by Scott Koegler
Ready for your picnic this weekend? Right! Blanket, MP3 player, bread, cheese, your loving companion. Oh, and the wine of course. As you're setting up camp, the first thing you want to do is uncork your wine and let it breath a bit before pouring the first glasses. There you are on a beautiful hill overlooking gorgeous scenery, ready to open the bottle, but there's no corkscrew to be found. Well, desperate times call for desperate measures, so here are a few methods to try to open that bottle without a corkscrew. Tap and Pull MethodThis first method is the preferred choice when you have absolutely no other tools available. It relies on inertia alone, and provides at least a possibility that you won't break the bottle. The technique is simple but requires patience and some restraint. Essent...
by Marlene Rossman
http://www.sommelierjournal.com/Cult Wines for Tough Timesby Marlene RossmanIn the olden days (before mid-2008), a label was considered a “cult” wine if it regularly received scores of 95 points or more, was hard to find due to limited production, cost $300 or more at release, and was sold only by mailing list to a few early adopters. These über-fabulous wines would often be “flipped” or sold on the secondary market for two to three times the release price.We all still want to drink good—no, make that great —wine, but spending hundreds of dollars on a bottle seems a bit obscene nowadays. And to be perfectly honest, is a $750 bottle really 10 times better than a $75 bottle? So what’s a wine geek to do? Take a bottle of wine from the next generation of cult winemakers and call...
by Scott Koegler
Summer time is the season for picnics and enjoying the outdoors. A great bottle of wine is essential (in my opinion) to the complete picnic fare. But wines can taste different in the heat of a Summer day than they do indoors with more controlled atmosphere. The right wine will cool your day and bring out the crispness of the shade. On the other hand, the wrong choice may leave you feeling heavy and lousy for the rest of your day. Pick a light or heavy wine based on your preference, but know what your preferences are in order to make the right selection.Lighter wines generally come off with fresher tasteIt's tough to generalize when it comes to wine tastes, but both white and red wines with fruity and tangy tones are likely to be your best bets when selecting warm weather wines. Their refre...
by John Hagarty
IN THE BEGINNING WAS ARCHIEWINE LEGEND LAID FOOTINGS FOR VIRGINIA INDUSTRY How would you describe a successful Virginia winery today? Produces 35,000 cases a year? Winner of two Governor’s Cups and myriad other medals and awards? Distributed in fourteen states? A client list of thirty-five restaurants and wine shops in Washington, DC? And oh, and the proprietor and winemaker a graduate of Oxford?A succinct description. But, the business profile of our hypothetical winery is accurate except for the year. It was, in fact, the actual performance of the second commercial winery to open in the Old Dominion, Meredyth Vineyards, located in Middleburg. And it reached this level of success twenty-four years ago, in 1985.The driving force behind this remarkable story was Archie M. Smith III,...
by Nancy Yos
Years ago, my high school French teacher would once in while give us a treat, and allow us to relax from studying grammar and vocabulary long enough to discuss French culture in English. Among other updates and commentaries, she said to us once that it takes about two years or so for French fashions to reach the midwest, but that they inevitably do. They travel first to the east coast, then they jump to California, and then they filter back to us here in our sunny plains and humid forests. (Astonishingly cool plains and forests, as it happens, at least here in my little ecosystem. For the first time ever, I have had to shut windows at night, to keep out the July chill.)One day, circa 1979, Madame warned us that in a short time, we would all be wearing brightly colored moccasins. She had ju...
by Cecil Wulfe
It's early Summer.. In fact, it's the first week of Summer, and already the weather is scorching. It was near 90 degrees over the weekend, but that didn't deter me from venturing out to a few vineyards on Saturday. I visited 3 - Raffaldini, Laurel Gray, and Buck Shoals.All three of these wineries are located in the Yadkin Valley, but are part of the Swan Creek appellation. They are all within about 5 minutes of each other, and that makes getting from one to another convenient. This weekend, I started at Raffaldini. If you haven't visited Raffaldini yet, you should put it on your list. They produce Italian style wines, and have an impressive building they use as both their tasting room, and for special events. While I was there, I saw the folks from NorthCarolinaWine.tv shooting a couple se...
by Scott Koegler
This last weekend, my wife and I ventured to one of our local wineries for a tasting and informal celebration. We can highly recommend the practice, and encourage you to try your own version. I'll leave the specifics of your own venture to your imagination, ingenuity, and creativity. But at the same time, I'll provide the details of our formula. Modification and iteration is encouraged.One of the great things about going to a vineyard is that many of the tasting rooms also have some area you can sit and relax after your tasting. The one we visited this week has a covered porch with a few tables and chairs. You'll find everything from picnic areas, to simple grassy slopes in many places. The variety is one of the great things about this area. And if the weather is cooperative, it's nearly i...
by Nancy Yos
Gruner veltliner is a white grape that is Austria's pride, and that is, for casual wine drinkers, perhaps the most unusual new variety to come along in the last five years or so. It's a sort of "oh,-yes-I've-heard-of-that-lately" wine, just as there are "oh,-yes" books, news events, film documentaries, and for that matter, people.This is not to say that the grape is a new variety in the universe. Frank Schoonmaker calls it "Veltliner" in his 1960s era Encyclopedia of Wine, and notes that it is a quality product of Austrian vineyards. (He advises it will remind you of a "Traminer," without traminer's very pungent floral aromas and tastes. By traminer he means gewurztraminer. Why the dropped prefixes in 1960s wine writing? Conversely, why the added prefixes in modern wine writing?) Oz Clarke...
by Marlene Rossman
The French once sneered at American wines --until the famous “judgment of Paris” in 1976, when a California Cabernet and Chardonnay topped the best red and white wines of France in a blind tasting. Today, no one doubts that the U.S. can turn out world- class wines. And it’s not just California that can do it! Although California still produces 90% of all the wine made in the U.S., just about every state now makes wine. (Some of them don’t make good wine-- but give them time). Since almost all wine drinkers have tasted California wine, let’s raise a toast to some of our other great wine- producing states. Washington State is the second largest wine producing state in the U.S. and, while it’s not well known, New York is the third largest. Oregon comes in fourth, Michigan makes...
by Nancy Yos
In that fun old movie, Life With Father, Clarence Day (William Powell) strolls down the stairs of his house with his wife Vinnie (Irene Dunne) on his arm, and asks her, in the midst of some swirling upheaval with the servants that he has caused, whether they can't have "chicken fricassee tonight for dinner." She replies only that he must know "chicken has gone up, it's eight cents a pound!"The plot of the movie unfolds such that the Day family and guests all end up dining at Delmonico's instead, but the way he almost smacks his lips over chicken fricassee does make it sound good. It sounds like just the sort of rich, comforting fare a New York gentleman of 1883 would want to come home to. In her reworking of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, Marion Cunningham agrees it is "a great old-fashioned ...
