A blend of buttermilk and honey make these easy-to-prep corn muffins exceptionally sweet and tender.

The muffins can be made a day ahead and stored in an airtight container at room temperature.

Use any leftover buttermilk to make creamy dressings, fluffy pancakes or even a tangy smoothie.
Read the full story

Sometimes you just need a little mid-week bubbly to get you through. Such was the feeling all the Swirl Girls had this past Wednesday, when we converged at my house armed with five different kinds of cheese, fruit, baguettes, raspberry phyllo brie bites and three bottles of champagne.

Sometimes we really know how to live.

The Swirl Girls had received three bottles of champagne to review, so we were three times as excited to do a little taste testing. After loading down my coffee table with our goodies, we settled in and popped the first. Read the full story

Sometimes my wine selection starts with a long meander down Publix or Total Wine or an hour of researching something very particular I want. And sometimes, it starts when you’re running out the door late and thinking “the only thing I have for dinner is that package of lobster ravioli…” and you end up grabbing the only wine that makes sense.

Which is how my night (and wine choice) went earlier this week. Thank goodness we had a bottle of Chardonnay that had been given to the Swirl Girls for review sitting around.

The wine comes from the Burgundy region of France and contains 100 percent Chardonnay grapes. It’s fermented in 60 percent oak barrels and 40 percent stainless steel. They use about 10 percent new oak. It’s bottled after a year and retails for $22.99. Total Wine in Boynton Beach carries Olivier Leflaive wine and will be able to order it for you if you like.

The color is so light it’s almost clear. It has an aroma of apple, citrus and woodiness. Either my glasses were dirty or it contained a tiny bit of effervescence. On the palate, it’s light and tart with a short to medium finish. It was oaky in the way we expect of Chardonnays but not so much I felt like I was chewing on bark. It held together as a fairly balanced wine and is a good example of a French Chardonnay.

It paired fairly well with our dinner of Caesar salad, corn on the cob and the lobster ravioli. It didn’t make me swoon (or even finish the bottle) but it was a good choice for a mid-week table wine. I wouldn’t buy it again, but if you’re a big Chardonnay fan, then you’re probably going to appreciate it.

Okay, I’ll admit it. When I first heard Earthy talking about wine sorbet I got excited. I have an awesome electric ice cream maker and I figured it was by far time to use it for something a bit more…adult.

So on a slow Monday night, I pulled it out of the freezer, found a basic recipe online and opened up a bottle of Riesling. As far as the cooking, it was extremely simple. Boil six ounces of water with 1/2 cup of sugar, add 10-12 ounces of wine and let it cool. I should have let it cool more, seriously slowed down the ice cream-izing!

At first, I was alarmed by how long it took to turn slushy but patience is a virtue and after a good 30-40 minutes, I bravely added a chopped up ripe peach, thinking the peach and the Riesling would pair well together. Read the full story

I’m having a Swirl Girl moment of confusion.

No, I’m not a bottle into the night and can’t remember what my dog’s name is, nor am I hazy and hung-over. I’m simply trying to figure out if my distaste for last night’s wine stems from a general distaste of the style of wine or if the wine was simply bad.

The Swirl Girls had received a complimentary shipment of wine from Waterstone Winery out in Napa Valley for review. As I walked out the door last night, I grabbed the 2008 Pinot Gris from Napa Valley, thinking it would pair nicely with my dinner plans of a light shrimp-feta-orzo dish and some asparagus, a dish I normally serve with Albarino. I chilled it happily and started cooking, excited to see how it would fare. Read the full story

After a first whirlwind tour of Napa, we woke up bright and early the next day ready to go again, which I attribute to the fact that we both fell asleep about 7 P.M. and only woke at midnight for a snack, then returned to bed. Which is a little bit sad, because I’m sure there are some great restaurants in Napa to try.

However, by 10:30 A.M., we were on the road headed back up to St. Helena, specifically, St. Supery. I’m familiar with St. Supery’s wines having tried them before at a live blogging tasting the previous month. I was very pleasantly surprised by a cool self-guided tour. As we wandered through the building, we stopped to watch the inner workings such as bottling, which was something I hadn’t seen before. The tour itself is highly educational as well, and I consider myself fairly wine geeky and I still learned and reveled. Don’t miss the aromatic “Smell-a-Vision”, which gives you an idea exactly what certain smells wine peeps mean when they say “grapefruit, with a hint of clove, nutmeg and week-old quince pie.” Read the full story

What do you get when you take one sweet-loving, wine sniffin’ Swirl Girl, drop her in the middle of Napa Valley and give her free reign to seek out her favorite wine? How about when you throw in a marathon and perfect weather and you’ve got a recipe for a dream vacation. Read the full story

There are moments when I despair of my development as a wine-o.

When my nose is buried in a big glass of red and I come up for air, announce proudly, “cherries! I’d bet my life on it!”, and then be told it’s filled with blackberries and plums, I don’t think I’ll ever figure this wine thing out.

There are a lot of those moments, actually.

Then there are moments I think “you’ve come a long way, baby.”

I had one of those experiences last week. I had invited a couple of friends over for a casual summer dinner – orzo with feta and shrimp and bought the perfect bottle of Albarino to go with it. Read the full story

Maybe we’ve gotten cocky. After all, the Winettes have been skipping through enormously large wine-tastings for more than six months. Gone are the days of total drunkenness by midnight. No longer are there girls passed out on the couch by the end of the night or the following morning. We have faced down 18 bottles of wine and somehow come out on the other side.

But none of that prepared us for the sugar involved in 10 bottles of white German wine.

I woke up the next morning and felt like I’d just consumed 12 pounds of cotton candy.

But it was totally worth it.

This month, the Winettes skipped back across the ocean and settled in for German and Alsace wines. (Dry) Gwen has cleverly avoided steering the group there since she’s a dry and red girl through and through. But when Winette roommates Alison and Mathilde offered to host, Mathilde stipulated the German region as she’d lived there and loved their wine. Game, set, match. Thus, we dutifully researched the region, made an effort to get some nice white blends that weren’t Rieslings and even had a couple of reds at the end.

But still – there was SO much sugar! And this is from the girl whose nickname is Sweet! Read the full story

What I’m going to say just might make me sound a little bit cheap but in this economy, I don’t feel like I’ve got to apologize for that. Sometimes I hate going to restaurants and being charged my future unborn child for a wine that I know retails in the under $25 range. I hate it.

It’s enough that mentally I think: “Well, I’ll just cook a nice dinner and spend the money I would have spent on a bottle of okay wine, on a really nice bottle of wine.” I like to cook, so this is cool for me.

But what’s even cooler are restaurants that don’t have a corkage fee, which means you can bring your own baby, I mean bottle of wine and they’ll open and pour it for you for no extra fee. Yep, a lot restaurants charge between a $5 and $25 corkage fee just to open up your wine and pour it for you.

There’s a web site called GoBYO where you can put in your address and how far you’re willing to travel and it will bring up a lot of the major restaurants and their corkage fee. There’s even subcategories where you can search by fee and discover what exactly doesn’t have a corkage fee. And, it will even tell you how wine friendly they are, what entrees cost, and what’s on their wine list.

Which makes eating out a whole lot, well, yummier.