According to the Chicago Tribune, the oldest written recipe in the world was for making beer. It was written on a clay tablet in Mesopotamia, now Iraq, in about 2000 BC. Here are some good buying guides and resources listed alphabetically. For some good dead tree buying guides, click here.
About links on this site. The links within the tan areas at the top and right of these pages are paid ads. Within the white, editorial content areas on this site, links and recommendations are absolutely positively not advertisements or paid endorsements. They are products, services, and websites I admire. Your suggestions are always welcome. Click here to send them to me. If you would like me to link to your website, click here to read my links policy first. Most product photographs are provided by the manufacturer, all the rest a made by Meathead.
Finger Lakes International Wine Competition. An up and coming international wine judging for which Yours Truly serves as Chief Judge. They publish the results online and link most of the winners to the producer so you can order direct.
JancisRibinson.com. Jancis is an English master of wine, a prolific writer, and a great taster.
LocalWineEvents.com. Find a wine tasting near you. OK, so they don't have wine reviews, but there's an old Talmudic saying: "Let not your learning exceed your deeds, lest you be like a tree with many branches and few roots." In other words, the best way to learn wine is to pull a few corks.
Schaefers.com. Since the 1930s one of the nation's best wine shops. Located in Skokie, IL, near Chicago, they ship nationwide. I buy from them.
Tastings.com. A searchable database of thousands of wines, beers, and distilled spirits reviewed by the panels of experts at the respected Beverage Testing Institute in Chicago. They also have an extensive database of beer and spirits ratings. Disclaimer: I founded BTI, sold it in 1999 and left the company in 2000. But I still sit in on their judging panels occasionally.
WineLoversPage.com. Robin Garr of Louisville, KY was one of the first wine experts online. His site focuses on value.
GrottoCellars.com. Custom wine cellars and racks from Grotto Cellars.
Wine-Searcher.com. Enter the wine you want and it will find it for you in a database they claim has inventories from 8,000 wine shops. They also catalog the results from many of the top wine competitions.
AmazingRibs.com is all about the Zen of Barbecue, cooking ribs, and all kinds of BBQ recipes and techniques: Baby back ribs, spare ribs, pulled pork, beef brisket, chicken, turkey, steak, lamb, barbecue sauces, rubs, side dishes, with the net's best buying guide to barbecue smokers and cookers.
About links on this site. The links within the tan areas at the top and right of these pages are paid ads. Within the white, editorial content areas on this site, links and recommendations are absolutely positively not advertisements or paid endorsements. They are products, services, and websites I admire. Your suggestions are always welcome. Click here to send them to me. If you would like me to link to your website, click here to read my links policy first. Most product photographs are provided by the manufacturer, all the rest a made by Meathead.
Copyright (c) 2008 by Craig "Meathead" Goldwyn. Unless noted, all text, photos, and recipes are full protected by US copyright law. This means you need my written permission to publish or distribute anything on this website. But I'm easy. To contact me, click here.
My Privacy Promise.I promise to never sell or distribute any info about you individually without your express permission, and I promise not to, ahem, pepper you with email or make you eat spam. Click here for more about my privacy promise.
New tips and recipes: Get "Smoke Signals," Meathead's free eletter. No spam. Guaranteed.
If you have a Weber grill, you need the amazing Smokenator. It really works! List is $55, but it's less at Amazon.com.
