A report about a list called Top 30 Momentum Table Wine Brands caught my attention yesterday. Wines & Vines ran the story on the Symphony IRI Group study, which ranks the wines with the most increase in sales in 2010 that consumers buy in places such as grocery and drug stores.
Cupcake Vineyards, a relatively new wine brand, rose to the top of the 2010 chart. It’s owned by The Wine Group and boasts a winery in California’s Monterey County. You’ve probably seen it in your grocery store’s wine aisle. Expect to see more of it.
I love chance encounters, especially the kind that leads you to something else. That’s the case for me, from a recent dinner at Kin Shop in New York City. The restaurant’s top toque is indeed a Top Chef: Harold Dieterle, the winner from the show’s first season. The menu features Thai-inspired dishes, so the wine list offers choices that pair nicely with the food. The bottle that caught my attention was the K Vintners Viognier. I recognized the name, and that the winemaker was Food & Wine magazine’s 
A poll about women and shoes is making its way around the internet.
Grant Achatz is on a book tour. Last night he was at Omnivore Books in San Francisco. An intimate setting for 40 of us who snapped up tickets to meet Achatz and hear a reading from his book. Omnivore books is a tiny, one room book shop lined with shelves holding an exceptionally curated selection of books about one subject, cooking and food. Any foodie worth his or her sous vide or lobster foam knows by now about Grant Achatz, chef owner of Alinea in Chicago. For those who don’t know, he’s a protoge of Thomas Keller (French Laundry) and Ferran Adria (El Bulli), and has become famous for his innovative take on molecular gastronomy.
Last week my cookbook club as a group went for lunch at
Oh yes I did. I brought a boxed wine to a recent gathering of my cookbook club. A few weeks earlier an odd-shaped box arrived on my door step. Super heavy for the size of the box. What in the world could it be? A box of wine. Sure, why not. Hmmmm.
This weekend, the
The French have it, the Italians have it, but does America really have a wine culture all its own? You bet we do. It took awhile for this to develop, but in 2010, for the first time ever,