Chocolate can trace its roots back to Ancient Mesoamerican Civilization, where crushed cocoa beans were fermented, then roasted, and then ground into a paste. The paste was used to make a bitter liquid for royalty and military warriors to drink. The valuable beans were also used as currency. In the early 16th century, Christopher Columbus…
So after learning the basics of wine-tasting, you should have some ideas as to how to choose a wine that you really love to drink. Now it’s time to buy the right glasses—because yes, glassware is deemed the most important tool in the enjoyment of drinking wine. It boosts the appeal of the wine you…
Kombucha, kefir water, shrubs…drinks made with an assist from bacteria have, of late, been seen as an opportunity for flavor expansion, and although not by any means a new concept, they are grabbing hold as quality ingredients are being used to create exciting crafted flavors that help take a slightly “blah” drink to new levels…
The final phase in evaluating wine is to assess its taste and finish. Some of the things you will be looking for are whether or not the wine is balanced and harmonious, its complexity, and how the wine finishes after you are done tasting it. If you understand how taste buds work, you will better…
Chinese New Year is a time of parades and festivals, a Nian Ye Fan (reunion dinner), a time of feasting and celebrating, a communal hot pot to signify togetherness, cleaning the house and “sweeping” away the bad of the previous year in order to start fresh, and gathering families to honor deities and ancestors. Although…
A wine’s smell or overall aroma is also called the “nose” of the wine, and this “nose” is the second stage in wine tasting, after evaluating by sight. The nose is a fascinating organ, capable of differentiating between thousands of unique scents. This makes it a great tool in evaluating wine, because it is able…
In 1926 Carter G. Woodson, a Harvard-trained historian, conceived of and announced Negro History Week, carefully chosen to coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass—an escaped slave and leader of the abolitionist movement—and Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States of America responsible for the Emancipation Proclamation which made freeing the slaves an explicit…
Without even taking a sniff or sip of wine, we can get an overall idea about what we are about to enjoy. The first step in the tasting process is to look at the wine in our glass in order to evaluate its appearance. The color can give you hints about the approximate age, what…
Food halls are the latest culinary movement spreading across the United States. In a sense, food halls take us back to a time before there were supermarkets, before there were convenience stores and drive-thrus, back to a time when locally sourced, artisanally crafted was the prime way to buy and consume. So what, you may…
At its most basic, wine can be described as the “juice from fermented grapes…and usually having an alcoholic content of 14 percent or less.” But the definition doesn’t do well to describe the many complexities of a tantalizing wine, nor the rich history of the origin of wine-making. Evidence of early wine-making reaches back to…