Photo by Tracie P.

​After what's your favorite wine?, the question that I get asked the most at wine tastings and seminars is how do you make wine last after you've opened the bottle?

My initial answer is drink good wine: Wine with high acidity will last longer once opened; acidity is one of the key elements that give wine its longevity.

Then I offer my technical advice: If you're only going to consume a few glasses from a bottle, pour the desired amount into a glass vessel (which doesn't have to be a decanter, by the way; any carafe -- glass, ceramic, crystal -- or even a measuring cup will do) and then immediately recork the wine -- red or white -- and put it in the fridge. Wine ages rapidly when it comes into contact with oxygen. By recorking and chilling the wine, you will slow this process.

Tracie P has been nursing our eight-week-old baby Georgia and she only drinks a glass of wine at dinner these days. On any given night, we might only consume a half of a bottle of wine.

And so I decided to conduct an experiment with one of our favorite bottlings of Chianti Rufina (100 percent Sangiovese) by Selvapiana (above), opening the bottle on a Monday and drinking one glass every evening through Friday (Tracie P had the sixth glass).

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This morning, I captured the above screenshot of the new TABC Facebook.

​Remember the Jonathan Franzen New York Times essay from last year, "Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts"? In it, he considers the "transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb 'to like' from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture's substitute for loving." And he opines:

But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist -- a person who can't tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.

If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you've despaired of being loved for who you really are.

Franzen's article came to mind on Friday when I received an email from the public service announcement arm of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission delivering the news that "The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission has launched a new Facebook page. It's a great way for the public, the media, employees, the alcoholic beverage industry, and community groups to keep up with the agency! Like us at http://www.facebook.com/TXABC.

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Photos by Jeremy Parzen.

Uchi's executive chef Tyson Cole's cooking combines the traditional, experimental, and ambitious in a marriage of eastern and western gastronomy. But what about his wine list?

​There's a lot riding on the launch of the new Uchi in Houston. Tyson Cole's Austin outposts -- Uchi and Uchiko -- stand apart as "destination" restaurants in Texas, venues that have attained national recognition in part because of Cole's success as a competitive chef on television and in part because of the sheer novelty of high-end, high-concept, and high-profile Japanese-inspired cuisine in landlocked Central Texas.

As a native Southern Californian, I was skeptical about Japanese cuisine in Texas. It would be hard to rival, I imagined, the availability of ingredients and the local culinary traditions of my home state, where Japanese nationals have lived and thrived for more than century. (The tragic story of discrimination against Japanese in East Texas in the early part of the twentieth century is too often glossed over in the annals of Texas history. All of those rice fields between Houston and Orange to the north of Interstate 10? They were all planted by Japanese before Federal law made it illegal for them to own land there.)

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Photo by Margaret Shugart, curator of a new blog, The Wine Roads of Texas.

​The Wine Roads of Texas: "If you've never seen the communities that run across that vast stretch of road," writes Margaret Shugart, author of a new blog called The Wine Roads of Texas, "you are missing one of the most unique cultures in Texas society, and certainly some of the most striking scenery" in the state. She's referring to that legendary stretch of U.S. Route 90 that runs from Del Rio to Van Horn, Texas, passing along the way through Marfa.

Margaret's been working on a revised edition of Wes Marshall's The Wine Roads of Texas: An Essential Guide to Texas Wines and Wineries, originally published in 2002 (Maverick) and most recently updated in 2007.

"I'm doing the legwork for the new book," said Margaret when we spoke to her in Austin, where she lives and works. And the blog is a chronicle of her adventures down those "wine roads."

She's about a month into it at this point and we can't wait for more!

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Chuck Cook Photography

​Have you ever told a friend, "I simply have to come see you sometime!" and then ended up saying that every time you ran into each other? And then, by the time you're ready, or he's ready, something has changed?

Well, while "wine badass" Marc Borel was at Bacchus, I kept telling him that, and by the time I was ready to visit, he'd gone off to Backstreet Café.

Marc may have left Bacchus, but the wine list and menu he designed is very much alive and well. I talked him into meeting me to discuss what he did while he was there. I was also looking for suggestions for some new things to try.

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Photos by Jeremy Parzen.

Back in October 2010, I visited the sole Natural winemaker in Texas, Lewis Dickson (left), together with the leading Natural wine advocate in the U.S., Alice Feiring (right).

​As we noted in last week's post on a new era of Nastiness and a call for civility in the Natural wine debate, it's not easy to define exactly what Natural wine is.

As Eric Asimov wrote in his weekly New York Times column, there is no official definition or doctrine for Natural wine or Natural winemakers. But he offered the following parameters to define Natural wines, noting that they are "wines that are made with an absolute minimum of manipulation: grapes grown organically or in rough approximation, then simply set forth along an unforced path of fermentation into wine, with nothing added and nothing taken away."

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Photo by Jeremy Parzen.

Houstonian Lewis Dickson is the only Natural winemaker in Texas.

​"Natural wine is wine to which nothing has been added," said the leading advocate of Natural wine in the U.S., Alice Feiring, when she visited Texas in October 2011 to promote her new book Naked Wine: Letting Grapes Do What Comes Naturally (Da Capo 2011). She was speaking at an event in a wine bar, and I asked her to give the audience a definition of Natural wine.

One of the biggest issues in the debate over Natural wine is the Clintonian question of what the definition of what Natural wine is is. The bottom line is that it's not easy to define Natural wine. At the same time, as Supreme Court Justice Stewart once said about obscenity, there is no shorthand description of what Natural wine is but I know it when I see taste it.

This week, in his weekly column in The New York Times, wine writer Eric Asimov wrote that Natural wine "advocacy lights a short fuse that explodes into hissy fits. In fact, as is so often the case with annoyances, the reaction brings the irritant far more attention than it might have earned otherwise."

What is the Natural wine movement? he asked, offering the following definition:

No more than a tiny collection of winemakers who, along with a motley crew of restaurants, wine bars, consumers and writers, prefer wines that are made with an absolute minimum of manipulation: grapes grown organically or in rough approximation, then simply set forth along an unforced path of fermentation into wine, with nothing added and nothing taken away.

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Photo by Jeremy Parzen.

​You can imagine how thrilled I was when I discovered one of my favorite northern Italian white wines on the list the other night at Giacomo's Cibo e Vino on Westheimer: The 2010 Anas-Cëtta (Nascetta) by Cogno for under $40. (The name of this rare grape is Nascetta, pronounced nah-SHEHT-tah. Originally, winemaker Valter Fissore called it Anas-Cëtta to avoid a legal issue by using a dialectal inflection of the grape's name and in the end, the proprietary name stuck.)

The Cogno Nascetta is a structured white, with nuanced aroma, great depth in flavor, and some tannic structure that make it a truly noble expression of winemaking in Piedmont, a region known solely for its red wines.

But when served too cold, the wine won't reveal its character.

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Image via Vine Sleuth Uncorked.

Things get steamy over at Vine Sleuth Uncorked with a "Date Night" wine pairing recommendation.

​Bear on Wine: We've been having a blast following Texas wine legend Bear Dalton's new blog, Bear on Wine.

This week he weighs in with some of his insights into cork damage with a post entitled (caps his) MURDER, HE TASTED or 'Death in the Desert'.

We don't want to spoil the grand finale of this film noir thriller. But rest assured, the Philip Marlowe of the Houston wine scene (and the longtime fine wine buyer for Spec's) always gets his man wine...

Wine Thoughts: Another one of our favorite Houston wine bloggers and top wine educators, Sandra Crittenden, delivers tasting notes for three different bottlings of under-$20 Bordeaux.

We're particularly geeked to try the 2009 Mission St Vincent Sauvignon Blanc Bordeaux for under $15 (yes, white Bordeaux): "Clear, pale lemon color. Clean, medium-intense, youthful aromas of grapefruit and gooseberry. Dry, light body, medium acidity, alcohol and length with grapefruit/citrus flavors. Good quality/drink now."

Click here for the other wines reviewed by Sandra.

Vine Sleuth Uncorked: Things get steamy over at Houston wine blogger Amy Gross's house as she prepares for "date night" with her husband... and three kids.

"You CAN have a date night even with children at home," writes Amy (that's her caricature, right). "Set a separate table for them and set the dining room table, complete with candles, for the grownups. If you must, break the rules a bit and even let the kids eat in front of the TV once a week so you and your spouse can reconnect."

Click here for Amy's recipe for Beef Roast with Balsamic Cherry Sauce and her notes on a Los Vascos Grande Réserve, a Chilean blend of Bordeaux varieties by Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite).

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Photo by Jeremy Parzen

Leading Texas wine authority Russ Kane (left) and his wife Delia love meatballs. That's Russ with Coppa executive chef Brandi Key. Russ has called Brandi's meatballs "the best in town."

​It seems inevitable that the authors of the two guides to the wines of Texas have names that sound like they're straight out of the movie Stagecoach: Wes Marshall published The Wine Roads of Texas in 2002 (Maverick), and now "Doc" Russ Kane is about to release The Wine Slinger Chronicles: Texas on the Vine (Texas Tech University Press, February, 2012).

And while Marshall's effort was unquestionably valiant (including a foreword by American wine luminary Robert Mondavi and 2007 reprint and a PBS show produced by KLRU, Austin, inspired by the book and narrated by Wes), the Texas wine industry has expanded exponentially in the decade between the two publications. Back in 2002, Texas wines were still learning to crawl; today, they are a "sleeping juggernaut," in the words of Master Sommelier and Master of Wine Doug Frost, author of the new tome's foreword.

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