Consumer Products and Services

Letters

Dying for Dollars

As the death-care industry booms and consolidates, Houston's Service Corporation International is leading the way

Hard Habit to Break

M.D. Anderson just can't say no to research funding from the tobacco industry

Letters

M.D. Anderson just can't say no to research funding from the tobacco industry

Houston Lawsuit Calls Foul On Those "Low-Tar" Cigarettes

Vincent Salazar, a Houston man, is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed against Philip Morris and its parent company, Altria Group, in Texas, making the state one of four where similar lawsuits were filed in the last two days. The suits are seeking damages allegedly caused by years of advertising w ... More >>

Bar Patrons

Warning: Tobacco companies' advertising money may be addictive in Houston's club scene

5 Wines That'll Blow Your Mind

Warning: Tobacco companies' advertising money may be addictive in Houston's club scene

Thea Gilmore

Avalanche (Compass Records)

Steak House Shuffle

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

Debt Releaf

Cigarette companies get crafty

Whitney Harper: Song Downloader's Appeal Slapped Down By U.S. Supreme Court

Faith Hill shall not be denied​Five record labels that sued a 16-year-old San Antonio girl six years ago for illegally downloading a bunch of shitty music the labels vomited upon the listening public can finally exhale: the U.S. Supreme Court has decided not to hear the girl's ... More >>

Top Six Artist Vs. Record Label Feuds

​Pink Floyd has finally settled its lengthy dispute with their longtime record label EMI. The band, which signed to the label over 40 years ago, first took EMI to court last spring in an effort to clarify their existing contract. Floyd sought to prevent EMI from "unbundling" their albums by se ... More >>

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 >>

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 >>

Made in Texas

Think all bourbon comes from Kentucky? Think again.

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 >>

Eminem's Victory Over Label Could Have Far-Reaching Effects

Now a Recovery in more ways than one.​Eminem quietly scored a major victory in a case involving download royalties this week. The U.S. Supreme Court threw out an appeal filed by Universal Music Group, the world's largest music empire, against Eminem's former production company F.B.T. Productio ... 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 >>

Bayport Cruise Terminal: Still Empty and Unused, Except for Wayne Dolcefino

We noted last month the interesting sidelight to the big Disney announcement that they'd be sailing a cruise ship out of Galveston -- that sidelight being that Disney was flipping the bird to the Port of Houston's boondoggle of a cruise terminal. KTRK's ever-intrepid Wayne Dolcefino has now taken a ... 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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

Invasion of Piracy

Illegal downloading costs the film industry billions of dollars per year. But does the legal strategy designed to recoup this lost bounty amount to extortion?

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 >>

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 >>

What's The Leading Cause Of Poor Record Sales?

​Last week, the music world laughed up a hiccup as Lil Wayne pranced around the VMA stage in nut-suffocating, Le Tigre-inspired jeggings. While that performance affirmed that Wayne is no fashion guru, his chart performance a week later reminded us that he's very good at something else-selling ... More >>

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 >>

Is Commercial Radio Fading Into Oblivion?

​How many times has this happened to you: You're driving home from work. A song comes on. Drums. Guitar strums. A wimpy voice: "Say, oh, got this feeling that you can't fight..." You've heard this same song three times in 30 minutes, and it bores you to tears. Unlike the imaginary audience th ... More >>

Beer & Brass

​How many times has this happened to you: You're driving home from work. A song comes on. Drums. Guitar strums. A wimpy voice: "Say, oh, got this feeling that you can't fight..." You've heard this same song three times in 30 minutes, and it bores you to tears. Unlike the imaginary audience th ... More >>

Rice Researchers: Lack of Copy Protection Decreases Music Piracy

​A joint study between marketing professors from Rice University and Duke University has revealed that music industry efforts to reduce piracy through placing copy restrictions -- referred to as Digital Rights Management or DRM -- may actually serve to increase the very theft they wish to prev ... 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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

Record Store Day Contest Coming This Afternoon

​When so many Americans will be camping out at Best Buys and fighting over big screen televisions at Walmart, music fans will be sleeping soundly in anticipation of Record Store Day's Black Friday events. The now annual day celebrating the stores that once carried the weight of music sales is ... More >>

Top 5 Reasons Cyber Monday Is Better Than Black Friday

​To bastardize a line from Groundhog Day, "Well, it's Black Friday...again." It's that oh-so-magical time of year when the strong walk away from predawn shopping trips with armfuls of electronic goodies while the weak get treated by EMS for boot marks left by shoppers stampeding into Best Buy. ... More >>

Material World: Music to Rock Your Cyber Monday with Video

​In the late '70s, there was a movie spoof on Friday the 13th called Saturday the 14th. It was about as dumb as you imagine it would be. Well, insert punchline here because Black Friday is over, but we are still smack dab in the middle of Cyber Monday, where instead of being stampeded by rampa ... More >>

Spinning the Black Circle

Is the music industry stabilizing?

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 >>

A Roundup of the 2011 Music Industry Based Strictly on Band Names

XL/Columbia​Theologians love saying things like "Man is created superior to animals" and "Animals can't be equal with humans." And then we go scouring philosophy books to see if animals have immortal spirits and if this means we'll someday meet our pets in heaven. That's a bunch of horse dung. ... More >>

Last Minute Shopping: The 10 Best Online Retailers (Not Named Amazon.com)

​For a decade now, online retailers have increasingly grown their sales to the point they now rival traditional brick and mortar establishments. Let's face it, it's just easier to shop online if you have a computer, an internet connection and a desire to avoid crowds. You can sit there with a ... More >>

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 >>

Meat Market

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

Swizz Beatz is the CEO of Shuttered Megaupload...Wait, What?

​We've all failed as music journalists. Swizz Beatz is the CEO of Megaupload.com and no one seemed to notice? No one, except Wikipedia (yes, that bastion of factual information on the web), which lists Swizzy's government handle, Kaseem Dean, as the head honcho of Megaupload. Megaupload's "Abo ... 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 >>

App of the Week: Pandora vs. iHeartRadio

​If you haven't been paying attention, a very tiny little war has been brewing over access to the ears of people who like to listen to radio online or on their smart phones. I say it's a tiny war because, at the moment, it is. While many of us who love music and like to listen to it a lot will ... More >>

The Natural Wine Debate Gets Ugly

Photo by Jeremy Parzen.Houstonian Lewis Dickson is the only Natural winemaker in Texas.​"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: Letti ... More >>

Wine of the Week: Natural Wine in Texas

Photos by Jeremy Parzen.Back in October 2010, I visited the sole Natural winemaker in Texas, Lewis Dickson (left), together with the leading Natural wine advocate in the U.S., Alice Feiring (right).​As we noted in last week's post on a new era of Nastiness and a call for civility in the Natura ... More >>