Drink what you like

Tasting is an important skill. It's a skill you need.

It's also been built up into something needlessly pretentious, a test of money and access: the right words, the right bottles, the right price. Tasting is none of that.

The pretension does real damage. A lot of people either tune out completely or grab whatever's familiar and hope nobody asks.

That's a shame, because what you drink makes a meal. The right bottle next to a brisket, a good tequila with tacos, a bourbon after dinner with friends: it's part of the cooking, not an extra. And none of it needs a PhD or a large bank account to work into your plans.

What I believe

You should drink what you like.

Not what a critic scored, not what costs the most, not what you think you're supposed to order. What you like. The only thing that makes it hard is not having the words to find more of it.

So that's the point of the drinks side of this site: to help you drink what you like with confidence. Confident talking about your choices. Confident exploring something new. And confident picking under pressure, whether that's a long wine list at a dinner, the aisle of a store when you need a gift, or a friend asking what to open.

Things should be what they are

This is where we differ from most of what's out there.

A bottle should be described for what it is, in words you'd actually use. If a wine tastes like dark cherries and a little smoke, that's what it says. If a bourbon is sweet and strong, it says that too. When a note does use a strange word like "graphite", it explains what it means and why it's there, so you learn the code instead of feeling shut out by it.

And you should feel good identifying what's in your glass. If you taste strawberry and the label says cherry, you're not wrong. You're in the same neighborhood, and now you know the neighborhood.

Price isn't the point

Some of the bottles I reach for most are the ones that play way above their weight.

Espolòn and Tito's are what a lot of bartenders swear by for their well: good enough to trust in anything, priced for pouring freely. Woodford Reserve is a workhorse, as good in a cocktail as it is neat. The Prisoner is a great everyday red, the one to open on a Tuesday. And the Cakebread whites get you a premium Napa label at a price that doesn't need a special occasion.

Then there's A to Z, which comes with a screw cap. A screw cap doesn't mean a cheap wine. It keeps the wine fresh, it can't give you a corked bottle, and plenty of excellent wineries use them. If anything, it just means you don't need to find the corkscrew.

The point isn't that expensive bottles aren't worth it. Some are. It's that price is one thing about a bottle, and rarely the most important one.

All six are on one page: Plays Above Its Weight.

How it works here

Every bottle in Drinks is written the same way, so once you've read one, you can read them all:

• Tastes like: two or three everyday flavors.
• Feels like: how it sits in your mouth, in plain terms.
• Pour it with: recipes from this site, and why they work together.

Each one also gets a few simple scales, like light to full or sweet to spicy, so you can compare two bottles at a glance without trusting anyone's adjectives, including mine.

If you want the how behind all of it, start with how to taste wine and spirits. Then open something and see what you find.