John Mariani

I have drunk enough 80-degree (26.7 centigrade) red wines in overheated New York apartments and enough ice cold, headache-inducing whites to know how misguided people can be about wine temperatures.

I was invited to a birthday party where each wine was followed by a greater, rarer, more expensive one, which eventually led to a single bottle of 1929 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild.

Being the fifth largest wine grape and wine producing state in the U.S. might be worth boasting about, but Texas is not a state that takes fifth place lightly.

Wine making is a romantic obsession -- a good selling point for an agricultural product marketed as seductive, sophisticated and highly cultured.

More than 150 years before California had vineyards, settlers in Jamestown, Virginia were crushing grapes.

While most of the northern hemisphere seems to be sweltering, it is worth considering the argument that red wines aren’t appropriate for hot weather drinking.

Has the term “Super Tuscan” become as fatuous as “vintage of the century” and “100 Point Rating”? Has too much of a good thing cheapened the category?

It takes 13 pounds of fresh potatoes to make one bottle of Woody Creek vodka, says Mark Kleckner, a former Washington, D.C.-based mergers and acquisitions expert in the defense industry.

While perusing the 1,800-selection wine list at New York’s Aureole restaurant, my wife nudged me at about number 785 and said, “Pssst. I’m still here.”

They are the color of gold but not at all rare; They are inexpensive yet hard to find on a wine list. Yet they are among the most versatile white wines, not least with dishes that contain a good dose of spice.

With growth in global wine sales waning, Spanish wine makers have introduced better quality and more attractive pricing to woo customers.

Ask people to name a rye whiskey label, and they’ll probably squint and mumble, “Uh, Canadian Club?” (Which is a blended whiskey, not a rye, according to the U.S. Standards of Identity.)