Consumer Non-Cyclicals

Hey, Lady, That Ain't Champagne in My Glass!

A few nights ago, I cozied up to the bar at the swank Hotel ICON on Main Street downtown to wait for a friend who was staying there. I asked for a wines-by-the-glass list only to discover that there was nothing by the glass that I wanted to put into my body (it was dominated by usual-suspect, high- ... More >>

Craft Beer and Charity: More Details on Next Week's Ash Bash Events

The craft beer community is still dealing with the as-yet-unsolved murder of Duff Beer Distribution founder Ashley "Ash" Rowell. The murder came at the tail end of Duff's existence, as the brand was in the process of being integrated into Favorite Brands following Rowell's sale of Duff to the much l ... More >>

Promoter Sues Owners of Club Where Jay-Z, Beyonce, LeBron James, Dwayne Wade Celebrated All-Star Weekend

A group called All Pro Management is suing the owners of Rich's, where Jay-Z (aka Mr. Beyonce Knowles) hosted an NBA All-Star par-tay, accusing them of cheating All Pro out of proceeds from liquor sales. The promoters claimed to have paid $25,000 to host the event, according to the Courthouse News ... More >>

Report: Texas Ranks Near the Bottom in Tobacco Settlement Spending

Texas is only spending 2.4 percent of the tobacco settlement money it collects on tobacco prevention campaigns, placing the state near the bottom of the Centers for Disease Control's recommended state-spending list, according to a December report. The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids' report states t ... More >>

What if Winemakers Listed Ingredients on Every Bottle?

"Ingredients," reports the back label on a bottle of Randall Grahm's Bonny Doon wines from California, "Syrah grapes, tartaric acid, and sulfur dioxide. In the winemaking process, the following were utilized: indigenous yeast, yeast nutrients, and French oak barrels. At time of bottling, this produc ... More >>

A California Chardonnay without Sin

I just love that the good folks over at the Chamisal winery in the Central Coast of California call their entry-level Chardonnay "stainless." To anyone familiar with the science and art of winemaking, the term "stainless" denotes a commonly employed technique and associated style of vinification. B ... More >>

Rice University Offers a Beer Education Your Own College Probably Didn't

When you talk about getting educated on beer at college, I am going to assume that you mean learning about the finer points of keg tapping and Natty Light hauling. Because until recently, a real beer education was something that most universities didn't teach. Wine appreciation classes? Sure. Beer? ... More >>

Texas Grape Harvest Expected to Be Excellent but Not a Bumper Crop

As the rest of the world is still preparing for the 2012 harvest, Texas farmers began picking their fruit as early as two weeks ago (and some even earlier). Even in the warmest wine growing regions in the world (like Apulia, Italy, the heel of the boot), harvest won't begin for another ten days or s ... More >>

Mikkeller Offers a New Salvo in the Beer Wars: 300 IBU Tastes Like Burning

The beer wars are nothing new. Long before craft beer came along, the large macro breweries engaged in back-and-forth barbs, jockeying for position in the market. Usually carried out via marketing and commercial sniping, the battles all but amounted to multimillion-dollar re-enactments of schoolyard ... More >>

Low-Alcohol Vermentino from California Makes Me Happy

The winemakers behind Uvaggio Vermentino from Lodi have a theory. "If we grow the right grape in the right place," they write on their website, "we can manage to get by with our respective degrees in psychology and geography. (If one of us gets lost then other can figure out why.) However, when you ... More >>

Natural Wine Becomes a Crime

If you follow along here at Wine Time, you know that we frequently cover Natural wine and the vitriol-fueled debate on Natural wine that often eclipses the wines themselves (and we have written about Natural wine in Texas here). The stakes in the Natural dialectic just got higher. Last month, a Eur ... More >>

The Best Wine in Texas? La Cruz de Comal Pétard Blanc Tasting Notes

"Pétard Blanc," writes La Cruz de Comal owner Lewis Dickson on his winery's website, "is a proprietary name and means 'white firecracker' in French. We call it that because of the hallmark natural acidity this wine always has and thus, its explosiveness on the palate." If you read our recent cover ... More >>

Bottoms Up: 5 Beers From 5 Bands To Give You 5 Hangovers

Whether you're at a show with friends or just putting your feet up while listening to some tunes after a long day at work, for many alcohol is just another part of the rock and roll experience. And when hard liquor gets too expensive and wine seems too highfalutin, there is one drink that's always t ... More >>

Infographic: All You Ever Wanted to Know About Texas Wine and More

See our slideshow of Texas wines and wineries. In this week's cover story, we take a peek behind the cellar door to investigate some of the Texas wine industry's more frustrating secrets. Namely, that much of the wine bottled and sold in Texas is made from California grapes -- and that almost all ... More >>

Texas Wines: Behind the Cellar Door

Not all the Texas wine you buy is made from grapes grown in our state. In fact, most of it isn’t.

Today's Cover Story on the Texas Wine Industry

See our slideshow of Texas wines and wineries. The cover story for this week's issue of the paper, coming out online this afternoon, is an article on the Texas wine industry by my colleague Katharine Shilcutt and me. In the piece, we take a hard look at the challenges that Texas winemakers face. ... More >>

Federal Lawsuit Filed in Corpus Christi Over Lobster Baked Potato

It's the clash of the Longhorn Steakhouse titans down south in Corpus Christi, where a local chain of steakhouses with a similar name to the national LongHorn Steakhouse restaurants has filed a federal lawsuit over a lobster baked potato. It's more complicated than that, of course, but the lobster ... More >>

Red, White and Orange: More and More Orange Wines in Houston

"Old man piss." I hate to say it, but it's the best descriptor to use to describe the color of many of the "orange" wines that are finding their way to our market these days. As you can see from the color of the wine in the glass above, orange wines aren't really orange: They tend to have a deep ... More >>

Texas Beer Fest 2012

Tasting Notes: This Week in Wine Blogs

Vintage Texas: Top Texas wine authority Russ Kane chronicles the bankruptcy filing and botched sale of one of the state's leading wineries, CapRock, in Lubbock. According to his report, New Mexico winery Gruet has been ordered to pay $4 million for a breach of contract after bidding in a bankruptcy ... More >>

From Defender of Wily Politicians, Serial Killers and Drug Dealers to Texas Winemaker

"I don't read anymore," said Dickson when I asked him to share his thoughts about the recent uproar in the world of Natural wine. "I did enough reading when I was an attorney." On Friday, I drove out to Houston native Lewis Dickson's Hill Country estate and winery, La Cruz de Comal, on the southern ... More >>

Tasting Notes: This Week in Wine Blogs

Wine Thoughts: There's so much groovy stuff happening this week in the Texas enoblogosphere. But we just have to open today's post with a nod to one of our favorite and most balanced wine bloggers here in our state, Sandra Crittenden, author of Wine Thoughts, who writes about one of our pet peeves: ... More >>

Wine of the Week: Natural Wine in Texas

As we noted in last week's post on a new era of Nastiness and a call for civility in the Natural wine debate, it's not easy to define exactly what Natural wine is. As Eric Asimov wrote in his weekly New York Times column, there is no official definition or doctrine for Natural wine or Natural winem ... More >>

The Natural Wine Debate Gets Ugly

"Natural wine is wine to which nothing has been added," said the leading advocate of Natural wine in the U.S., Alice Feiring, when she visited Texas in October 2011 to promote her new book Naked Wine: Letting Grapes Do What Comes Naturally (Da Capo 2011). She was speaking at an event in a wine bar, ... More >>

Must Like Texas Wine: The Wine Slinger Chronicles, a New Guide to Texas Wines

Photo by Jeremy ParzenLeading Texas wine authority Russ Kane (left) and his wife Delia love meatballs. That's Russ with Coppa executive chef Brandi Key. Russ has called Brandi's meatballs "the best in town."​It seems inevitable that the authors of the two guides to the wines of Texas have name ... More >>

Meat Market

You'll probably be paying more for your rib eyes and Whoppers thanks to the great Texas drought of 2011.

Wine of the Week: 2000 Valpolicella by Giuseppe Quintarelli

Photo by Jeremy Parzen.Giuseppe Quintarelli, one of the greatest winemakers of our lifetime, passed away on Sunday in the Valpolicella, Italy. He was 84.​From the tiny village of Negrar in the picturesque Valpolicella (Veneto, Italy) to the upper reaches of the One-Percenter wine collectors in ... More >>

Absurdity of Texas Wine Shipping Law Reaches New Heights

Photo by Jeremy Parzen.Castell'in Villa Chianti Classico is one of the greatest values in Italian wine today, but out-of-state retailers can't ship it to me in Texas... at least not legally.​On Friday, one of the most bizarre press releases I've ever read found its way to my inbox. "The Texas ... More >>

What Do Wine and Saddles Have In Common? The Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo

​Over the course of a weekend, volunteers with the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo wash 20,000 wine glasses in two days. It's just one of the staggering statistics behind the annual International Wine Competition, the contest that leads to the Rodeo Uncorked! Wine Show and to a few lucky wineri ... More >>

Wine Time: Wine and Sulfur Dioxide

Image via HomeBrewers.com.No, that's not cocaine. It's potassium metabisulfite, one of the many forms of sulfites employed by winemakers for a variety of purposes.​A post earlier this week ("Wine of the Week: A Wine with No Detectable Sulfites") inspired a lot of acidic (pun intended) discussi ... More >>

Wine of the Week: A Wine with "No Detectable Sulfites"

Photos by Jeremy Parzen.The Madoff segment on last night's 60 Minutes was made more palatable by a tasting of the utterly transparent Frey Vineyard's "Natural Red."​One of the chief complaints often expressed by advocates, champions, and militants of Natural wine (with a capital N) is that ove ... More >>

Natalie MacLean's Unquenchable Search for the Best Cheap Wines

​To research her new book Unquenchable: A Tipsy Quest for the World's Best Bargain Wines, Natalie MacLean traveled to wineries in eight countries including Australia and Italy over a five-year period. Each chapter in Unquenchable pairs a wine with a day of the week and a meal. While the book ... More >>

Odd Pair: Wine and Legs (or Tears That Rhyme with Ears)

Photos by Jeremy Parzen.The legs of 2005 Langhe Nebbiolo Sperss by Gaja (Piedmont, Italy), tasted this week in Houston.​How many times have you been at a dinner party and heard some blowhard say something like the following (uttered with a fake British accent): Observe carefully: After swirli ... More >>

Beer & Brass

Wine of the Week: A Rosé from the Texas Hill Country

​The more I read about Texas Hill Country winemaker and San Antonio endocrinologist Richard Becker, the more I am intrigued. Any doctor-cum-vintner who quotes readily from one of my favorite 20th-century American poets, Wallace Stevens, sounds like someone who puts more thought into the art an ... More >>

Tasting Notes: This Week in Wine Blogs

Know a Houston-based blog we should be paying particular attention to? Leave the address in the comments section below. ​TweetChat #TXWine: If you've been following along here at Wine Time, you know that Texas wines have been on our minds. We found out about the TweetChat #TXWines thanks to t ... More >>

Wine of the Week: Texas Blanc du Bois

​Above: Blanc du Bois grapes from the 2010 harvest at the Cruz de Comal Winery in the Texas Hill Country. To tell the story of winemaking in Texas today, we need to start with what happened in California back in the 1970s and the way wine has been marketed historically in the U.S. When I was ... More >>

Wine of the Week: Orange Wine (Yes, Orange)

​White wine, rosé wine, red wine, orange wine... Orange wine? Qu'est-ce que c'est? No, it's not a wine concocted by Longhorn fans. (They call UT the orange tide? Call me Deacon Blue Nun). Orange wine is a loosely codified category of winemaking and winemakers who macerate the juice obtained ... More >>

Open the Taps: Houston Lobbies for Statewide Access to Better Beer

Will you support the cause?​It's one thing to sit and complain about the wretched restrictions the State of Texas has placed on the sale and distribution of craft beer. It's quite another to actually do something about it. And because Houston is a city of do-ers, five Houston craft beer lovers ... More >>

AB InBev Trademarking Our Area Code for Crappy Beer

Filling a stein with Budweiser is tantamount to filling a Riedel glass with Boone's Farm, just FYI.​Anheuser-Busch is counting on civic pride to make its next product a smash seller: beer named after America's various beer-drinking cities, based on their area codes. To that end, AB has alread ... More >>

Wine of the Week: Righting the Wrong of Rosé

​Remember the "pink" and "blush" wines from the 1970s, like the one pictured right? They were mass-produced and mass-marketed blends of white and red grapes with high alcohol content (and often with added sugar) intended for the swinging cocktail set of the era. And while we all had a grand t ... More >>

Pierre Celis, Brewer of Hoegaarden and Celis Beer, Dead at 86

Flickr user wolfworld​Pierre Celis, the "King of Belgian White Beer", died over the weekend. He was 86. In spite of several unfavorable transactions with major brewing companies, Celis is widely considered one of the forbearers of the craft-brewing movement in America. His self-named brewery ... More >>

Upcoming Events

Italian winemaker Ezio Trinchero​Starting this Saturday, there are plenty of inexpensive ways to get your gourmet on in Houston this week, and it all kicks off at Block 7 Wine Company. Fresh off last night's wine dinner featuring acclaimed Italian winemaker Ezio Trinchero, Block 7 Wine Compan ... More >>

Made in Texas

Think all bourbon comes from Kentucky? Think again.

An Afternoon of Free Wine at Archway

Photo by CrosslersAn example of home winemaking supplies.​Take a late lunch tomorrow, if you can. And maybe bring along a designated driver. Archway Gallery (2305 Dunlavy, 713-522-2409) is hosting an afternoon of free wine in its Montrose space, and this isn't your typical gallery showing. Fr ... More >>

Come and Bake It

Local movement fights for cottage food bill.

Vintners Own Winery: Wine (in a Freaking Keg!) in the Heights

Happiness is eight different wines on tap.​I called my most wine-savvy friend upon receiving the invitation to the event. "Did you know there's a freaking winery in the Heights, just a few blocks from your house?" This was followed by a string of expletives (apparently she was not aware). I co ... More >>

5 Wines That'll Blow Your Mind

Steak House Shuffle

Vallone's takes a break just in time to give Fleming's a shot

Play Ball!

Sports bars and gay bars cater to a similar crowd: Guys who watch buff men