News, Views and Reviews by Michael Rollins in Tokyo
On Friday we unveiled a new design for our webshop, the Petit Tonneau Online Wine Boutique. Overall it’s much more clear and bright that the previous design, and also benefits from a reorganized global navigation menu and a newly-built “top page” for wines. We’re adding news wines and food pairing recipes all the time, so [...]
Just added this Online Wine Buyer’s Guide today and will be updating it periodically. I’ve included the well-known English/Bilingual sites for now and will follow up with Japanese sites later. Enjoy!
These are some of my favorite books on wine: A fantastic resource for educating oneself about wine. Broad in scope, well-written and very informative, this is one of the best wine hooks I’ve read. Windows on the World Complete Wine Course: 2009 Edition When you just want to know everything about everything about wine, this [...]
It’s November and that means Beaujolais Nouveau for the wine world here in Japan. While in many other countries (especially France, perhaps) the entire spectacle has become passe, in Japan we love our annual rituals and comfortably familiar events, and so dutifully exult in the 解禁 or “lifting of the ban” on Beaujolais Nouveau wine [...]
Stumbled across this great article on pairing vegetables and wine on the NPR website today. It also includes some tasty-looking recipes that I’ll be preparing sometime soon.
I picked up this exceptional Pinot for around 50% off the list price at Enoteca’s online store. (They have a clearance page which changes often and offers some great deals on good wines.) Many medium- to high-end New Zealand Pinots offer an astonishing balance of acid, fruit and alcohol, and this one is no exception. [...]
Congratulations on finding my personal blog. It's been around in various incarnations since 1997, which is before blogs were called "blogs." See if you can top that.
My name is michael, and denbushi (電武士) is the now-dorky-seeming online name I made up back when I thought (ever so presciently) that some kind of unique nickname for the interwebs might be handy. Just for the record, it IS unique (even today!) except for this jujitsu variant/dojo in Puerto Rico which co-opted it without even asking me. If I had to cage-fight them for exclusive use of "denbushi" chances are good they'd win. But I'd still do it.
These days I live in Tokyo and mostly use my real name. A few years ago I founded a design and marketing agency called netwise. We do web and internet stuff. We're pretty good at it.