Room in the Suitcase Issue #13 · Wednesday, August 19, 2026 The estate Cabernet, poured on the patio in West Hills. The best wine they make, and I had to ask. I sat in six tasting rooms over two days in the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys and flew home with an empty bag. I was down there working on an article about the region's wine road, which is a trip I would recommend to anyone and will be recommending in print. I had flown in, and the bag I brought had room in it for a couple of...
14 days ago • 5 min read
The Tobacco in the Cabernet Issue #12 · Wednesday, August 12, 2026 The 1999 Merryvale, Beckstoffer Clone Six. Mike brought it in himself. We ate at Chickie's and Pete's on Thursday before the show. The wine list there is average at best, which is roughly what a casino sports bar list is built to be, and the practical effect is that nobody at the table chooses anything. Lori took the house Chardonnay because the house Chardonnay was the option. I knew what that glass was going to be and I knew...
21 days ago • 8 min read
Issue 11 · August 05, 2026 Collecting sunsets Thirty months. That's how long the average wine club member stays now. Golden Gate Bridge. The sun going down behind the Marin Headlands. In Maine, summer arrives like a rumor. You get mud season first, then black flies and no-see-ums so thick you can taste them, then a random morning of snow flurries in June just to remind you who's in charge. Then summer, briefly, ferociously, and then September with its first frosts before anyone was ready....
27 days ago • 4 min read
Issue 10 · July 29, 2026 The Tikis Nobody Straightened A 1964 motel on the south end of Palm Springs, 105 degrees, and nothing on the walls to explain any of it. The one bar at the Palm Springs airport had no air conditioning the day we arrived. An HVAC problem, somebody said. I had two hours to wait there for Lori's flight, because we had booked separately, because the trip was being paid for in miles. By the time she landed I had sweated through a shirt without going anywhere or doing...
about 1 month ago • 8 min read
Issue 9 · July 22, 2026 Thirty Feet from the Answer Barcelona Wine Bar, Atlanta. Just off the BeltLine. She had the guest for the length of the room. Forty feet, maybe, from the barrel racks to the door, and a glass of the estate red still working on him. He liked it. He said so twice. Then he set the glass down, thanked her, and walked out with nothing, and she turned to the next pour without seeming to notice that a sale had just left through the front door. I thought about her a few weeks...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Issue 8 · July 15, 2026 Somebody Has to Be Here A one-bottle Malbec run at a Healdsburg winery, and the story a good winery knows how to tell. The garden at De La Montanya, apple trees in bloom. The umbrellas go up when the heat arrives. I went to De La Montanya for one bottle. My daughter's partner likes Malbec, probably owing to his Ecuadorian roots, and on a hot Tuesday at the end of June I stopped in to pick one up. Jarod looked up from the only other table he was working and said my name...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Issue 7 · July 8, 2026 The Fourth of July had run hot all day, and by the time the heat finally let go I had the backyard to myself in Sparks. The firepit lit, the last of the daylight going out of the yard, nobody around but me. The bottle was the Ruxton Sands Rosé from Croix Estate, pulled cold from the refrigerator because on a day like that nothing else sounded right. I wasn't working. There was no tasting room, no line at the door, nobody to convert into anything. And still, somewhere...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Issue 6 · July 1, 2026 The Long Way Around A Viator tour to Châteauneuf-du-Pape, four strangers in a courtyard, and the discovery that the world is smaller than it pretends to be. September 2025. The estate sits up off the road, gravel courtyard, vines visible in every direction. Working winery, not a destination polished for the camera. We arrived first and waited for the other two couples to show up. Fifteen minutes maybe. The dog was somewhere out of sight. The sun was already heavy on the...
2 months ago • 6 min read
Issue 5 · June 24, 2026 The Ghost in the Architecture Virginia City in the heat of the day, an Edgar Allan Poe speakeasy, and a bar that was exactly what Paul said it would be. We took the Subaru. The road from Sparks to Virginia City doesn't ease you in — it climbs out of the valley on a series of switchbacks, sheds the subdivisions fast, opens across high desert with views that run fifty miles on a clear day, and then tips over the Comstock and drops you into 1859. Twenty-six miles from our...
2 months ago • 4 min read