Bourbon plays a supporting role on Justified

Timothy Olyphant stars as US Marshal Raylan Givens

If you like complex, continuing stories, Justified has joined Breaking Bad and Mad Men at the pinnacle of quality television. All three shows have their signature vices: blue meth on Breaking Bad; trendy cocktails on Mad Men.

Based on an Elmore Leonard story, with all the complex wrong-side-of-the-law characters and relationships he's famous for, Justified is set in Kentucky. So naturally the drink of choice is Bourbon.

It's refreshing to see a TV show treat spirits in an adult way, rather than as the source of juvenile jokes or hand-wringing about abuse.

In one pivotal scene, villain Dickie Bennett and a henchman break into the star's aunt's house and point shotguns at her.

"Aren't you going to offer us a beer?" Bennett says.

Aunt Helen says, "We drink whiskey in this house."

"We definitely see these guys as they see themselves through the Bourbon they drink. It's another piece of the subtle makeup of everything," says Taylor Elmore, a main writer and producer on Justified. "I don't think we'll ever hang a story on (Bourbon). But it's ingrained in the culture, how bootlegging was part of the Harlan County culture. It also informs class. There's a class struggle coming up and Bourbons inform that. It's just such a part of Kentucky."

Elmore said Bourbon choices were more accidental in season one.

Retailer pisses off winery by promoting its wine

Frank's Wine is probably Delaware's best wine shop, in part because of the effort owner Frank Pagliaro makes to offer tastings and events. Frank has personality. Last year he posted this video of a guy stealing a $25 wine from his store on Valentine's Day and ended up getting local media coverage and selling stacks of the wine, which he renamed "Assclown Cab" after the poorly dressed perpetrator.



Last week, a more normal, non-profane promotion -- a simple mixed-case discount -- riled up a tone-deaf California winery so much it threatened to pull its wine from his shelves.

Fifty Shades of the Gray Report

The UPS man trips when delivering me and I fall into his apartment. I had heard about W. Blake Gray, an international man of mystery who seems to have unfathomable riches without ever doing any real work. But seeing him in person is staggering, and I feel shivers down there. He is the most beautiful man in the world -- and did I mention the unfathomable riches? Of course that doesn't matter to me. But his face is cold and cruel.

He says, "Stay away from me. I'm not good for you." I shiver with delight.

I'm just days away from graduation, my official release date, and I've never been tasted. Not many men have tried. I prefer to stay bottled up. I look at myself in the mirror sometimes, and I just see an ordinary, somewhat flat shape, but my closest friend tells me I'm hot. I wear her labels so often that you'd think I don't have any clothes of my own.

There's a static electricity unleashed when Gray touches me. He's so beautiful, so frickin' wealthy, and he also is a trained pilot, a concert pianist and a professional ballroom dancer. Oh, and he's only 25 years old. And he made all his money from scratch and has four dozen Teutonic women working for him, all of whom are Harvard and Oxford graduates whose only dialogue is "Yes, sir." What could a man like him want in me?

Who will be the world's most important wine critic?

For three decades, Robert Parker has been the world's most important wine critic. Now the position is open. Who's going to take it?

I was all set to declare the Robert Parker era over after the back-to-back announcements that he sold the Wine Advocate and the Advocate's most prolific critic, Antonio Galloni, has left the publication to go out on his own.

But Parker isn't willing to go quietly. He said on his bulletin board that he's thinking of making a comeback in California, after giving it over to Galloni for the Advocate.

So now we might see Galloni vs. Parker for the heavyweight title, with Wine Spectator circling around, looking for signs of weakness.

You might ask, will there necessarily be one most-powerful critic? Wouldn't a variety of voices be better?

I thought I knew sake, but I was wrong

Sake brewing in the 1600s. Just the first two steps: polishing and washing rice

I'm sorry. I've been writing about sake for 15 years, and I just realized how little I knew.

Writers do that all the time; some will say bloggers write beyond their knowledge level every day. But I didn't know how much I didn't know.

After spending a week visiting breweries in Japan and talking with master brewers, I feel very humble.

For one thing, I have been tasting sake the wrong way for years.

I've been tasting like a wine writer: making notes on the aroma and forming judgments before putting the sake in my mouth. Plus I almost always spit when taking sake tasting notes.

This is all wrong.

English translations favor the wrong sakes: Genshu and nigori, over honjozo

Nigori is too sweet for this; genshu is too strong

Americans often order sake by how it can be described in English. Sure, why not? But for three classifications of sake, this isn't leading to the best drinking.

We drink a lot of nigori, the White Zinfandel of sake, in the States, partly because we have a sweet tooth. But there's a marketing reason as well: Nigori is often described on menus as "unfiltered," a word guaranteed to appeal to wine aficionados.

It's at best misleading, usually an outright lie, and unfair to every other sake. Sake that comes from the press is not that cloudy soup of sweet rice you see in nigori bottles: those little chunks of rice are added in afterward.

You never see nigori sake in Tokyo; people here just don't drink it. But it's a top seller in the US and who can blame breweries for making what sells? Drink it because it's sweet, drink it because you like it, but don't kid yourself that it's somehow more natural; in fact, it's more adulterated.

Is there radiation in Japanese sake?

The purity of rice is very important to Japanese consumers

Sake breweries in Japan don't want to talk about radiation, but American drinkers do. A Colorado sommelier told me it was the first question people asked when seeing a sake on the wine pairing list: Is this safe?

I visited 10 breweries and Nanbu Bijin owner Kosuke Kuji was one of the few to address the issue, but he's also a professor at Tokyo Agricultural University.

Kuji buys most of his rice from a local co-op in Iwate prefecture. The location is important: Iwate prefecture is northeast of Fukushima.

Wind flows west to east over Japan, so the great majority of breweries, more than 90%, can shrug off the radiation question. We're more likely to have radioactive particles from Fukushima in California than they are in Kyoto or Fukui or even nearby -- but due west -- Niigata. Sake brewers assume we're smart enough to read a map, but of course we aren't. I asked this question in Yamaguchi prefecture, at the far southwestern end of the main island of Japan, and the brewer laughed at me.