Anthony Giglio

Sign up to get the best of Boston, every day. I’ve hung out with enough beer geeks in my life to know when to slowly but surely back away from a conversation. But on a recent night at the Publick House in Brookline, I found myself quite pleased to be…

Intrepid local importers are bucking the trend of big generic reds to bring exotic bottles to a table near you. Come on, admit it: It feels pretty cool when you pick up a wine list in front of a group of friends and recognize all of the producers as…

Can you make a mean cocktail without hard spirits? At Boston’s wine-and-beer-only joints, creative bartenders are proving you can. And with surprising kick. I have to admit I was pretty surprised to find a cocktail list at the Symphony neighborhood…

I always preach that enjoying wine shouldn’t be a snobbish endeavor. But I must confess I’m a secret snob when it comes to where to drink: I like bars that are small, intimate, and plush. Yet in my quest for great wines, I have found myself…

Sign up to get the best of Boston, every day. It's early morning at Caffè Graffiti, and men wearing tool belts abound. Everyone is speaking Italian, even the barista, the guy behind the bar who looks sort of mean until he smiles. Andrea Bocelli…

Pity the state of the home bar. The vestiges of its romantic past — the silver laid out meticulously on white linen, the dark wood buffed to a high shine, the perfectly made martini — are now so rare, people have forgotten what a thing of elegance a…

Fast Eddie Felson might squint in disbelief at the flashiness of some of Boston’s pool halls, but he’d no doubt be impressed by the ingenuity of those that manage to meld top-tier tables with top-shelf booze, attracting a trendy clientele who…

This past Christmas, practically every wine-drinking friend I know was given a gift of a set of stemless Riedel O glasses. But not me. My peeps knew that Mr. Fancypants didn’t buy the whole glassware “r-evolution.” I thought it was just a fad.…

The holidays are the only time of year when I tend to break my self-imposed rule of never paying more than $15 for a bottle of wine. The fact is it’s also when people expect me to, even if most of the time I’m thrilled to pull the cork of an…

When I studied to be a sommelier, I was, at 25, the youngest kid in the class, surrounded by salt-and-pepper–haired cranksters who wanted to kick my ass for trying to ascend to their ranks. Trust me, I wasn’t there to take their jobs. I was merely…

Few grapes in the history of winemaking have drawn more raised eyebrows than zinfandel, an exotic black variety whose name is odd given the European accents on most grapes we know and love, and whose provenance is as circuitously mind-boggling as a…

Okay—so I was being lazy. I was anxious to use my gleaming new Screwpull leverpull corkscrew, one of those Star Trekkie–looking gadgets that could do some serious damage if used on anything other than a wine bottle. So I decided to forgo removing the…

If the mere sight of thousands of wine bottles reclining horizontally makes you weak in the knees (as it does me), you’ll probably need to grab hold of something to steady yourself (as I did) the first time you see the three-story glass “wine tower”…

During dinner one night at one of Boston’s most fancy-schmancy (read: French) restaurants, the sommelier poured me a glass of expensive California chardonnay that smelled distinctly like a pile of moldy, damp newspapers. It was “corked,” a wine term…