image: thrillist.com

My latest for Thrillist.com is now available, titled How to Level Up Food and Wine Pairings.

Is there anything new regarding food and wine matching offered in this piece? Probably not; just about everything that need be said about pairing up food and wine has pretty much been said.

Having said that, the article is chock-full of the tips and tricks that I myself have actually employed over the years when trying to elevate my own food+wine game, so I’m confident that it will be useful to the Thrillist readership (hell, even if casual wine drinkers remember only the very first tip on the list, they’ll have walked away from a hopefully entertaining read with a culinary rule-of-thumb that’ll improve almost any future wine-pairing attempt that they might make).

Anyway, feel free to stop by at heckle me!

Cheers!

image: thrillist.com

A quick update today to let you know that my inaugural wine piece for online food, drink, and travel juggernaut Thrillist.com (seriously, their numbers are sick) is now available.

The article is a quick run-through of what to look out for when hunting down a good, inexpensive ($15-and-under) bottle of wine, and is geared towards the non-currently-geeky-over-it-but-hopefully-could-be-geeky-about-it-one-day drinking populace.

It’s by no means exhaustive, but it should give a fair number of shoppers an entertaining place to start. I’m excited about working with Thrillist, and hoping to have more content appearing their in the coming months. In the meantime, go ahead an pick my first piece for them apart (just drink something good while doing so, okay?).

Cheers!

image: Fix.com

1WD is no stranger to the geeky details of alternative wine closures (see previous thoughts on touring the Nomacorc synthetic cork plant, my write-up about screwcap closures for Publix Grape, and an introduction to cork alternatives penned for Answers.com). Some of us find shizz like that to be fascinating… potentially unhealthy, argue-about-it-vehemently-over-many-drinks levels of fascinating (that’s why they call us “geeks).

The other 99.99% of wine drinkers probably (ok, definitely) don’t spend anywhere near as much time pondering the developments in the alternative closure scene; it is for them (the normal people) that my latest Fix.com article has been penned.

In this info-graphic-laden entry, we take a look at traditional cork, “technical” cork, glass stoppers, synthetic cork, and screwcaps, the Pros and Cons of which are all brought to colorful life by the Fix.com crew. Full embeddable graphic below after the jump, for your viewing pleasure.

Cheers!

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image: fix.com

Last week, my latest for Fix.com was published, entitled Wines at Chilly Extremes. Just in time for Winter, which in my neck of the woods has been mild enough in general to make me want to instantly slap global warning deniers.

The article is an alternate take on the “cool climate wines” theme, in which we highlight not grape varieties grown for fine wine in cooler regions, but the wine world’s more extreme cooler regions themselves.

The result is some trivia-worthy tidbits on areas such as the Nahe, the Niagara Peninsula, and Norway, all brought to life in super-accessible Technicolor graphic style by the Fix.com design wizards. This time, some specific (and Pinot-centric) wine selections are also mentioned as examples from the highlighted regions: Kim Crawford Pinot Noir, Bodega Chacra ‘Barda’ Pinot Noir, Inniskillin Vidal Icewine, Nelles Spätburgunder, and the Lerkekåsa Solaris (and no, I’ve not had it or visited… yet…).

You can head on over to Fix.com for the full-monty, and/or give your eyes an infographic feast via the embedded goodness below (more of my Fix.com work can be found here).

Cheers!…

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