Patrick Comiskey

If you're out on the town and you've got a drink in your hand, chances are that it's been made with a spirit you didn't ask for by name. Instead, the booze likely was selected by the bar manager as the place's go-to spirit for its class -- part of......

You say you don't know what you want? You say you want more focus in your life, all parts of your life, including your drinking life? You could do worse than the R&D Bar. The "R&D" stands for research and development, rather academic posturing for a drinking establishment, but from......

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 discriminating......

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,......

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 his face......

Dushan Zaric and Simon Ford of the 86 Company were in town this week prowling around the bars that sell their hooch and getting their bearings -- in fact, this duo of drink slingers with a New York pedigree as long as a tattooed arm is here to stay --......

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 turning......

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......

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......