Waiter, There’s a rock
(herb, green bean) in my wine!
America's Test Kitchen Radio

It’s not easy to translate sensation into words, but sommeliers, retailers, and even winemakers are under constant pressure to do it. Much of the rhetoric that ensues is fanciful and frankly useless, but a handful of terms now seem to have entered what might be called wine’s universal, if unofficial, lexicon—a set of terms most…

Up with Champagne,
down with flutes!
America's Test Kitchen Radio

  It was the Widow Clicquot (Veuve Clicquot) who around the turn of the 19th century developed several now­-standard techniques for making Champagne both reliably sparkling and profitable when produced on a mass scale. And it’s really from this time forward that the heavy­-duty marketing of Champagne as an indispensable accompaniment to the good life gets…