coming. Those of us who make a living in and around the wine world, and those of you who enjoy the gigantic selection of really great wines available…
Now that Thanksgiving is past we can all let out a small sigh of relief. Except for wine retailers, who now begin the struggle to sell off the annual river of Beaujolais Nouveau that invariably gets stuck on their shelves. Now don’t get me wrong, Beaujolais Nouveau is a fun…
I’ve bought wine from just about every place that sells it, online and brick and mortar. I’ve even bought wine from a gas station when funds were short. BevMo and Total Wine have changed the retail landscape of wine dramatically, one stop shops with comprehensive selections and aggressive pricing that…
It happens something like this; you buy a bottle from your local retailer, you get home and open it and the wine smells funny, or you order a bottle in a restaurant and it smells funny. Not just funny, the wine smells like a musty, damp basement, or soaked newspaper…
What? Not done with your holiday shopping? Yeah, neither are we. But we’ve been making lists — and checking them twice — and we’ve got some suggestions for the nice people on your list. Today, Chow Bella’s Gift Guide for the Wine Lover. A lot of people don’t know that…
Every year around this time every food or wine related magazine is chock full of advice for pairing wine with your holiday meals. Sangiovese, Pinot Noir, keep it light, do this don’t do that. This wine goes with this kind of stuffing, that wine is terrible with turkey etc. I…
Wine geeks, cork dorks, oenophiles, and winos: Welcome to our little corner of Chow Bella. It’s here that you’ll find weekly dispatches from the wine universe or at least the very small part of that universe that I humbly inhabit. It was over a decade ago that I came to…
