Flower Shops Columbia MS

Columbia MS Press

Great Northwest Wine: Best of the best from Platinum Judging

Only wines from Washington, Oregon, British Columbia and Idaho are eligible. The wines are then tasted blind (the judges don’t know whose wines they are or what they cost) by panels of international wine experts over the course of three days, and the best are considered Platinum winners. In this year’s competition, a record 698 wines were entered, and of those, 143 earned Platinum or Double Platinum status (a Double Platinum is earned when a wine is awarded Platinum by all judges on a panel). This year, the top wine of the judging was from Barnard Griffin in Richland for its 2013 Syrah Port. Here are a few of the top wines from the 16th annual Platinum Judging. For full results, go to www.winepressnw.com. Barnard Griffin 2013 Syrah Port, Columbia Valley, $17: This fortified dessert wine is consistently one of winemaker Rob Griffin’s finest efforts. It opens with aromas of blueberry, Marionberry, dark chocolate and huckleberry. The alcohol is beautifully integrated, and the creamy, silky palate turns this into a sensual, luscious wine. (19.5 percent alcohol) Walla Walla Vintners 2012 Cabernet Sauvignon, Walla Walla Valley, $38: This gorgeous Cab opens with subtle aromas of oak, dark cherry and spice, followed by flavors of black olive, black tea and dark fruit, all in a... http://www.tri-cityherald.com/living/food-drink/wine/article52013435.html

Boy's quest to honor veterans survives flag flap

Veterans Day was broken-hearted Sunday when he discovered all his flags had been removed. "It was so awful," said April Sharp, the mother of Columbia Elementary School fourth-grader Preston Sharp. Initially told the flags were tossed away to accommodate the mowing of the cemetery's grounds, Sharp said cemetery officials later said they did not throw them away and would return them to Preston. "First they said they threw them away, now they said they still have them," Sharp said. It didn't make much sense to her, she said, noting that none of the plastic carnations her son placed at the graves of the veterans were touched. A cemetery spokeswoman was in a meeting in Sacramento on Thursday and was unavailable for comment. But Sharp said she cemetery officials presented her with the flags — about 600 of them — on Wednesday and the flag flap may have been put to rest, at least for now. In an email from the memorial park's corporate office in Houston, Texas, spokeswoman Julie Kuenstle said it's the company's policy that grave decorations must be removed every two weeks to accommodate the maintenance of the grounds. "As part of the process, we keep the removed items at the cemetery so that any family who wish to retrieve their items have the opportunity to do so at our office," she wrote. "It was never our intention to upset or offend our client families or visitors." But it was not entirely clear whetehr that po... http://www.redding.com/news/local/boys-quest-to-honor-veterans-survives-flag-flap-271a8848-015a-1329-e053-0100007f5525-362878751.html

'To Have and Have Another': Ring in your new year as Hemingway might

Did you know that the District of Columbia went dry almost three years before the rest of the nation? Our fair city provided a test case, a trial run. After a few months, Dickson wryly notes, “there were twice as many illegal establishments operating inside the District as there had been legal ones before the act was passed.” Nonetheless, with Washington “serving as vivid testimony to the fact that Prohibition could not be enforced, Congress passed the Volstead Act or National Prohibition Act on October 28, 1919, over the veto of President Woodrow Wilson.” Why? Largely because the Anti-Saloon League was probably “the strongest political organization in the world.” Before long, a bootlegging operation — located in the Cannon House Office Building — was serving “scores of congressmen and their constituents.” Later, its proprietor, George Cassiday, shifted his base to the Russell Senate Office Building. In his memoirs, Cassiday alleged that he was supplying liquor to 80 percent of a distinctly hypocritical House and Senate. Dickson loads every page with facts, anecdotes and telling details about life under Prohibition. Bartender Harry Craddock “went from Manhattan (where he served his last legal drink at the Hoffman House on Broadway) to London, where he presided at the Hotel Savoy and where he authored the ‘Savoy Cocktail Book.’ ” A 1926 article about him in the Atlanta Constitution ended with “a list of the 280 cocktails he was mixing at the Savoy. The list does not include the coolers, daisies, fizzes, flips, highballs, punches, sours, and rickeys he mixed in London.” Serious aficionados of the happy hour will be particularly fascinated by Dickson’s chapter on “the archaeology of the cocktail.” Here, he looks at the period’s bartenders’s manuals, including Al Hirschfeld and Gordon Kahn’s “Manhattan Oases” (recently reprinted as “The Speakeasies of 1932 ”). That book covers both high-end clubs and low dives, with illustrations by Hirschfeld. As the artist much later recalled, in an interview at age 99, one joint on the Bowery “had a recipe for a drink called smoke, made with Sterno. I don’t know how anybody survived it.” The second half of “Contraband Cocktails” prints the “formulae” for the most popular drinks offered by top-drawer establishments. The list runs from the Alexander — gin, sweet cream and crème de cacao — to the Yale Cocktail, essentially gin with a dash of orange bitters and a dash of P...