Articles By: Aliya Marder

Aliya Marder is a food and wine nerd currently living in the Chicago area. She loves going out to BYO restaurants and staring at other peoples' tables hoping to see what they brought to drink and then analyzing the choice, a habit which annoys her dining partners to no end. In her spare time, she daydreams about owning her own winery and spending days on end preforming the backbreaking labor of picking grapes during harvest season. Writing about wine is a favorite pastime, done in the hope of spreading the knowledge and love of wine to everyone and anyone who cares to learn.

Aliya Marder /

Vino 101: Your Crash Course in Wine Lingo

Wine lists, bottle labels, and online blogs are full of wine techno-babble. “Stone fruit” and “chalky barnyard” don’t explain much about how a wine tastes. We’ve defined commonly used terms in easy to understand words so you will know what you’re getting without having to wade through the bog of lingo. And just so you know, words such as flavors [...]

Aliya Marder /

Wine and Dine: A Pain-free Guide to BYO Wine Pairings

Chicago teems with BYOs begging for Belgian Tripels, German Weissbiere, or a good old American lager.  The same restaurants are ready and waiting with corkscrew and stemware, but the task of picking wine to pair can be daunting. The first rule of drinking wine is this: Drink what you like. No matter what a master sommelier says, drinking the perfect [...]