This chat with CBC radio in Ontario was one of 26 interviews with the morning and drive-home shows on Friday about terrific (and surprising) pairings for Canadian wines with barbecued food. We also kicked off The Great Canadian Wine Match: BBQ Edition. Got a wine to nominate? Or maybe you’d like to see which wines others have nominated and vote for them. Check out the race so far here with lots of great ideas for July 1 barbecue wines. Read more about the wine competition here as well as prizes for those who nominate wines, including a $3,000 Weber Summit […]
Author: Natalie MacLean
The Great Canadian Wine Match: The BBQ Edition
In May 2013, we launched the first People’s Choice Wine Awards with The Great Candian Wine Match. Thousands of wine lovers from coast to coast (and around the planet) voted for their favourite Canadian wines online and via social media. This friendly (and increasingly social ;) competition brought wine drinkers and winemakers together to celebrate the best of what we produce in this country, and garnered considerable media recognition for both nominees and winners. We’re building on that success this year with The Great Canadian Wine Match: The BBQ Edition, pairing Canadian wines with your favourite grilled or barbecued foods, […]
Win a $3000 Weber Summit Gas Grill + Prizes in The Great Canadian Wine Match
Nominate your favourite Canadian wine in The Great Canadian Wine Match: BBQ Edition, and you could win the Grand Prize, The Weber® Summit® S-670™ gas grill, Weber’s top-of-the-line grill worth more than $3,000! You could also wine one of 25 Weber Cookbooks or one of 5 sets of grilling utensils. Nominate your favourite Canadian wines today! Grand Prize: Weber® Summit® S-670™ Gas Grill The Weber® Summit® S-670™ gas grill takes normal grilling up several notches with Weber’s innovative Sear Station™ technology. The Sear Station™ is a dedicated area in the middle of the grill which reaches temperatures of 800 to […]
Rhone Red Wines from France Featured in the LCBO Vintages May 24
Rhone wines from France are the focus of the LCBO Vintages Release on May 24. This is just a sampling of wine ratings, the most quoted Canadian source of reviews in the Vintages Magazine. You can access the 81 wines that I reviewed for May 24 as a text wine list with my complete tasting notes, scores, food matches and the stock for each bottle in their closest LCBO stores. You can also see my wine reviews for May 10. You can also add my wine picks to their custom shopping list with one click and access that list […]
Australian Shiraz, Cabernet, Chardonnay: LCBO Vintages June 7
Shiraz, Cabernet and Chardonnay from Australia hit the spotlight in the LCBO Vintages Release June 7. This is just a sampling of wine ratings, the most quoted Canadian source of reviews in the Vintages Magazine. You can access the 66 wines that I reviewed for June 7 as a text wine list with my complete tasting notes, scores, food matches and the stock for each bottle in their closest LCBO stores. You can also see my wine reviews for May 24. You can also add my wine picks to their custom shopping list with one click and access that list […]
20 Red Wines Under $20 > Nat’s Conscious Coupling of Quality and Price
I’m always making lists of wines for different occasions and different price points. Ever since my second book, Unquenchable: A Tipsy Search for the World’s Best Bargain Wines, was published, I’m frequently asked for the best wines priced less than $20. Here they are … I’ll be updating this list monthly. (My thanks to Gwyneth Paltrow for the inspirational title ;) Here’s your shopping list showing your closest liquor stores that have these wines in stock, and how many of each bottle. Cheers! Oscar’s Estate Vineyard Shiraz Viognier 2011 Barossa Valley, South Australia $17.95 This could be the ultimate hamburger […]
Wine Review of the Week: National Waiter’s Day Wine
Steve Cranny, a graduate of the Canadian Association of Professional Sommeliers (CAPS) program, has selected our Wine Review of the Week to celebrate National Waiter’s Day, May 21. A toast to all those hard-working heroes of the restaurant industry! #NationalWaitersDay Here’s Steve wine review and rating: Until I became involved in the Industry I had no idea how hard service professionals work to make other people happy. So in honour of National Waiter’s Day and all of those great service people I would like to recommend a wine that I have enjoyed across several vintages. The Caparzo Brunello di Montalcino […]
10 Best Shiraz Wines to Buy Now + 5 Surprising Facts about Shiraz
Shiraz and Syrah are both originally from the same clone, but various regions have chosen one name or the other. You’ll find my top 10 Shiraz reviews and ratings here. 5 Surprising Facts about Shiraz: They both create rich, robust red wines with a smooth texture and signature aromas of spice, pepper, clove and licorice leading, followed by dark fruit such as blackcurrant, blackberry, plum and black cherry, as well as truffle, earth, violets, vanilla, smoke, sandalwood, cedar, cigar box, earth and leather. The greatest of these wines can age for 25 years or more. The grape […]
High on Wine: Argentina and Chile Magic Mountain LCBO Vintages May 10
The wines of Argentina and Chile hit the spotlight in the May 10 LCBO Vintages Release. The premium wine region for Argentina is Mendoza, 650 miles southwest of Buenos Aires. Many of us have only a vague notion of this South American country that’s five times the size of Spain. It spans more than a million square miles from the sub-tropical jungles and parrots in the north, near the equatorial Tropic of Capricorn, to the Antarctic ice fields and penguins of Patagonia in the south. To the east, lie the expansive cattle-grazing grass-fields of the pampas; to the west, the […]
Android and BlackBerry wine mobile apps
I would love to create a wine app for every smartphone platform on the market, or even most of the major ones. But the reality is cold hard cash. I’ve invested $30,000 in the iPhone platform alone to create the existing app. Apple continues to lead the app market by a margin of 10 to 1 when it comes to their smartphone users actually using apps and to supporting those who develop for them. That said, to date, I have invested another $25,000 into each of the Android and Blackberry platforms. I’ve also created a mobile site that works on […]
