Just hit ESC to wine, dine, and stay in a whirlwind of sensory inspiration.
This was originally written for the March 2023 edition of Philosophy Notes, the newsletter of the Marin Philosophical Society. There’s a continuum that flows like so: data to information to knowledge to wisdom. Age, I believe, is supposed to support that trajectory. And if not age, at least time. In my case, it’s been neither. …
Grüner Veltliner — sure, it sounds like some kind of Viennese rail system — but the Austrian white wine varietal has been popular stateside for well over a decade. Check your fridge, you may already have one laying on its side, playing possum as a sauvignon blanc — a forgotten party gift handed off during the hurly-burly of…
This much I know I love: California Craft Beer Week starts on a Friday and ends on a Tuesday-11 days later. That’s a helluva week of beer and precisely the kind of math I do after I’ve had a couple of pints (and by a couple, I mean multiply everything I say by a factor of…
As the wine world raises a glass to the late Fred Franzia, the unorthodox businessman behind the Charles Shaw wine brand (a.k.a. “Two Buck Chuck”) who passed away this week, it’s high time to revisit the story of Shaw himself and one of the potential pitfalls of being a brand name. How did Shaw’s name end…
There was a time when, for the price of a nickel, diners could participate in a uniquely American food phenom. The Automat anticipated both the worlds of fast food and “self-serve,” became a social institution, then vanished into obscurity. Founded by entrepreneurs Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart in the late 1880s, their restaurant concept was…
Je dis ça, je dis rien is a French idiom that translates literally as, “I say that, I say nothing.” Its nearest English counterpart is the comparatively flip “just sayin,’” which is as close to a raison d’etre as I can presently muster for this column. You see, the problem with being a humorist during…
