Wine Blogging Wednesday #8 – An Italian Obsession

 

 WBW #8 – Vini Siciliani Rossi was announced for April 13th and will be hosted by LoveSicily.com.  The topic is going to be a bit of a challenge for somm but you can probably guess that its Sicilian reds.  This should be a learning experience for Kelly and I seeing as we’re not really big on the Italian reds.  Should be fun!

Of course, for those that don’t know, Wine Blogging Wednesday is the Internet’s premier monthly Virtual Wine Tasting event.  Bloggers post their tastings on their sites and let the host know who, in turn, posts the summary on their site.  Its open to bloggers and non-bloggers alike.  For any non-blogger, you can either e-mail you tasting directly to the host or go ahead and post a comment here and I’ll post it with Vivi’s entry to the wine tasting event.

Juice Round-up – Wine Reviews

Here are the reviews from last week.

Collectively, the wine blogs of the world represent a little less “high and mighty” and more of an approachable view of wines they’ve tasted. In fact, they often rebuke “the establishment” of wine. More approachable wine discussions are good for everyone. Wine Blogs of the world make good reading and more often then not they find some smaller winery wines that may get overlooked elsewhere.

Enjoy the Wine Life!

Three glasses a day?

OK, I think its going a little overboard now.  Medical News Today is reporting that a study by a Yale School of Medicine researcher published in the Journal of American College of Surgeons shows drinking two to three glasses of red wine daily is good for the heart.

You have to start to worry about this doctor’s recommendations.

WineHacker – Instant Drip Ring

Tired of the ring of wine that gets on the counter or table while serving wine? You know, because a drip got down the neck of the bottle while you were socializing at a party. There are nice drip rings you can buy and other accessories and for formal dining occasions they’re probably the right way to go. But for bigger parties a paper towel is all you need! Simple, fast, and cheap. So you can mingle without worrying about the ring-around-the-counter.

Monster tasting events – Good or Bad?

This weekend Kelly and I went to Rhone Rangers tasting event in San Francisco. The Rhone Rangers is a group of wine enthusiasts that organized and created a mission which, according to their site, is:

The Rhone Rangers is a non-profit, educational organization, established to advance the public’s knowledge of the Rhone varietal wine grapes grown in America and the production and enjoyment of these wines with emphasis on integration into our daily lives.

This is great. A basic marketing engine organized and run by anyone with an interest, business or otherwise, in Rhone varietal wines. They have all sorts of events and you can check their sitefor more detail. Plus, they also usually have a charity component to their events, so thats a positive point.

The wine tasting event itself took place this weekend and featured 130+ wine makers showcasing their Rhone varietals. We made some notes of 20 some-odd wines that we tasted but I think I want to focus a bit on what an event like this is like in terms of its part in the wine lifestyle. How do you optimize your fun at one of these monster tasting events?

Radio silence???

Sorry for the radio silence…sometimes life events and work crowd the schedule a bit. Pesky work

 

 

A Week of Ballentine

So I’ve said before that wine blogs are a great source of discovering smaller wine producers that remain largely overlooked by the large magazines that, quite frankly, don’t have the bandwidth to deal with all vintages and varietals from all wineries. If you’re a publisher of a wine blog, however, you are part of a wine blog-based army of tasters going out and tasting wines from all sorts of producers and, more often than not, finding gems that have never been written about.

So now I’m going to put forth one that is a bit of an unknown quantity. Ballentine Vineyards – a small producer established in 1993 on 100 acres in St. Helena that produces less than 10,000 cases a year of Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Zinfandel, Syrah, Chenin Blanc, and a Cab Franc/Merlot blend called Bg Integrity. When I say small, I mean small. They employ about 7 people and one day the sales/pr/spokesperson/jack-of-all-trades Mesha Provo contacted me to tell me about their newly released Chenin Blanc. After speaking to her I asked why she was small and why they haven’t scaled up the operation. Her response was that Van and Betty Ballentine have a simple philosophy of “we like it small so we want it to stay that way.” While I can’t speak for their consistency of great wine making, I will say that the Kelly and I did a Ballentine Week and made notes each night of a different wine and we were pretty impressed overall.

29th Annual San Francisco Wine Auction

Quick post on a charitable wine event for a good cause. 29th Annual San Francisco Wine Auction is April 29th. All proceeds of this charitable event go to the Guardsmen General Fund to support indoor and outdoor educational programs for disadvantaged Bay Area youth.

Don’t like to plug on the blog particularly because I get alot of requests from event planners, but when you have talent like Michael Mina donating his time for a good cause I’ll let you know because not only will it benefit charity but you’ll get a great meal out of it as well.

Handy Wine Tasting Pocket Guide

While participating in our favorite Australian Wine Forum I met Glenn Green, an independant consultant winemaker and creator of a great little wine tasting guide which he appropriate calls “The Essential Wine Tasting Guide“. While the name is a mouthful and with my marketing background I probably would’ve steered him toward something with less syllables, this little pocket guide to wine tasting truly is handy to have around.

WineHacker – Hard water stains? Goodbye!

Living in CA, one of the biggest problems Kelly and I have had with the house is the hard water. Its a pain for everything but particularly for the nice stemware or the fine crystal from your wedding. First, let me say this – washing and drying immediately by hand will avoid any wine or hard water staining. But lets face it, if you’re hosting a party you don’t want to sit in the kitchen washing the stemware while the guests sit there. You’ll often find yourself rinsing them off quick and then getting back to the fun.

Problem with that? The residual wine left in the glass and even the water itself can leave your nice stemware looking a little sketchy. There is an answer.