Doug Cook

@EricAsimov @wblakegray It's rare, but it happens. I still remember the somm at (Michelin-starred!) Terra, in Saint Helena, who insisted a bottle of corked wine was fine, refused to replace the bottle, and when I politely insisted, refused to taste the (delicious) replacement bottle next to the first.

@wblakegray I can’t remember having a sommelier like that, in this country, at least.

They're going to hate me but ... depending on the somm, AI might be better. I'm sorry. AI will never be as good as a Master Sommelier, but they're never on the floor. I love a good somm's personal touch. But if I get some dismissive know-it-all who doesn't listen ...

@ntoddpax @iamAtheistGirl I think Lawrence pretty much wrote the story because he couldn't resist the prurient double-entendre of the man saying "I have arisen!"

@ntoddpax @iamAtheistGirl In the fiction of DH Lawrence, anyway: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Escap…

bringing jesus into a conversation about vibrators blaming the women for their husbands inability to please her christians are insufferable

@dbasch Knew you were going to say that

I think the world has never been more unpredictable. Trying to predict 2036 is like trying to predict 1980 in 1950.

He took the greatest military force in world history, lost a war to a middle power in a week, begged the world to save him, and demanded that the media lie about this and everything else. I try, but at a simple human level I do not see how anyone can mistake this man’s almost supernatural weakness for strength. His weakness is something negative, gravitational, so deep that it can draw in a whole country. But only if we fail to see it. Only if we let it.

In an attempt to explain just why it is that some 77 million Americans voted for the dumbest man alive to be their president for a second time, I’m absolutely delighted to present you with the expanded list of US food that you cannot legally sell in Europe!🧵

Donald Trump is the worst president we've ever had.

@bruceschoenfeld Need a button other than "heart" to respond to that. Why can't we have a button that means "I agree, it's totally f--ed up?"

The guy who wants the Nobel Peace Prize renamed the defense department the Department of War, killed innocent fishermen before invading Venezuela, and now, after illegally started a regional war without justification, dropped a bomb on an Iranian school and denied it.

@wblakegray Let me know next time you’re out this way on a wine junket, and I’ll keep you posted when I am next on the west coast!

@ablegrape Jealous! Hopefully one day I'll meet you there for some frog legs.

I spent all last week in the hospital, being mistreated by young doctors who saw me as nothing more than a "user of alcohol." Something needs to change about alcohol/health messaging. Their indifference to my pain nearly killed me. wine-searcher.com/m/2026/03/alco…

@wblakegray Might be a while, as I’m in Lyon these days!

@ablegrape I miss you too! Let's have lunch when you're out here. I haven't had lunch in a restaurant since this happened, but I'm hoping for next week.

@BillJelavich @Hmitchell French vanilla is vanilla, but when you use your tongue?

@Hmitchell Vanilla. Or French Vanilla

What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?

@NickKristof "I force myself to laugh at everything, for fear of having to cry about it." -Beaumarchais

Do we laugh or cry?

@wblakegray I had figured it out, not that I knew what it was beforehand. But couldn't resist replying nonetheless. Hope you're well too, Blake!

@ablegrape mlb.com/world-baseball… Always good to hear from you, Doug. Hope you're well.

I get to visit Italy relatively often. I'll bet nobody there even knows about the WBC. But I do. I love when Vinnie Pasquantino looked at the camera and said, "You're welcome, USA." Vinnie's right. Grazie, Italia. Grazie. #wbc #TeamUSA

@WSETglobal "1.5 liters of wine - great for two people, if one is not drinking"

The age-old question, does size really matter? Whilst magnums may look like they're purely for ceremony and show, they actually offer a few benefits over the standard size wine bottle... #magnums #wineeducation #wsetglobal #wine

"In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, "And we shall overcome." I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh's madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing 'Amazing Grace' in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. "These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless. "And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House. "The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. We never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president* as currently occupies the office. We never have had a president* so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite contempt. "Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don't have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too. Watch him behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn't he a funny man? Isn't what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now." - Charles Pierce

@ntoddpax Especially if it's underwear

vinyl, man.

EXCLUSIVE: An NPR investigation finds the public database of Epstein files is missing dozens of pages related to sexual abuse accusations against President Trump. Other documents that mention Trump have been taken down (and some restored). npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-…