Riesling has been called the wine for all occasions, and luckily, there’s plenty available in Washington. It’s one of the most versatile white wine grapes and can be made in styles to fit almost any mood or occasion and to match a wide range of foods. You can find a good one for under $6 a bottle retail, and it is often the lowest-cost wine on restaurant wine lists. Rieslings are versatile because they come in all measures of sweetness — from bone dry to syrupy sweet. The most popular seems to be off dry, with about 2 to 3.6 […]
Wine Articles
BYOB 1
A Happier Happy Hour for Your Wallet Want to grab a drink tonight? How about meeting at… my place. In the tough economy, a night out drinking is looking like an indulgence. Liquor sales were flat at $18.7 billion in 2009, and volume shifted. While sales for home consumption rose 2.2%, sales for restaurants, bars, hotels and nightclubs fell 3%, according to the Distilled Spirits Council. Another reason people are drinking less: because bars are pushing pricey premium liquors and complicated cocktails. “The best bars are charging a premium because the cocktails take a while to make,” says Noah Rothbaum, the founder of […]
Bubbly For New Years
Natalie MacLean, editor of one of the largest wine newsletters on the web and author of “Red, White and Drunk All Over”, says: “Santa Margherita Prosecco, D.O.C., Veneto, Italy: A lovely summer day with bright notes of ripe white peach and toast. Toast your good fortune to be alive. Score: 89/100. Bollinger Champagne Special Brut Cuvée, A.C., Champagne, France: Green apple, toasty bread and lovely white peach goodness. An extraordinary complex bubbly. This was James Bond’s favourite bubbly: it makes every occasion special! $79.95 Score: 93/100 Why? I love to have 2 choices: one a value option for larger parties […]
Learning about Wine
In the new decade, we’ll know much more about what we eat The 10 years just past could have been dubbed the “foodie decade” – when “artisan” was attached to everything from bread to chocolates, when cupcakes went gourmet and food blogs gained big fan bases. It also was a decade of peanut butter recalls, contaminated spinach and “Super Size Me.” If anything, we head into 2010 much more aware of the origins and handling of the food we consume. Here are some trends to watch as the decade unfolds: More information, please As consumers hunger to know more about […]
Champagne 4
Rappers pay homage to it. Marilyn Monroe was rumored to have bathed in it. And it’s probably what’s in your glass when you’re toasting the new year, your anniversary or any other special occasion. Champagne has long been synonymous with luxury. Although it is a sparkling wine, make no mistake — not all sparkling wines are Champagne. The only wines that can bear the name are those produced in the Champagne region of France — an area particularly primed (thanks to cold weather and chalky soil) for creating the more earthy taste that Champagne is known for. (Other types of […]
Champagne 3
“Too much of anything is bad, but too much champagne is just right,” opined the late great American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. Many would tend to agree with Ole’ Fitzgerald, and fortunately this New Year’s may be the first one in a long time that those of us longing to party like rock stars can afford the good stuff. Shipments of champagne to the United States plummeted 41.2 percent from January to August, according to the Champagne Bureau, the U.S. arm of the region’s official trade group. The surplus left in storerooms still exceeds current demand, the excess supply resulted […]
Wine Writers 3
How did you become such an authority on wine? It must truly be your passion. Lots of drinking! You learn over time … As they say, there’s no substitute for pulling corks. I let my curiosity guide me. I will always be an enthusiastic amateur, never an “expert.” :) I love your purple prose – especially your view on wine writing: “…when I read about wine, I often get the odd impression that it has no alcohol in it”. Did you have any worries on telling it ‘like it is’ in your book? None whatsoever. This is my point of […]
Sending Back a Bottle
Anyone who’s ordered a bottle of wine at a restaurant knows the ritual. The server brings the wine to the table, displays it for the customer’s inspection, then uncorks it with a flourish. A small portion is poured for the diner to sniff, taste and evaluate. If there’s something wrong with the wine, this is the moment for the taster to send it back. But few do … Natalie MacLean, editor of one of the largest online wine newsletters, at www.nataliemaclean.com, said 5 percent to 10 percent of wines are “corked,” or tainted by a chemical compound introduced by a […]
Wine Writers 2
Many wine writers also have a day job. If wine isn’t your job, what is and for whom? [Natalie] Before I started writing about wine, I was in high tech marketing for a California-based supercomputer company. I’d probably be doing that or anything to do with writing. When did you start writing about wine? [Natalie] Although I had taken a sommelier course for fun, the thought of writing about my hobby didn’t occur to me until I hadn’t slept soundly for three weeks. Shortly after our son Rian was born in November 1998, my life took on a biological beat: […]
Wine Writers
Natalie MacLean first had the idea to write about wine on a seemingly innocuous trip to the grocery store back in 1999. Groggy and sleep-deprived — she was on maternity leave at the time — she picked up a local food magazine and started flipping through it. That’s when it hit her. “They had all this beautiful food photography, recipes and so on, but no wine,” MacLean told CityLine.ca in a recent phone interview from her home in Ottawa. “I thought, well, I’ve taken a sommelier course. I know about the Internet, so I pitched them a story about wine […]
