In the last 45 years that I have been drinking wine, probably well over a thousand

bottles of wine, I can really say that I have only had 2 bottles of what I had

considered wine that had gone bad and had actually been “corked”. Drinking

a sip of corked wine is something you will never forget once it has happened to

you, trust me on that!

My job allowed me to travel to Northern Spain for a week in March to the town of

Vitoria. It is located just north of the fine wine region of Rioja, where most of the

great reds are grown using the Tampranillo and Granacha verities of grapes. I

arrived there in late afternoon and was greeted by a very fun and interesting guy

and a couple of his co-workers who insisted that we go out for meal at 8:45PM,

which is really late for this old “poop” to eat anything.

I vowed after that last bottle of pinot noir in central England from the up-scale
wine store that I would give up on French wines forever! I really felt that way
too, and did not want to break my resolution. I had been reading my little pocket
guide “The Best Wines in the Super Markets 2010” by Ned [...]

The company that I was working for moved me to Brighton in the UK for several

months so it was basically starting over setting up housekeeping, finding barbers,

dentists, grocery shopping and of course an entire new world of wines to purchase.

There are few times in life, mine anyway, when you get the chance to drink a cabernet that is 24 years old. Now most things that I have read about the taste of old wine is probably not good unless one; you know exactly what you are drinking and two; how that wine has been stored over its many years of bottled life. Many articles that I have read warn about developing a taste for “old wines”. They are definitely different in structure, flavor, texture and color.

We have had several different styles of wine glasses in our home over the 38 year of marriage and until recently, we have never paid much attention to what we were drinking out of. We do have the red wine (balloons) ever since my friend pointed out, “You need to drink reds out a glass like that and not the skinny ones!”

Traveling for a large company as I do, takes me to some really strange, wonderful and interesting places. On just that type of a 3 day trip to do “all-day” meetings I ended up in Albuquerque, New Mexico in the fall of 2007. I stumbled onto a local winery when I was unconsciously thumbing through the rack of pamphlets and brochures for the local area near the elevator at the hotel, mostly out of boredom, waiting for it to come back down to the lobby. One caught my eye as it was a winery/tasting room/restaurant not far from the hotel and meeting facility.

I travel for a living with a major company and I often end up in Las Vegas for national trade shows. I had just returned from one of my many road trips for the company and was sitting down with my wife and sharing a great bottle of pinot noir that Friday evening. She told me that she had debated telling me about a flyer she had opened that was in the mail from the “Wine Spectator” advertising the Las Vegas “Grand Tour” wine tasting event in May.

A couple of years ago, my nephew and his lovely bride were to be married in Palo Alto, California and my wife and I were planning to attend. Naturally, I took a few extra of my vacation days to travel to “wine country” seeing that we were so close and June was a great time to be there. We had hit on the fact that we both really like the “Russian River Valley” pinot noirs and would like to visit wineries in that area around Santa Rosa and Healdsburg for a few days and really enjoy ourselves. Great idea!

Who didn’t see the movie “Sideways” and didn’t just love it? I did! That movie has been credited with the biggest upsurge in the interest and sales of pinot noir in the history of wine in the United States. My wife and I saw it when we were going through a phase where we only drank cabernet and occasionally a merlot – that’s it! We were stuck in a rut, but we liked it.