Patrick Comiskey

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......

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......

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......

With respect to Los Angeles wine list prices, my colleague Besha Rodell appears to be experiencing some sticker shock lately. I don't altogether blame her. L.A.'s wine menus are expensive, and markups are often egregious, especially for popular items you could find in a retail shop for a fraction of......

As a wine, as a beverage, even, fino sherry seems like it comes from a place that time forgot. The lightest and driest of all sherries, it's as if that strange, inimitable beverage from a hot corner of Spain has been created miles from any other wine or spirit, bred......

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......

For the last official U.S. Government-sanctioned grilling weekend you will need an arsenal of beverages with which to address the meat, a palate cleanser that only marries with the good parts but which can stand up to the grease and the gristle. A good beer? Perhaps, but a better foil......

It's time to say it: Flavored vodka is a threat to our cultural existence. It's bad enough that vodka branding has devolved into an almost brazen mash-up of borrowed imagery, aspirational memes poached from music (Chopin), art (Van Gogh), clouds (Cirrus), ice (Iceberg), sky (Skyy), geometry, weirdly (Square, Level) and......

5. Wandering downtown L.A. streets in the midafternoon 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......

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......