Wine we actually want to drink is gradually becoming available in lighter containers that don’t put as much strain on the climate as their traditional glass counterparts. We tasted 36 examples so you don’t have to. Here’s the good and bad.

A serendipitous sequence of luck, magic, mystery, chaos and belief brought Lou Preston to the place he is today. Which is, essentially, where he started—and, at the same time, far from it.

The first thing you notice is the smell. An acrid eau-de-wet-garbage mixed with electrical fire and burning diesel. Mad Max meets scratch and sniff. Breweries and distilleries have a distinct aroma, like moist bread. The backrooms of gin distilleries can fill with the scent of cardamom and juniper and smell like a Silk Road spice cart.

Wine country restaurants are (finally!) taking their wine lists way, way beyond Napa and Sonoma. It sounds like blasphemy, but it’s true: Finding an adventurous wine list in wine country is shockingly difficult. Laboring under the misapprehension that regional wines alone are of interest to their customers, Napa and Sonoma restaurants all too often stick to the usual suspects—mega-production “local” wines easily available from their distributor.

When Rex Pickett got the word that Alexander Payne, fresh off the box-office success of Election, was optioning his unpublished novel for his next film, he’d just had his credit card declined for a $6.50 charge at Baja Fresh in Santa Monica. The manuscrip

Barolo is not for those seeking instant gratification. That wine made from the Nebbiolo grape, like some of the old-line winemakers who produce it in the region, has a reputation for surliness—but unlike those particular Piemontese, the notoriously tannic wine mellows with age. These wines give Nebbiolo appreciators another, often more approachable, way to enjoy the fruits of these protean vines grown in their most renown region, and they give producers wines to offer that do not require 10 years to tame.

“This road is littered with winemakers who have tried to make wine here,” says Greg La Follette, careening in a rickety pick-up through a winding and narrow dirt road with shear drops into the ravines below. We’re bouncing along the road to Manchester Ridge Vineyard, a place where La Follette has come since 2008 to make what some call one of America’s best pinots.

Where will the most gifted people in the world work? Wherever they want. We almost forget that Madison Avenue once had more than a representational connotation. It was a place. A place at the pinnacle of a fast-talking grey-flannel-suited culture that celebrated plastic everything, joy rides just for the sake of burning gasoline, mass-produced homes among manicured lawns and, perhaps most of all, a rampant and joyful consumerism.

California’s sparkling wines are growing—in both number and quality. And they might finally get their due. Throughout the country, the popularity of sparkling wine is surging skyward like a cork shot from a bottle. And here in the Bay Area, a growing number of producers are competing with champagne houses to go straight to your head.

Decades of Communist rule didn’t kill Hungary’s centuries-old winemaking tradition, but the country’s reputation for mass-produced, sickly sweet wines nearly did. Today, however, that’s finally changing.

Forget the retro speakeasy cocktail craze and drinking establishments with unmarked doors. Welcome to the rough and tumble world of back-alley baking. Macao Trading Co. pastry chef Victoria Howe is taking her baking skills to the underground with the Chinatown Cake Club. The private invite-only tastings will be held, initially, in Howe's Chinatown apartment -- a move might necessitate a name change.

Sometimes a toothfish is just a toothfish. And sometimes it’s a sea bass. Not really. It’s just a toothfish. A study released in February by conservation group Oceana found that, among other shocking revelations, 59 percent of America’s “tuna” isn’t. You’ve likely seen some of the reaction in the media.

The first food I have any conscious memory of eating is three-dozen raw clams on the half-shell. I was four.

You'd think placing a “Napa Valley only” limit on a restaurant wine list would constitute an unwelcome constraint in the eyes of sommeliers, but Kelli White and Scott Brenner of Press in St. Helena, Calif., have accepted the challenge with enthusiasm. After moving to Napa from New York in 2010 to launch Press’ wine program, the two have assembled the largest collection of Napa bottles in wine country, with vintages going back to the 1940s.

Ten years ago this January, in the deepest part of Brooklyn (okay, the Lorimer stop on the L train) a shadowy organization was born from Chris Rubino’s beard. Long, lanky and Italian, Rubino was a natural born beard prophet. His Garibaldi came in lush and thick. His roommate, Sean Donnelly, saw his friend’s prodigious whiskers, and, citing his lineage and personal experience, doubted his own ability to grow similar facial foliage.

A shark does what it does. This particular fish, a 4,500-lb great white racing through the murky depths off Montauk, had a meal on its mind. Or rather, in its nose. Sharks, it’s said, can smell one drop of blood in a million drops of water. It might have taken as few as ten minutes for this great white to catch up to the rapidly expanding chum slick.