Imagine my delight upon arriving in Dallas last Fall to find that there's an impressive vitality to the Food and Wine scene here in the big D. I've gotten to know quite a substantial group of wine professionals, and I'm impressed by the breadth and depth of wine selections available for purchase (if not entirely so by the speed with which certain allocations make their way down here).

My first year at the Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek is nearing an end. It's been quite a ride! For a more complete read on our experience these past many months, click here, and read Dallas Morning News food critic Bill Addison's five star review of the new and improved Mansion.

I'm posting the link containing the latest big review of the Mansion restaurant at the Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek, which appeared last Friday in the Dallas Morning News, essentially the only paper in this town.

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then I recently paid the highest tribute to Burgundy winemaker and icon Jacques Seysses at a dinner party here in Washington for friends of the American Institute of Wine and Food...

Recently, I read a blog on one of the local sites characterizing the wines of Bouchard, Pere et fils as stodgy and ordinary. Now normally, I might have agreed with this view, but I'd been tasting and, increasingly, buying the wines from this large and venerable domaine for a number of years, and while I may not have what I respectfully refer to as the Clive Coates palate...

Wanna know what this sommelier would choose to line his cellar, were someone with considerably deeper pockets fitting the the bill? You'll want to check this twice!

In the May 15th, 1989 issue of The Wine Spectator, a letter to the Editor was printed , in which I wrote: "As an eager and somewhat overconfident participant in the recent competition to coin a marketing term for California's proliferating Bordeaux-style blends, I could hardly wait to get the March 31st issue of The Wine Spectator to discover the results. While I did expect to be notified sooner of my victory, I naturally chalked the delay up to the usual bureaucratic waffling."

Whenever I'm asked about restaurant experiences on my travels to wine-producing regions of the world, I have to harken back to the Auberge de L'Ill in Illhausern, France , in the heart of Alsace, for one of my most memorable meals.

One of my better customers brought in a bottle of the Marcassin Chardonnay Hudson Vineyard "E block" from the 1995 vintage the other night, and I felt a little sheepish, because I had just recommended, and served his party a bottle of the 2002 Mer Soleil Chardonnay, right before he showed up. The Mer Soleil is always a crowd-pleaser and certainly no slouch, but I'm afraid it was no match for the E block from this outstanding producer and vintage. I was grateful for the chance to taste it, as the Marcassin wines have proven practically unattainable to those of us in the Washington market.

Deep, honey-golden color, the nose was all hazelnuts, butter, smoke and marzipan. In spite of the wine's age, I was impressed with the purity of its structure, which held up from start to finish under the crushing weight this wine's density and power. And while it might prove difficult to pair with food as a result of its sheer size, that backbone of pure acidity goes a long way toward yanking it back to food compatibility. I'd try it with a straight-forward herb-roasted capon with morels! Sheer decadence!

Suppose I were to tell you that I'd come up with this brand new system that could revolutionize an industry by saving upwards of one billion dollars in spoiled product, lost profits, and packaging waste a year: a system that was easy to use, that didn't degrade the product, that was reasonably attractive, and that was based on a tried and true concept? You'd say I was a genius, right, and that I should probably become a very wealthy man indeed for having devised the strategy?

I think one of the single greatest challenges for the sommelier comes in maintaining the accuracy, and thereby the integrity, of the winelist. I'm sure the average restaurant goer doesn't give much thought to the fact that a cellar is an organic entity, constantly changing, growing, shrinking, changing its focus, etc., rather that a static thing that you can leave alone for days or weeks or months at a time.

Travelling through Australia this past summer as one of a group of Americans accompanying Grateful Palate importer Dan Phillips, I learned to expect the unexpected. At one wine estate in the Barossa Valley, we were greeted with a roaring morning bonfire (since it's winter there), and Bloody Mary's to take the chill off. At another, we were invited along on a midnight bush tour, where from a fleet of pickup trucks careening through the open fields and dense forests, we "spotlighted" scores of terrified kangaroos fleeing their menacing pursuers, and even spotted a lone emu loping crazily through the woods to escape the fracas.

On a trip to France last Fall with a couple of wine buddies, I had the opportunity to spend some time in the cellars of Domaine Chave in Hermitage. Behind that nondescript green door in that modest little village of the northern Rhone lay a winemaking operation some people can only dream about, and I relished the opportunity to hook up with Jean-Louis Chave and his young American wife Erin for a tasting. Although I had visited Chave on one other occasion a few years back, I was not prepared for the experience about to unfold.