You could make a case that James MacPhail and Jeff Gaffner are two of California's most important winemakers. There is an equally strong argument that no one beyond a tight circle of dedicated wine geeks has ever heard of either.

Yet both men, ...

Wine enthusiasts of a certain age will remember the Chianti bottle encased in a fiasco, otherwise known as a straw flask. It was as ubiquitous as the red-checked tablecloth in Italian restaurants of the 1960s. A typical wine list in a ...

I remember a sidewalk cafe on a warm, humid summer day near the historic hotel Le Cep in Beaune, the spiritual center of France's Burgundy district.

One glance at the wine list and my heart sank -- Burgundy as far as the eye could see. Under ...

The Concours Mondial de Bruxelles is unique among the wine competitions I regularly attend as a judge. For one thing, it skips from country to country each year. The 2012 Concours was staged in Portugal, while this year, for the first time, it ...

As Memorial Day, the official kickoff to the outdoor barbecue season, looms in the not-too-distant future, it's not too soon to ponder the wines of summer, aka grilling wines.

The caveat here is that no matter the season, no matter the cuisine, ...

For the uninitiated, corkage is the fee a restaurant charges for the service it provides when a customer chooses to bring his or her own wine rather than order off the restaurant's wine list. In my experience, corkage fees can range anywhere from...