Patrick Comiskey

Découvertes en Vallée du Rhône is a biennial wine event held up and down the Rhône Valley for four long, thrilling days, involving the systematic tasting of mostly red wine by thousands of eager tasters from all over the world, and the systematic inebriation by same each night. Each day, is roughly devoted to a different area, and each room breaks down that area into a small number of appellations, such that in some cases you can, if you want, taste the entire output of an entire appellation -- every producer and every wine -- for a single vintage. So if you want to know about, say, the syrahs of Hermitage in 2010 -- you'll come away with an indelible impression.

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Flickr/AleGranholm

Japanese whiskey

In Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola's 2003 cinematic homage to anomie, Bill Murray's character, Bob Harris, travels to Japan and submits to a kind of humiliation by whiskey as the spokesman for Suntory spirits. He endures various slights by pompous art directors, his eyes streaked with mascara and his face bearing enough pancake makeup to make a clown blush, all of which culminates in the immortal tagline, "For relaxing times, make it Suntory time."

In L.A. right now, in tumblers neat and, increasingly, in cocktails, it's Suntory time. All over the city, Japanese whiskey is creeping into a guest role on cocktail menus, in some cases supplanting the whiskey it plainly pays homage to, scotch. One of Sam Ross' more popular Negroni variations at Hinoki & the Bird involves Suntory's Hakushu whiskey, Maurin Quina (the infamous French aperitif with the green imp on the label) and chocolate bitters for a smoky cocktail he calls the Harajuku. Both Seven Grand and Lukshon have employed Japanese whiskies in their cocktail programs, Seven Grand in the popular Shimamoto Sour, and Lukshon in its Fujian Cure.

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Flickr/Espen Klem

cognac

Doesn't this swanky French grape spirit reside in the beverage province of rich, white men in their private, paneled rooms? Isn't cognac what rappers grab at the neck and swig from in their bling-y cribs? Isn't it mostly for postprandial luxuriating or sultry babymaking? What, then, is it doing turning up in cocktails at Mélisse, Black Market, Pour Vous, the Varnish and elsewhere, a gold-standard libation working the trenches and wells of the city's bars?

I was wondering all this on a night out recently where I was handed a Sazerac made with the stuff -- a generous pour of Hennessy Privilege -- and I asked the guy who made it, Jordan Bushell, isn't this a waste of good cognac?

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Flickr/paulaloe

I don't know about you, but this is the week that spring fever has officially kicked in, for me. The sun feels higher in the sky, the backyard patio beckons, the fruit trees are blossoming, and everything feels more redolent and alive.

It's time to lock the wine cellar door -- leave the reds to lie in repose until next fall, or the next steak dinner -- and stock the refrigerator with light, crisp young whites for spring meals. Here are a handful of suggestions, some regional directions to explore. The best thing about this category of wine is that most are very affordable, less than $20, and often hovering closer to $10.

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Flickr/naotakem

a Manhattan

You make reasonable assumptions about what you're going to drink depending on where you are. You don't go to Manhattan Beach to drink scotch, any more than you would Ensenada; you expect something more beachy there, in a tropical, caipirinha-colada vein perhaps. In Silver Lake you may be able to order a cosmopolitan, but it's at your peril, in deference to absinthe, mezcal, or some other mouth-numbing concoctions.

On Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, between bites of sushi, you might want to pop in a few of the watering holes the strip has become known for, like the Laurel Tavern, Page 71, your odd hookah emporium. In most of these places you'd get more or less what you expect, easygoing drinks, modest riffs on fairly safe cocktails, made with infused vodkas or wan departures from a predictable palette. In the last half-decade, it might as well be called Mojito Row.

So it's a relief to walk into the darkly lit, moody Black Market Liquor Bar, a gastropub on Ventura, and feel out of place.

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For the past three years, a small group of California chardonnay and pinot noir producers has gathered for a conference and tasting called In Pursuit of Balance. In past years it's been staged in San Francisco and New York; in 2013, for the first time, they brought their wines and their message to Los Angeles.

The organization represents the concerted effort among these winemakers to pursue, revisit or otherwise reclaim an aesthetic once rumored to be lost in California: wines of proportion and restraint. For the better part of two decades, the trend in wine styles has been toward making riper, more buxom and more extracted wines, with softer textures and higher alcohols, a trend rewarded by critics and snatched up by consumers -- and heeded, needless to say, by the wine community.

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Patrick Comiskey

Rippon Vineyard, Central Otago, New Zealand

At the New Zealand Consulate in Brentwood last week there was a wine tasting of that country's pinot noir. There were just 18 wines in the seminar, curated by British Master of Wine Tim Atkin; and yet this amounted to a quietly nuanced performance, demonstrating the strides that country has made with the heartbreak grape.

New Zealand pinot noir is relatively new to the American market, and what's here often feels obscured from view beneath the wave after wave of sauvignon blanc that inundates the market, the herbaceous white that is, for better or worse, that country's largest export wine by far. This simple bracing white which Atkin described variously "a bungee jump into a gooseberry patch" and, more simply, "bitch diesel," is not without its pleasures, despite the fact that it much of it more or less tastes the same.

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Flickr/Kenn Wilson

Hot Toddy

There are drinks that, as the saying goes, hit the spot, and then there are those like the toddy, the warm concoction for winter nights with a capacity for comfort-making that seems almost erogenous in its acuity at landing in the spots needed to be hit.

A well-made, well-seasoned, well-heated toddy possesses a kind of prodigious restorative power. The heat of the drink and the heat of the spirit seem to combine in a kind of factorial of warmth, flushing ears and noses and limbs and bellies fully down to the cockles (whatever and wherever those are), inducing a chorus of sighs, rendering the eyelids heavy with contentment.

If that's not enough of a sell, consider that the toddy is basically the only drink on earth for which you have an unlicensed permission to drink when you're sick. Nuff said?

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photo credit: Viktor Budnik

Caitlin Stansbury

Caitlin Stansbury is a force.

L.A.'s busiest wine consultant has become its most recent wine author with the debut of Wineocology, a wine-appreciation manual steeped in exclamatory energy. The book is a culmination of years of experience on the dining floors of myriad local restaurants, where Stansbury has been consulted as part fixer, part auditor, part drill sergeant and part cheerleader, all gathered beneath a wine-geek umbrella.

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Hinoki & the Bird

Cocktail impresario Sam Ross was in town last week to train the staff of Hinoki & the Bird in Century City, which, as this goes to press, is in soft-open mode. I went to the unfinished restaurant last week to sample some of the new creations, but on the day I arrived the bar itself looked like a failed cocktail experiment, as its surface was being finished with various jellied enamels and waterproofing potions, splattering the bartop like a battleground of spilled drinks. So instead we sat down to talk.

Ross is with the influential New York cocktail group Milk & Honey. He was lured here in 2007 by chef David Myers to curate the cocktail program at Myers' bistro Comme Ça. That assignment was the group's first foray west, but the route has since become fairly routine -- so routine, in fact, that a number of the Milk & Honey team are, like Ross, leading mildly inebriated double lives on two coasts.

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