Today marks the start of Bourbon Heritage Month. Celebrated each September, Bourbon Heritage Month highlights this authentic American spirit from the South. Bourbon didn’t start out as the American spirit. Before the revolution, rum from Britain’s trade in molasses dominated our drinking. However, starting with the Boston Tea Party in 1773 and continuing through the […]

…brick sandwiches consisting of two pieces of bread with brick between are set out on the counter, in derision of the state law that prohibits the serving of drinks without ‘meals.’  Jacob Riis (1902) In late May, as Napa and Sonoma counties began allowing tasting rooms to reopen, the California Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) established […]

To help celebrate National Daiquiri Day we provide a quick history of the cocktail along with two of its most famous renditions – the Hemingway Daiquiri and Simon Difford’s best daiquiri recipe. History attributes the daiquiri to Jennings Cox, an American mining engineer working near the town of Daiquiri, Cuba. As legend has it, Cox […]

With the numerous juniper trees surrounding the Benedictine monastery in Salerno, Italy, it’s of no surprise that the berries from the trees easily provided both inspiration and ingredients for the 11th century monks there to distill what we now know as gin. In fact, their gin was distilled of wine (watch this space) and was […]

In developing our Sidewinder packaging, we put a lot of careful thought into how we would create a natural and authentic tie-in, with our winery, Occasio. We settled on another form of the pocket watch, the Sidewinder, and as they say, the rest is carefully calibrated history. Our label printer loved our packaging as much […]

Vermouth is a wine that has been aromatized with roots, herbs and spices and then fortified with brandy. Vermouth is often used sparingly in cocktails as few are worth drinking on their own. Yet a well-made vermouth is the perfect aperitif before dinner and can be the foundation of a low alcohol refresher on a […]

        Grappa is an ancient drink. Legend places it in Roman times, although the first recorded commercial production wasn’t until 1779 with Grapperia Nardini, an Italian distillery still operating today.  Although grappa production (or its equivalent like marc in France or bagaceira in Portugal) is widespread throughout Europe, little quality grappa is made in California, in […]

We opened the doors to Occasio Winery in 2008, driven to recapture the winemaking traditions that made the early wines from Livermore legendary. This has been no simple task, as these winemaking traditions have been lost for generations, victims of a rush to quantity over quality, and of a diaspora of talent that occurred here […]

We opened the doors to Occasio Winery in 2008, driven to recapture the winemaking traditions that made the early wines from Livermore legendary. This has been no simple task, as these winemaking traditions have been lost for generations, victims of a rush to quantity over quality, and of a diaspora of talent that occurred here […]

As the railroad industry began to take flight, the latter part of the nineteenth century led to the widespread popularity and use of pocket watches. In fact, the pocket watches produced by companies like Waltham and Elgin were so precise, they made the conductors on-board systems look rudimentary. Some trains even used the pocket watches and […]

My introduction to Hemingway was through his novel A Farewell to Arms. Required reading in my senior year, we spent countless hours discussing the themes and motifs in the work, and in learning about Hemingway’s involvement in the first world war. But struggle as I might with these important themes, my mind kept wandering to the peculiar […]