Washington, DC: The New Sommelier Capital?

For such a small city, my hometown of DC is packed with a lot of good wine experts, from Andy Meyers at CityZen to Inox' John Wabeck and Proof's Sebastian Zutant. This is old news to regular readers of DonRockwell.com, DC's pioneering chatboard on food and wine. But I owe Don a debt of thanks. For our January Judges Issue, he helped me recruit three of DC's fastest-rising talents to judge supermarket brands of foods sommeliers often cite when describing wine: grapefruit juice, raspberry jam and red wine vinegar. Kathryn Morgan (Citronelle), Jill Zimorski (Café Atlantico and Minibar) and Kat Bangs (Komi) were amazing, blind-tasting the oak aging in Colavita's tasty red wine vinegar and discerning the corn syrup in Smuckers. The results surprised us all; check them out here.