Hey there! After yet another inexplicably protracted absence, I’m back! And today I’ve got three wines to review: wines that hail from my favorite shoe-shaped wine-producing country of all time, Italy. You may remember Italy from World War II, The Jersey Shore Season 4, or perhaps even my past reviews – Italian wine is, in fact, my favorite, and I tend to drink it pretty frequently. But this marks the first time I’ve received press samples from ...

It appears that Captain Planet Month has, as sort of originally anticipated, taken longer than a month to unfold. I can think of a few reasons for this – chief among them being my sporadic update schedule as of late. Now sure, I could say I’ve been on some sort of odyssean Odyssey all this time, cursed to rove the seas for week after futile week as penance for offending the mighty god Poseidon; but that would ...

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m going to get right to the point: it wasn’t easy finding a Wind wine for Captain Planet Month. This feat in fact proved so difficult that I began writing my review well in advance of my having actually located a thematically appropriate bottle. Why? Well, it didn’t have anything to do with the Wind Planeteer, Linka, whose origins in the Soviet Union have naturally shrouded her life in secrecy; nor ...

Do you remember way back when, many millions of milliseconds ago, when I reviewed my first ever Texas wine? A rather prickly Tempranillo, it wasn’t all that great, and I’m realizing my writeup may have left my readers – just as the wine left me – with an overall negative impression of the state’s enological efforts. As it turns out, however, when I acquired my Fire wine for Captain Planet Month, another bottle of #TXwine (as it’s ...

You may have noticed something as of late: I haven’t been updating my beloved blog as much as I used to. The lapses have been subtle, but steady, and I admit I’ve harbored a fair amount of guilt over this sudden downward spiral of enological neglect. Truth be told, I’ve been working on another writing project: one which demands most of my creative energy, leaving me with little time to effuse about the wines that inspire my ...

Four wines. Nine people. Five people with whom I remembered to discuss the four wines. Put them all together and what do you get? The tasting that took place at my apartment on Saturday (well, a Saturday, anyway…sorry for the delay) much to the chagrin of neighbors everywhere. By which I mean, the neighbors in my immediate vicinity. While my last tasting had featured wines I’d received from Inter Beaujolais, this time I chose the theme myself. ...

As my last post oh-so-subtly hinted, this past weekend I made my way down to the great state of Virginia in order to taste their wine before it becomes too popular (and therefore uncool). Those of you in the know are probably familiar with Virginia’s reputation as an up-and-coming wine producing region, but it still hasn’t achieved the level of recognition that would, say, allow me to find a single bottle of Virginia wine anywhere in Pennsylvania. ...

Much like Odysseus, the protagonist of Homer’s Odyssey, I am a great tactician and warrior favored by many mighty and beautiful goddesses. And also like Odysseus, I’ve been known to drink a glass of wine when the situation calls for it. But even though we share so very many similarities, Odysseus and I are worlds apart when it comes to our wines. As an ancient Greek general, he was in all likelihood rather patriotic, and therefore it’s ...

As a Jew, I faced many challenges growing up in the predominantly Jewish suburb of my childhood. The others mocked my meager middle-upper-middle class status, themselves fortunate enough to have been born members of the upper-upper-middle class elite. I was seldom invited to play Debtors and Creditors (the semitic equivalent of Cowboys and Indians), and by high school I found myself left in the dust when it came to all the usual preoccupations of adolescence, like sex, ...

Seeing as it’s Regional Wine Week - albeit the tail end thereof – there’s something you should probably know about me: I live in Pennsylvania. PA is one of a handful of states still controlling all the wine sales within its borders, and this has had both positive and negative ramifications for my vinic adventuring (but mostly negative). Still, I’m proud to say that I’ve managed to avoid the unpleasantness of actually taking a stance on the ...