Custom Wine Cellars Come of Age

Tagged as: Wine, Wine Cellars, Dinner, Cellarworks, North Fork Wine Cellar Designs, Home, Drink

Assuming you've pulled all your money out of the market in the last few weeks, you might be looking for a place to put it. We suggest using it to build your bottle portfolio. You?ll need to be on the lookout for fakes, but the upside is huge: an anonymous Chinese businessman recently shelled out half a million dollars for 27 bottles of burgundy. And you'll want to protect your investments. Don?t be like the Lehman Brother trader who, when faced with the company's impending doom, uncorked a bottle of 1997 Bruno Giacosa Barbaresco Santo Stefano and poured it out into paper cups. Store and serve your wine properly, people. Condos and co-ops in the city now include wine storage as a luxury building amenity, right up there with concierge service and media rooms. If you're looking to put in your own cellar, options abound. North Fork Wine Cellar Designs, for example, imports materials from several different regions, focusing primarily on a wide range of woods, allowing them to adapt to the diverse needs of wine collectors. For bigger projects, Cellarworks has established itself as a go-to resource for modern wine storage. They offer more traditional work, like a SoHo apartment outfitted with an African mahogany 2,200-bottle space and a Greenwich home with a 7,000-bottle basement cellar. But among their modern designs, we?re particularly fond of the glass-enclosed model at the Mandarin Oriental in Miami. Finally, some transparency in the market.

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This is *THAT* Brandy

Tagged as: Korbel, Drink, California, Brandy, Wine, Remy Martin

This is *THAT* Brandy With the inevitability of the seasons changing, the leaves turning, and the temperatures dropping, we?re not ashamed to say we?ve been thinking about brandy. Is that healthy? Not sure, but we need something to keep us warm through the oncoming cool autumn months. While there were a few bottles to consider in search of the best spirit distilled from wine (sorry, Cognac gets its own category), we always considered the gold medal-winning Korbel California brandy our go-to spirit when a good Remy Martin bottle wasn?t readily available. The rich golden color and amber hints were always a favorite of ours, and there aren?t too many distilleries (although Asbach and Christian Brothers come to mind) with the same history and a stronger reputation for everything from a quick sip to cooking to mixing. Now the company has introduced a new custom-designed bottle and label that pays homage to spirit namesake Francis Korbel. But we?re not going to just laud the new Korbel for the bottle redesign. With a smooth texture and strong, flavorful hints, it already stands on it own. The fact that we?ve even considered lumping it together with our favorite cognacs is an even greater testimony to this brandy. We?re not going to lie and say we thought we were drinking Remy, but the new Korbel is helping prepare us for the imminent post-summer chill.

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Don't Believe the Hype.

Tagged as: Wine Spectator, Robin Goldstein, Wine, Awards, Drink

From that wonderful world of wine comes the fascinating tale of Robin Goldstein, a wine writer and aficionado who conducted an experiment to examine the scrutiny Wine Spectator uses in handing out its exalted Awards of Excellence. Goldstein submitted a fake Italian restaurant, Osteria L'Intrepido named after a dining guide she had started.

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A New Way to Spot a Fake.

Tagged as: Drink, Bloomberg, Technology, Wine, Electronics

There have been a variety of articles over the past couple of years about the spreading problem of fakes in the high-class but mostly clueless world of fine wines. This according to a new story on Bloomberg.com about how a group of Spanish sacientists have come up with a brilliant concept: the digital tongue. According to a report published by the UK Royal Society of Chemistry, the electronic probe can analyze a wine for authenticity by measuring elements like the year and grape used in the vintage.

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Eat, Drink, Tuscany. Now *THAT's* a Vacation.

Tagged as: Dinner, drink, Italian, Italy, This is THAT, Travel, wine

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