September’s Food & Wine Menu
Working on the menu for next week’s culinary and cooking classes. That includes the Corked & Forked Cooking Class, the Sommelier Smackdown, and my personal favorite, the Cook & Corks class. With butternut squash coming into the markets this week, I will...Left Hand Brewing Co. Milk Stout Nitro
Last St. Paddy’s Day, I implored you to forgo Guinness and other mass-produced Irish imports for local brews that pack more freshness and flavor. One year on, my opinion hasn’t changed, and our local beer scene continues to improve and evolve. My first choice, in...City Paper: Class Act
Picking the perfect vintage can be a frustrating venture — the employees at PLCB stores are often unhelpful; labels on the bottles can be harder to decode than the exemptions for Philadelphia’s smoking ban; and experimenting with different wines gets expensive.
Much like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods to give to man, Keith Wallace (pictured) has made it his mission to demystify wine and make it more accessible to the masses. “It’s an art form that’s to be enjoyed, not to be rarefied,” says Wallace. “The more you know about it, the more you’ll love it.”
Frustrated by the quality of wine education, Wallace founded The Wine School of Philadelphia in 2001. “Everything everyone was learning was bullshit. Every major wine book is underwritten by a distributor or an importer,” explains Wallace. “This really bugged me, so I started the school.”
Wallace didn’t know whether it was going to be successful; he just knew he liked doing it. But in the last six years, The Wine School has sold out every class it’s ever hosted. His teaching staff has grown to include writer Brian Freedman, local wine distributor Pete Mitchell, and Frank Cipparone, a retired teacher who spent the last decade studying Italian wine.