Ok, so I need to fess up. There’s something I have not been straight up about…wine is not my favorite drink. Water is. As passionate as I am about tasting wine, understanding where it’s born, the hands that touch it, the magic of making it, when it comes down to...
5 Tips for Picking a Wine Blindly
You’ve been there. You’re standing in the supermarket, or liquor store, and have absolutely no idea about any of the wines in front of you. You look around. There is no floor help anywhere in sight. You have to hit the road NOW for a dinner party. Ayy, what to...
Tasting Notes: Napa Night
Can a whole dinner revolve around a single wine? Most definitely. I love working in reverse. On Friday, the whole pretext of the dinner was to crack open my friend Melissa’s ’97 bottle of Beaulieu Tapestry . She sent me the Cellar Tracker ) notes for planning. It...
Bodega Cruzat: Overflowing with Effervescence
Don Pedro is frantic. The bodega alarm won’t stop shreking. It is shrill enough to hurt our ear drums a little. He greets us shrugging his shoulders and laughing in surrender. Suddenly there is silence. Meet Don Pedro Rossell--Argentina’s primo maestro in...
Pure Inspiration: Nomads of the Seas
Sunday night we came back from what I can only qualify as a mind-blowing four days in Patagonia. We headed down to cover a new gastronomic program called Tasting Chile with the “extreme” fly-fishing/ecotourism cruise called Nomads of the Seas. The objective?...
Inspirational Entertaining
Entertaining at our place has been on hiatus for the past couple months as work, life, and trips enveloped us and left me wanting to order out, not cook in for a crowd. This past long weekend over Easter in Santiago was very quiet. A small exodus to the beaches had...
Back from the Other Side
You know, it’s really Amazing how close Mendoza is to Santiago. Normally, I just jump on the LAN shuttle and bam, 45 minutes later over the Andes, I am there. However, this time, Francisco and I decided to take the scenic route and drive, something we hadn’t...
Coming soon…
Happy New Year! Coming Soon: EatWine redesigned. Stay tuned for our new blog featuring people, places, food, wine and more.
Wine of the Year 2008: Clos Apalta
AWESOME!!! A Chilean wine made the Wine of the Year (2008) for Wine Spectator. That means it beat the Premier Grand Cru, some rockin' Pinot, many, many others. Wow. Clos Apalta is the creme de la creme of Casa Lapostolle winery, a sultry, slinky vintage of 42%...
Oh, those Aussies
Oh, those Aussies. Always trying to throw out some shockers with the wine labels. I have to admit though, they always make me laugh and it inevitably creates this intense desire to try the wines to see what they are like. Is the wine that good (or bad),...
Banana Dark Chocolate Bread
I will admit that of all the foods in this world it has taken me years to get around to even putting a banana in my mouth. Something about the smell, the texture, the slimy sweetness, just wasn't happening for my palate. I occasionally buy bananas at the market for...
Mixer Melodrama
For years, I dreamed about owning a Kitchen Aid Mixer. A bright cherry red one. It was my ultimate baking toy. I thought of all the amazing Christmas cookies I would whip up, the creamiest mashed potatoes I would make. Then I realized that my love for the mixer...
The Irony of Buying Chilean Wine: Part 1
In a year's time, we receive a lot of people with our Culinary & Wine Tours business (www.lizcaskey.com) that are very savvy wine drinkers. They come to Chile and Argentina to experience the wines in their place of origin, taste the local terroir, and inevitably,...
A Wine Eulogy: Good-bye Paul Bruno
It seems that most wine buffs are obsessed with how long a wine can, and should, be aged. Will it taste better? Will those tannins round out? Will it turn into hidden gold? For those collecting as a commodity, will it become so valuable that I resell it to buy more...
Diary of a Foodie: Chile Mestizo Episode
I wanted to give a heads up though about a great show airing in the US on PBS: The Diary of a Foodie. The Chile episode, called Chile Mestizo, is presently broadcasting across the US. It’s an episode rather dear to my heart since I was brought in to collaborate...
Smokin’: San Antonio Valley’s Sauvignon Blancs
For many years, Sauvignon Blanc in Chile has been synonymous with the Casablanca Valley–that foggy valley off of Route 68 on the road to Valparaiso and Viña del Mar. Mostly dairy farms until 1982, winemaker Pablo Morandé was the first to pioneer and plant wines here,...
Me & My Microplane
Living down here in South America, at times I feel a little out of the gourmet loop in terms of kitchen gadgets. While we have the basics, there is no Williams-Sonoma, Sur Le Table, and imagine, Food Network. Back in October, a couple food-and-wine minded clients were...
The Spice of Life
Published in Placeres Magazine-January/February 2007 When it comes to Indian food, what the majority of the world considers as authentic, being most of the food served in restaurants is in essence Northern Indian cuisine; a meat-based cuisine passed down from the...
and the meaningful