Patrick Comiskey

3 Great Bars For Celebrating World Whisky Day

It's World Whisky Day on Saturday, May 18, declared last year by a Scottish college student named Blair Bowman who saw the need to hold an annual celebration of the spirit. He figured it was only fair to designate one for his country's drink of choice, seeing as how there were world days set for bee ... More >>

Five Wines to Seek Out in L.A. Wine Bars That You Probably Won't Find Anywhere Else

Here in Los Angeles our embarrassment of riches wine-wise might sometimes lead to a forest-for-the-trees blindness, with too much to weed through on the shelves or the wine lists to actually find something you like. Fortunately area wine bars work hard to assemble lists that are highly focused and d ... More >>

Help Wanted: A Cocktail and Wine Writer

Do you love to explore the cocktail, spirits and wine scene in Los Angeles? Do you love to talk to your bartender about not just your messy private life, but about obscure spirits, current trends, secret recipes and how exactly he made that illegal still he's got in his Echo Park basement? And most ... More >>

Serious Drinking: Discovering Rhone Wines at Decouvertes

Découvertes en Vallée du Rhône is a biennial wine event held up and down the Rhône Valley for four long, thrilling days, involving the systematic tasting of mostly red wine by thousands of eager tasters from all over the world, and the systematic inebriation by same each night. Each day, is roug ... More >>

Suntory Rising: The Rise of Japanese Whiskey

In Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola's 2003 cinematic homage to anomie, Bill Murray's character, Bob Harris, travels to Japan and submits to a kind of humiliation by whiskey as the spokesman for Suntory spirits. He endures various slights by pompous art directors, his eyes streaked with mascara and ... More >>

Serious Drinking: What is Cognac for?

Doesn't this swanky French grape spirit reside in the beverage province of rich, white men in their private, paneled rooms? Isn't cognac what rappers grab at the neck and swig from in their bling-y cribs? Isn't it mostly for postprandial luxuriating or sultry babymaking? What, then, is it doing turn ... More >>

What's In Season at the Farmers Market: Early Green Garlic From ABC Rhubarb and Bih Shan Farm

It's March. Everything is flowering, or at least starting to. The zen duet of "warm sun, cool breeze," is manifesting every time you step out the door. The only thing that would tip the spring meter into the red would be a taste of fresh green garlic and parsley pesto, maybe thickened with the las ... More >>

5 Crisp White Wines for your Spring Table

I don't know about you, but this is the week that spring fever has officially kicked in, for me. The sun feels higher in the sky, the backyard patio beckons, the fruit trees are blossoming, and everything feels more redolent and alive. It's time to lock the wine cellar door -- leave the reds to lie ... More >>

What to Drink on Oscar Night: 4 Great Drinks for the Academy Awards

Oscar night now looms over Hollywood like a gathering of clouds, some of which, for the winners at least, will be parted or silver-lined (if only there was a playbook for that!). Hollywood Boulevard is cordoned off, knots of tourists and lookyloos line the corners. Whether you attend, watch, or both ... More >>

Black Market Liquor Bar: Embittering Ventura Boulevard

You make reasonable assumptions about what you're going to drink depending on where you are. You don't go to Manhattan Beach to drink scotch, any more than you would Ensenada; you expect something more beachy there, in a tropical, caipirinha-colada vein perhaps. In Silver Lake you may be able to ord ... More >>

Balance: A 2013 Conference, an Achievement in California Wine (and a Calder Mobile)

For the past three years, a small group of California chardonnay and pinot noir producers has gathered for a conference and tasting called In Pursuit of Balance. In past years it's been staged in San Francisco and New York; in 2013, for the first time, they brought their wines and their message to L ... More >>

New Zealand Pinots To Drink Now

At the New Zealand Consulate in Brentwood last week there was a wine tasting of that country's pinot noir. There were just 18 wines in the seminar, curated by British Master of Wine Tim Atkin; and yet this amounted to a quietly nuanced performance, demonstrating the strides that country has made wit ... More >>

Winter Drinks, Part Two: The Toddy A Cocktail Recipe

There are drinks that, as the saying goes, hit the spot, and then there are those like the toddy, the warm concoction for winter nights with a capacity for comfort-making that seems almost erogenous in its acuity at landing in the spots needed to be hit. A well-made, well-seasoned, well-heated tod ... More >>

The American Wine Market: More Good News

Market research from the Wine Market Council, in its annual analysis of the American drinks market provides more irrefutable evidence that the United States is becoming a wine culture. The country's drinking habits continue to move toward wine above beer and spirits, making it as the fastest growing ... More >>

Mammoth Brewing Company: To the Ends of the Earth for a Microbrew

It never ceases to amaze me where microbreweries turn up. You can be in a shithole town in Texas, in the shadow of Miller Brewery's hulking complex in Milwaukee, you can be in Utah, so far off the beaten path that you're wondering if you can even buy beer in the county you're in and wham, turn the c ... More >>

All We Want For Christmas: A Wish List From The LA Weekly Food Team

It's that time of year, when material and consumer lust the joy of giving is upon us. There are a million food-related gift guides out there, many of them touting all that's new and exciting in the world of cooking gadgets and indulgent eating. But I thought, rather that scour the web for gift ideas ... More >>

6 Great Wine Books For the Holidays: Old Wine, New Books

Drinking wine is not the sort of activity known to inspire scholarship. The pleasures of writing and the pleasures of wine seem to work mostly at cross-purposes, despite the latter's renowned capacity for loosening tongues. But several books on wine's history, as well as its appreciation, hit the bo ... More >>

Happy Repeal Day! Are You Drunk Yet?

Happy Repeal Day!! Are you celebrating wildly? Are you drunk yet? On this day in 1933, Utah was the final state to overturn statewide restrictions on alcohol, thus ratifying the 21st Amendment, ending Prohibition in America. Woot! All across the country, Americans legally celebrated Repeal by drink ... More >>

The Balvenie Fifty: A $30,000 Bottle of Scotch

In the glass depicted above is a scotch whisky from The Balvenie, a highland distillery that specializes in single malts with lustrous wood finishes. This particular scotch went into a barrel in 1962, and did not emerge until late last year, when the company decided to release it as a single cask re ... More >>

Chardonnay? Yes, Really: 5 Great Chardonnays for the Holidays

For many years, American chardonnay has been a wine category that cognoscenti love to hate, a wine whose ubiquity, confected stylings and bloat have more or less condemned it to a reputation for mediocrity, a wading pool of a wine, epitomizing the shallow waters of American taste. And for many year ... More >>

Fall Drinks, Part 2: The Old Fashioned

When did the Old Fashioned become old fashioned? It's not an easy question to answer: the first mention of the cocktail as 'old' occurs around 1880 in a bar called the Pendennis Club in Louisville, Kentucky, suggesting that the basic formula -- bourbon, some sugar, a dash or three of bitters, a twis ... More >>

Serious Drinking: Harvest 2012, in California Everywhere Else

Next week's Serious Drinking column is devoted to chardonnay, an often maligned but nonetheless wildly popular grape variety in California, the most ubiquitous in the state. Of course the grape originates in France, specifically Burgundy, where it was isolated and called Pineau Chardonnay, probably ... More >>

Pumpkin Beer: Good for what Ales Ya, Or Not

Is there really a demand for pumpkin beer? Do squash aficionados start summer letter writing campaigns to make sure their fridges are stocked in November? Do brewmasters have a secret fervor for Charlie Brown cartoon reruns? Do they respond to skewed surveys that weigh the answers of the ardent few, ... More >>

Serious Drinking: The 2012 California Wine Harvest

The 2012 harvest looks like a return to normal for California growers statewide. After a pair of unusually cool seasons in 2010 and 2011, vintages which resulted in lower than average yields and lower than average ripeness levels, 2012 looks relatively trouble free, with good-sized yields and excell ... More >>

Serious Drinking: The Manhattan

I think we can all agree that a summer cocktail's main reason for existence is refreshment. Fall cocktails, though, are a little more complicated. Like the season it's a category of drinks that falls to a more nocturnal hue. Amber, oak-aged spirits play a central role in the repertoire, perhaps refl ... More >>

Serious Drinking: Peel Me A Grape

Across the state, harvest is upon us. California winemakers either are readying their crush pads for what appears to be a fairly large crop, or are out among the vine rows, tasting fruit, rolling it around on their tongues or between their fingers to determine if it's ready to pick. Last week I was ... More >>

Hope for Zinfandel: 1999 Ridge Vineyards Lytton Springs

Most American Zinfandels fall into two categories, explained to me recently by Doug Nalle, a Dry Creek Valley winemaker and a bit of a Zin Master in his own right. "There's BHT and AHT," he says: "Before Helen Turley, and after Helen Turley." Turley is the American winemaker who famously amped up ... More >>

Serious Drinking: Sherry Marcona Almonds

There are many perfect food pairings in the world -- Sauternes and foie gras, Muscadet and oysters, Champagne and potato chips, Barolo and truffled anything -- but no pairing in the world is so perfectly simple as the pairing of Marcona almonds and fino sherry. These are the rich, flavorful almond ... More >>

5 Things I Learned About Beer at the 3rd Annual L.A. Craft Beer Crawl

5. Wandering downtown LA streets in the mid-afternoon sun, giving off a hoppy scent, carrying a small pilsner glass still sudsy from the last visit, mildly lost, mildly dazed, is totally normal on the Saturday of L.A. Craft Beer Crawl. Never mind the stink-eye from the cops, never mind the regal bea ... More >>

Serious Drinking: A Flight of Gin at Lucky Rice Night Market

Bars can be lousy places to drink. Oh, they're excellent places to buy a drink, and to drink a drink, and lately they've been pretty great for marveling at the combinatory skills and anachronistic facial hair of drink executors. But when it comes to actually trying, say, a dozen drinks to learn, sim ... More >>

Los Angeles Food & Wine Festival: The Wine Part of the Equation

The second annual Los Angeles Food & Wine Festival concluded Sunday, a slickly produced, three-day debauch mostly held in and around the capacious digs of L.A. Live and its Marriott property -- though neither conference room nor rooftop exhibition tent could adequately contain the assemblage of whit ... More >>

The International Pinot Noir Celebration: 300 Wines, 75 Producers, 700 Participants A Movie

While most of the city's denizens of drink were in NOLA celebrating Cocktail Tales and learning indelible lessons on what to drink when, and where, and in what century, I was in Oregon's Willamette Valley at the International Pinot Noir Celebration, an annual event now 26 years strong which does as ... More >>

Olympic Drinking: Beer, Gin Whisky

By now you're fully ensconced in the full-on drama of the Games of the XXX Olympiad, a global event featuring feats of human skill so thrilling that you're likely to have to endure a few marathon sessions yourself -- in front of the telly, that is, unspooling TiVo recordings hour after hour, devotin ... More >>

The Summer of Riesling: Los Angeles Edition

This year marks the fourth annual Summer of Riesling in the U.S., a hostage program established in 2008 by "Acid Overlord" Paul Grieco of the restaurant Terroir in New York, in which white wine by-the-glass programs are hijacked by what most sommeliers and wine professional think of as the most thri ... More >>

Summer Drinks, Part II: The Americano

When you ask a bartender like Ink.'s bar manager Gabriella Mlynarczyk what her go-to summer drink is, seven times out of ten you'll get an answer that's about staying in the game. Summer drinking is an endurance sport, after all, requiring stamina to get to sundown without collapsing in a heap on th ... More >>

Hey Mr. Mixologist: The Hilarious New Mixology Video From Fog And Smog

Fog and Smog, the video production company that gave you "Whole Foods Parking Lot" and other cool-eyed glimpses of California's cultural posturings, has just released "Mixologist," a send-up of the L.A. bar scene. Filmed in what might be the home office for that scene, La Descarga, the video goofs o ... More >>

Shades of Rosé

For years, wine writers have been haranguing their readership to drink more rosé, a category that plainly couldn't catch a break either among macho types who opined that pink wine was too, well, pink, or the rest of the wine-drinking public, who assumed that, since the wine was the color of white z ... More >>

Drinking in Utah: A Road Trip

Last week my wife and I rented an absurdly large all-wheel-drive vehicle, and hit the backroads of southern Utah, a trip we make every year or two when the grim tug of professional life starts to feel like a pit we can't crawl out of. Instead, we crawl into pits and gullies, slot and box canyons, i ... More >>

An All-Star Bar at Art Beyond the Glass: Bartenders, Booze Kentucky Bubble Bath

It's a good day when the first meaningful thing that's put in your hands is a drink: a good drink, a weird drink, a purple drink, one so chock-full of fruit it almost tastes like it'll boost your immune system, the rye expertly disguised in blood orange juice and an indigo robe of cassis, girded by ... More >>

A Shortage of American Rye: No Booze in Your Pockets

Here's the thing about the brown spirits -- that brown color is largely the product of aging, usually in oak casks, and at the risk of stating the obvious, aging takes time. So when the popularity of a brown spirit spikes, it is very difficult for a spirits company to ramp up production. They can di ... More >>

Dom Perignon's David Lynch Party: Champagne, 1,000 Friends, Werner Herzog Mysterious Vapors

Dom Perignon's Chef de Cave Richard Geoffroy returned to Los Angeles from Champagne on Wednesday night. He threw a party for about a thousand friends to celebrate the release of a special edition of Dom designed by David Lynch, who was not only the evening's special guest but was the chief architect ... More >>

Summer Drinks, Part 1: The Gin & Tonic

It is odd to think that the Gin & Tonic originated as medicine -- or rather the 'tonic' part did, dosed as it was with a measure of quinine, a bitter alkali that British nationals from the East India Trading Company used to ward off malaria. Recipients sweetened the medicine with sugar, then added g ... More >>

The Thirsty Season: Beer Chicks The Question of Summer Beer

The idea was to meet the Beer Chicks for a pint. The topic was summer beer. The Beer Chicks are beer experts with twice the volubility -- because there are two of them, and because they've forgotten more about beer than I'll ever remember and are eager, very eager, to share. I wanted to know if th ... More >>

The Beer Chicks: Italian Beer, Their New Book The Naked Brewer LA Craft Beer Crawl 2012

Beer Chicks, by definition, do not sit still. Oh, they sit, on bar stools and booths and on picnic benches and lawn chairs, pint in hand, but neither of the Chicks -- Christina Perozzi, with her dark hair and penchant for dark lagers and Hallie Beaune, with her blonde bangs looking rather like Zooey ... More >>

Tales of the Cocktail Nominees Announced: Congrats, Los Angeles

For ten years, Tales of the Cocktail has been doing for cocktail culture what the James Beard Foundation has been doing for food culture: advancing the craft of the drink through education, networking, promotion, as well as a bit of sanctioned mayhem. Each summer the organization throws a massive pa ... More >>

A Consideration of Whiskey Dick

I might be oversimplifying here, but when it comes to sex, there are two kinds of people: the kind who like using a lubricant, and the kind who don't. If you are in the second camp, feel free to move on. If you're in the first, tell me this: to what extent is TASTE an important consideration? I as ... More >>

Comment: Darling Dita

From Highland Park to Venice Beach, Our New Columnist Finds That the Cocktail Moment Has Become a Movement

On Los Angeles Cocktails: A Moment, A Movement, A Very Good Town in Which to Drink

As The Varnish does not open until later this evening, you have a few hours to get some lucid reading accomplished. And if you would like to read about what you may be presented with at that estimable downtown bar, you might turn the pages of today's feature food story, a consideration of the curren ... More >>

L.A. Weekly Food: New Hires and Big (Exciting!) Changes

Let's start by stating the obvious: There have been big changes to the L.A. Weekly's food section recently. And there are even more on the way. After our longtime critic Jonathan Gold departed for the L.A. Times, we've been nibbling on this and that: a reflection on cookbooks from Roy Choi, a piece ... More >>