Love wine? Love graphic design? Here are five awesome designs we stumbled across while drinking wine and surfing the web. The above image comes from Grey Jay’s design for a sherry-focused drinks list at NYC’s The Beagle. Any resto with this much oxidative juice has to be good! The above…
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Sadly, the first season of Game of Thrones has come to an end. So to hold us over, and to have a little fun, we’ve decided to merge our wine-geekdom with our Seven-Kingdoms-fanaticism. In that spirit we bring you Game of Rhônes – Our picks for Rhône wines that match GOT characters. Have any ideas of your own? Feel free to share them! 1. Tyrion Lannister – Small in stature but large in influence, the “Imp” is easily GOT’s most entertaining character, as well as its most decadent. So for him, we’ve chosen the 2005 Michel Chapoutier Greffieux. The Greffieux...
The moment I step foot in Nicolas Joly’s vineyard in Savennières, I realize all my thinking about the man and about biodynamics has been wrong. I had spent too much time investigating natural winemaking techniques; too much time pondering the possibility that the moon might have an effect on how wine tastes; and far too much time considering what makes a wine “good” or “bad”. I had missed the point. All I needed to do was smell the air. You hear a lot about how wine evokes place—a notion usually reserved for wine as a mnemonic device, one that brings...
Suck on This Bloody Good Sips for True Blood’s Season 4 Premiere Can Bill and Sookie’s star-crossed love survive? Will Tara ever find a normal boyfriend? Does Sam ever worry about getting Lyme Disease? Could Eric possibly be any hotter? We’ve been waiting for the next round of HBO’s True Blood for what seems like an eternal night, and we’re craving this new summer season like Jason Stackhouse used to need a fix of V. To quench our insatiable thirst for more, we present to you the Bon Temps-worthy, fang-tastic top 10 wines to sip for the Sunday, June 26...
Thanks to everyone who came out to our Spanish Wine Festival on Friday June 17th! It was a wonderful evening filled with wine, food and song. Hopefully you had the chance to be there and sample some of the greatest wines Spain has to offer. If you missed it, don’t worry, there’s always next year. And if you’re still thirsty, you can sign up for our email newsletter, check out our facebook, or visit our website for more opportunities to taste the latest and greatest in Spanish wine. We have seminars and special events throughout the year, and of course...
PJ Wine 2010 Bordeaux Vintage Report In April, we traveled to Bordeaux. We went there with a big thirst, a healthy dose of curiosity, and a lot of toothpaste (you wouldn’t believe how long it takes to get the purple off your teeth from barrel tasting all day). But we also came with questions: Would 2010 be the “vintage of the century,” following those other “vintages of the century,” 2000, 2005, and 2009? Is there such a thing as a bad vintage in Bordeaux anymore? Will the emerging global market make the best wines completely unaffordable to anyone besides the...
Francois Pinon I know how I’m going to sound right now—like some totally annoying Francophile who’s just come back from France all starry-eyed and full of good wine and goat cheese who insists on moaning and groaning about how inferior everything is back home. Blah-blah-blah. But, see, that’s not at all my point – it’s just hard to visit a Vouvray producer like Francois Pinon and not be just a little bit blown away. When we pulled up to his small winery, bound by lovely but overgrown honeysuckle and rose bushes, and filled with myriad mismatched pots of herbs and...
The Top Ten Wines We Can’t Wait to Taste at the 2011 Spanish Wine Festival: The Spanish Wine Festival is our favorite day of the year. Why? When else do we get to taste so many exceptional wines, from exceptional vintages, from our favorite country? Plus, we get to do this in the company of other enthusiasts, folks who love España as much as we do! What could be better? Our taste buds are itching to get their game on, and just to get in the spirit of things, we’ve compiled the top 10 wines we can not wait to...
In Search of Rioja Part II: A week in Haro The dining table at Muga is huge. It’s more of a giant lazy Susan really, and we’re spinning it round and round while picking up various Muga vintages to taste. Juan Muga is our host and is the only man with enough size and personality to feel comfortable at a table like this. And why shouldn’t he? It’s his world. About twenty minutes before the first vintages started their circular journey, Juan gave us a tour of the winery; one of the most traditional in all Rioja. We walked through...
We’re sitting in a restaurant no-one is supposed to know about. At least Peter (PJ’s owner) doesn’t want anyone to know about. It’s up in the hills above San Sebastian and overlooks what is now Europe’s capital of cuisine. There are about twenty, 3-star Michelin restaurants in the world; five are in San Sebastian. This is not one of them. But we’re not here for the food—which is too traditional and too satisfying to win high marks from Michelin (no foams, sprays, or deconstructed shellfish)—we’re here for the wine. More specifically, we’re here to drink old Rioja, something the cellar...
Today, I’ve been doing a lot of rosé tasting. ‘Tis almost the season, after all, and we’re getting ready around here to quench the collective thirst for summer sipping with bright, salmon-hued, berry-scented bottles of juicy, thirst-alleviating delight. Horray! But while I love this task in the same way that I love unpacking my summer clothes (“Oh my god, I forgot all about that cute dress—what a great color!”), tasting rosé after young rosé can get kind of… old. Ironically. As the aromas of cherry and raspberry and citrus danced in my head, though, there was one bottle that stopped...
The concept of Hipster is like pornography, you can’t define it but you know it when you see it. Recently Lettie Teague of the Wall Street Journal wrote that, “While the Urban Dictionary defines “hipster” according to geographic location, hairstyle and attire, there is no indication as to a preference…
When Equipo PJs arrived in Lyon last March it was challenging enough to walk down the street, let alone to try and land a plane. In retrospect, though, blustery March weather is the ideal mood setting atmosphere for visiting the largest city in the Rhône-Alpes region, one that is known…
If you are traveling to the Jura to drink wine you will surely stumble across the towns of Arbois and Poligny. They are both tiny, but thanks to the genius of French civic planning they feel like miniature versions of Paris or, perhaps more accurately, like one of those “secret” neighborhoods in Paris, such as…
This year’s Action Against Hunger Grand Tasting was a tremendous success. Once again PJ Wine was thrilled to be the principal sponsor for this event, which does so much to generate funds for a noble charity and is, of course, and excuse to taste so many amazing wines. And taste…
