In this chat below with CBC Fresh Air host Mary Ito, we discuss how to choose a great wine as a gift for someone depending on their taste and style preferences, or when you don’t know those details. (Hint: Try wrapping a story around the bottle.)Wine is the ultimate gift: doubles are okay, one size fits all and re-gifting is easy! We also chat about screwcaps, whether you can get a good wine under $20, underrated wines, wine and food pairing, low-alcohol wines, the differences between Ontario’s regions and some of my favourite Ontario wines, including those below. Listen by […]
Wine Articles
Top 3 Wines for Bad Customer Service: More Magazine
Much as I try, I can’t get stuffy about wine. Anyone can match an expensive Bordeaux with filet mignon, but which wine do you drink when you’ve been on hold with customer service for an hour? There’s the rub. Here are my top wine picks for the most commonly terrible customer service experiences from my column in More Magazine. Got one to suggest? D’arenberg The Dead Arm Shiraz 2007 Mclaren Vale, South Australia Big black bruiser with dark fruit, savoury bacon, dark spices and mint. Full-bodied and smooth. Big “bang” for your buck. 981183 $49.95 Score: 91/100. Rosehall […]
Brookstreet Sommelier Rene Wallis Wine Tips
Rene Wallis, sommelier at the Brookstreet Hotel’s restaurant Perspectives, in Kanata shares, his tips on choosing from a wine list, unusual food pairings and favourite holiday wines. Where did you grow up? My mother raised my older sister, Angela, and I on her own in Ottawa’s French village of Vanier, a bilingual community where everyone knew each other. Wine wasn’t on the dinner table, but my good friend’s Portuguese parents made their own wine. At his tenth birthday party, I bit into a large piece of hot pepper on the pizza, filled my glass from a large pitcher of […]
A Letter to My Readers about My Wine Reviews
Dear Reader, Whether or not you’ve been following the recent debate on quoting third-party wine reviews, you deserve to hear my thoughts on it in the interest of balance and fairness. To summarize, I’ve always been open and consistent in my manner of attribution, but I realize that it should change and I am doing that now, and my reviews are not influenced by whether or not wineries subscribe to my site. When I was approached by a fellow writer about how I quote other writers’ wine reviews, I didn’t realize that there was an issue since I had been […]
Seven Celtic Questions – Celtic Life International
Internationally renowned sommelier and wine writer Natalie MacLean has no sour grapes about her personal pedigree. The author of Red, White and Drunk All Over, and Unquenchable; a Tipsy Quest for the World’s Best Bargain Wines uncorks her Celtic heritage in our Seven Celtic Questions. What are your own Celtic roots? Both my mother, Ann Estelle (MacDonald) MacLean, of Baddeck, Nova Scotia, Canada, and my father, John MacLean of Mabou, Nova Scotia, are Celtic. The only non-Scot was my grandmother, who was a Brophy of Irish origin, so the family line is 100 per cent Celtic-grown. I was born in […]
Canadian Restaurant Mobile App by Top Food Critics
By Anne DesBrisay Last spring, I opened an email from John Gilchrist, Calgary’s pre-eminent food writer, asking if I’d be interested in contributing the Ottawa section to a cross-Canada restaurant app he was working on. It was to be a first of its kind, geared to the business traveller, a catalogue of best places to eat as chosen by the leading restaurant critics in eleven cities across Canada. Its working title was Dining in Downtown Canada … good places to eat within a walk or cab from major hotels in our major cities. The idea was simple: you’re in Saskatoon, […]
Ontario Produces Such Great Wines – Maclean’s Magazine
This story about Ontario wines by Jessica Allen in Maclean’s Magazine deserves to be shared widely: she makes some excellent points about Ontario wines … By I spent American Thanksgiving with friends in Washington D.C. They’re enthusiastic wine drinkers and the last time they visited this side of the border they couldn’t contain their excitement over a variety of Niagara wines they’d enjoyed. So, I brought along a couple to share. They did not disappoint. But I did: when they asked me how it’s possible that cold Ontario could produce such standouts, I babbled on about Southern Ontario being on […]
Want a wine bargain? Consider South Africa and Canada – Providence Journal
Looking for some wine advice for Thanksgiving? Or any part of the holiday season? Check out Unquenchable: A Tipsy Quest for the World’s Best Bargain Wines now in paperback. In it, sommelier and award-winning wine writer Natalie MacLean shares her expertise to reveal wines that aren’t commonly considered but that many will find stunning. Basically, these wines are affordable because demand doesn’t drive up their prices. Argentinean Malbec, for example, doesn’t have the cachet or brand awareness of Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot, so producers have to compete aggressively on price. Its flavor falls somewhere between the two noble red grapes. […]
Iconic Voices in Unquenchable – Fairmont Magazine
Meet top authors as part of the Random House Iconic Voices series at select Fairmont Hotels, including Natalie MacLean (Unquenchable: a Tipsy Quest for the World’s Best Bargain Wines) and Clarissa Dickson Wright (A History of English Food). You can read more reviews of my new wine book Unquenchable here.
Women’s Executive Network Wine Tasting
I’m looking forward to hosting a wine tasting at the Women’s Executive Network Summit on Wednesday. More than 500 power drinkers … should be fun! Here are the speakers throughout the summit … an inspiring group of women and topics. Canada’s Most Powerful Women Summit Speakers Arlene Dickinson CEO & Owner Venture Communications Arlene Dickinson is a judge on CBC’s Dragons’ Den, the television phenomenon that has ignited a national conversation about entrepreneurs in Canada. Dickinson — aggressive but fair, kind but practical, serious but fun — is the show’s marketing expert, its lone female judge, and one of […]
