As we emerge from 2020—a year in which we needed wine for an entirely different set of terrifying reasons—and the bits of 2021 that the previous year swallowed whole, I thought I’d share some of my favorite bottles that made Field Blends a book for wine lovers everywhere. Think of these questions as good talk amongst friends at your first post-pandemic springtime gathering.
Read moreEfímero restaurant in Madrid, Copenhagen wine bars, cocktails and more are my Top 10 of 2018
This New Year I’ve decided to go with a more expansive top 10 list that I hope will inform your wine and travel aspirations in the year ahead. Cheers, and happy New Year!
Read moreTasting my way around three Paso Robles wineries
The climate and soil in Paso Robles are very suitable for vineyards. The soil is rich, porous, and holds water. The days are hot and the nights cool. All these factors, make it ideal for growing grapes. The grapes are allowed to reach full maturity while still retaining crisp acidity. Paso Robles is home to 11 different viticultural areas or districts over approximately 614,000 acres. I’m going to take you to three of these districts on our tour.
Read moreAt Vingården i Klagshamn, splendid wines growing up in the countryside of southern Sweden
Wind rustled through the garden. Soft from afar, then flapping quickly like a rain stick or a far off waterfall as it met the bowed green branches of the tree that hung over a path between bushes over which vines crawled up the arbor, the open door to the vineyard beyond. We're sitting in the garden of Vingården i Klagshamn, Skåne County, in the south of Sweden.
Read moreMiddleburg's Greenhill Winery & Vineyards is the next great Virginia winery
We're turning into Greenhill Winery & Vineyards in the town of Middleburg. You'd be forgiven thinking that it is larger than it is when driving up. They've done a splendid job of creating something that is both expansive and personal: farm houses spread across acres, stately and stone walled next to the pond yet intimate in their myriad little tasting rooms, open fields, open skies stretching out to the thick tree line along the opposite side of the vineyard.
Read moreCelebrate National Rosé Day! They are our best of June, but you should drink them all summer.
Anyway, getting back to the point of this post, the reason that we were at Slate was for the #roseallday tasting, and National Rose Day (the second Saturday of every June) happens to be today. So it seems like as good a time as any to tell you about some of the wines we tasted at Slate that night. This year’s tasting line-up was pretty solid, and I would recommend any of them as options for you to drink today or any day! There were two flights - one American and one European, so naturally we had to try both.
Read moreUse the "Seated" app to earn Amazon and Lyft rewards when you dine out, fancy or casual
It's great when my fondness for wine and getting the most out of my spending come together in novel ways. Consider the "Seated" app. Though it has been floating around the app universe for a bit, it was not top of my mind until last week when I used it for the first time. The general premise is that you use Seated to make reservations at any number of great restaurants, and are rewarded with gift card credit to Amazon and Lyft. Consider it a sort of universal point earning opportunity that is available across a range of establishments.
Read moreCelebrating "Wine Day", May 25th, in California, New Zealand, and Spanish wine country
In contemplating how to make a truly global experience out of today's annual National Wine Day, we decided to ask several of our wine writing friends to tell us about their favorite of the world's wine regions. We left the question open ended to be as specific (Santa Barbara's Ballard Canyon AVA) or as wide open (several regions scattered about New Zealand), and loved what we found.
Read moreWherefore go Wine:Thirty Flight? Nineteen photos, a handful of wineries, and one odd flight itinerary.
It's been a strange stretch, with a bizarre itinerary that found me flying to Dallas and San Francisco in order to get from Washington, DC to Boston, a jaunt through Connecticut, Rhode Island, and back to Massachusetts, and -- now -- down to about sixty hours before I head to New York en route to London, Stockholm, and Copenhagen.
Read moreThe wines of Bodegas Arrayán from Spain's Méntrida region continue to impress
In the usual immersive ambiance of candlelight refracting through wine glasses as if a thousand diamonds had been scattered on the table, our friends at Joselito -- a Washington, DC restaurant that I once described as being from "a bygone world both elegant and intimate" -- recently reconnected us with the delightful wines of Bodegas Arrayán from Spain's Méntrida region.
Read moreVirginia's Viognier and Cabernet Franc wines are our Best of April
Last weekend we made an annual pilgrimage to the actual cellar of Delaplane Cellars, an extraordinary Virginia winery that we've recommended before. There we loved -- once again -- a tasting that has become something of a ritual first day of the springtime wine tasting season for us, drawing winemaker Jim Dolphin's latest creations direct from the barrels wherein they have spent the last months aging. And so it is, in our minds at least, that the finest time of year for exploring stunning Virginia wine country is upon us. Indeed, the Commonwealth's wines are our Best of April.
Read moreVisiting a new city? Seek out the wine.
Something wonderful is happening. As a new generation of oenophiles makes wine and cities -- two of the world's oldest institutions -- their own, the two are blending in both ways and places most unexpected.Wineries, wine bars, and restaurants with excellent glass and bottle lists are often reflective of the local culture surrounding them, and -- when such regions exist -- of the wine made in the countryside beyond the next mountain. I can think of few other ways to connect more deeply and learn more thoroughly about a place than to do so in the company one keeps with a glass of wine in hand.
Read moreHappy birthday to our memories of you, for they are old vines producing wonderful fruit
Six weeks pass between the seventeenth of February and the thirtieth of March each year, immovable as the moon and the stars and every other rhythm of the calendar. Both days come and go, irrelevant to most, but between them an entire season for those of us making good on a promise we once made to choose happiness from sadness, hope from despair, intellectual curiosity from backwardness, the thrill of the run from the sameness of the sedentary.
Read moreWhich wines should I drink as winter becomes spring? Our Best of March (April and May, too).
We spent last week's first day of spring, whilst snow fell here at home in Virginia, contemplating which wines we'd recommend to everyone in the northern hemisphere's seasonal regions as we transition into (perhaps slightly) warmer weather. Spring and autumn are the conundrum seasons for those of us whose tastes hew fairly reliably to thirst for reds in winter and whites in summer. So in this our Best Wines of March we recommend you look into a white, a rosé, and a red that we find pretty reliable in confused temperatures.
Read moreDefinitive guide to the world class wine, food, history, and energy you'll find in Madrid, Spain
I make no secret of my love for cities, and less secret still of my particular love for the capital of Spain. I always seem to return to the first European city with which I fell in love on a visit years ago with my grandparents. Though I've written here and there about the city before, I've recently found myself responding by email to several friends seeking advice for their time there. Thus, this Wine:Thirty Flight Guide to Madrid is born.
Read moreIn a volcano's shadow, Bodegas El Grifo's excellent wines are a profound expression of terroir
Eyes closed, this warm breeze is unlike any of you've ever experienced in lands where wine is made. Tropical, wrapping you up inside of that very distinct sense of what standing in the middle of the ocean feels like. It is, yet, not what truly thrills the senses here. Open your eyes to the horizon, where the bluest of skies meets the black, pockmarked, grey stoned earth as if we had colonized the moon, and this was our vineyard there.
Read moreExploring wines of Romania, Slovenia, Armenia, Bulgaria, and Croatia for "Global Drink Wine Day"
February 18 is National Drink Wine Day, dubbed "Global Drink Wine Day" by our friend Casey at Travelling Corkscrew in Australia. Hers is branding we can get behind. We'll be drinking wine in Madrid, Spain the day of (this Sunday), and in further celebration of this as a global event, we've decided to take a look at wines from countries that are a bit off the beaten path for the typical wine drinker. Romania, Slovenia, Armenia, Bulgaria, and Croatia each get a look here.
Read morePhiladelphia's great new AMEX Centurion Lounge makes the airport my new favorite layover
I used to dread Philadelphia International Airport (PHL). Now it has become one of my favorite layovers on the east coast. Yes, you read that right... I am actually enjoying my connections at PHL thanks to last autumn's opening of the American Express Centurion Lounge in Terminal A. Its combination of bright modern spaces, excellent cuisine designed by local-Philadelphia award winning Israeli Chef Michael Solomonov, thoughtful wine and cocktail lists, and always warm hospitality makes it one of my favorite airport lounge experiences in the United States.
Read moreBest of February, recommending five Champagnes to toast Valentine's Day and the year beyond
Ask anyone who has ever put proverbial pen to paper writing about wine here, and you'll be vociferously encouraged to drink more Champagne. It's celebratory, to be sure, but it's also quite well suited to adding texture before, during or after a meal, or to drink on its own. We're celebrating Wine:Thirty Flight's third Valentine's Day with our best wines of February - five bottles of Champagne to pop open with the love of your life, or whoever you find yourself sipping with this fourteenth of February.
Read moreVinarna Bokovka is the very best of Prague's excellent wine scene
Enter through a quietly cloistered courtyard whose cobblestones reflect the light that shines from above, through arches and columns both stately, yet sooted by time. A soft bronze glow of filament bulbs and candles gently twinkling through the phalanx of glasses and bottles cast merry shadows on the vaulted walls of a place that one might think dilapidated if you didn't know it was a wine cellar. We're inside of Vinarna Bokovka, an absolutely exquisite wine bar we discovered in the heart of Prague, capital of the Czech Republic.
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