News

This Week In Wine–11/27/11

  China Basketball Star to Sell ‘Yao Ming’ Wine Months after retiring from basketball, Chinese sporting hero Yao Ming is venturing into business by setting up a wine company to meet a growing thirst for the tipple in his home country. Yao, 31, is China’s first global sports superstar with a personal brand valued at more than US$1 billion. Yao Family Wines will sell vintages using grapes from the famed Napa Valley region of California,…

Read More

The Thanksgiving Wine Survival Guide

Selecting Wine Since there’s no possible way you can select one bottle of wine to satisfy everyone’s taste-buds,so I recommend we split it up! The one theme I do suggest you stick to is, whichever wine you choose, make sure it’s from the U.S. (Beaujolais being the exception). It’s an American holiday after all! White Wine Californian white blends are usually a big hit, especially ones with a hint of sweetness to satisfy the Riesling…

Read More

This Week In Wine–11/20/11

Georgia Allowed to Start Selling Alcohol on Sundays. Early poll results had voters in most of the 51 metro Atlanta jurisdictions giving a resounding yes to continuing the slow dissolution of a blue law dating to the late 1800s, one of the last restraints on Sunday consumption. But at least two cities have said no — Palmetto in south Fulton and Clayton County’s Forest Park. "That’s the Lord’s day, in my opinion," said Corine Deyton,…

Read More

Perfect Pizza Wines.

It would be all too easy to simply say “anything red and Italian”, I was actually quite shocked to recently find out that most Italians actually don’t pair pizza and wine together! No Sir! They much more prefer a nice cold Peroni or Moretti beer, and consider pairing wine with pizza “for the tourists”. I guess I’m a tourist! I can’t be too sure why most pizza places have terrible wine lists, but it’s a…

Read More

It’s Mulled Wine Time!

Since last night was officially the first night whereby I said “….holy hell it’s cold outside!!!”, I figured there’s probably no better time for me to post my recipe for mulled wine.   I’ve mixed my recipe up a little since last year, and the beautiful thing about mulled wine is that there really is no right or wrong answer! Feel free to change-up the recipe I’ve posted below as much as you see fit….

Read More

Understanding Sherry, Should You Want to…

“Sherry!?!? Who the bloody hell drinks Sherry?!?!” Well, that’s a very good question! Who does drink Sherry? The answer? Not very many people at all! Which is kind of a shame…. Being from England, drinking Sherry is almost a right of passage (saying that, it’s normally only at Christmas). I would state though, if you haven’t ever tried a good Pedro Ximenez with an aged Gouda cheese, you’re missing out! It’s been one of my…

Read More

This Week in Wine–11.6.11

A New Harvest at Chateau Changyu. The picture to the left shows an artist’s rendering of the newly updated “Disney-esque” Chateau Changyu Baron Balboa winemaking facility, scheduled to be completed next year. The Chinese chateau now has a combined 16,666 hectares of vineyards in Xinjiang, Ningxia, Shandong,Shaanxi, Liaoning and Beijing – a quarter of the entire grape growing area in China. With dry weather, favorable soil conditions and 2,700 hours of annual sunshine, the area…

Read More

Wine on TV – Why it Won’t Work.

Do you ever wonder why there aren’t any TV shows (at least good ones) focused on wine? I do. Food seems to hog all the limelight, and has amassed its fair share of personalities: Gordon Ramsey, Emeril Lagasse, Paula Deen, Rachael Ray, Nigella Lawson, Delia Smith, Bobby Flay, Anthony Bourdain, and Jamie Oliver, to name just a few. Who does wine have? No-one. Seriously. No-one. But there has to be a reason why food is…

Read More

This Week In Wine – 10/30/11

    To Save Soggy Grapes, Winemaker Looks To Helicopter It’s been raining for days and the crop you’re a week away from harvesting is about to mold. If you don’t dry it quickly, you will lose the crop. What do you do? If you’re Bruce Cakebread, you call in a helicopter to be a giant grape dryer. When rain soaked Napa Valley two weeks ago, Cakebread — the president of Cakebread Cellars in Rutherford,…

Read More

This Week in Wine 10/24/11

Actually it’s more like ‘”Last Week in Wine”, since I didn’t get a chance to post this yesterday!   Shelf crash destroys 6,810 wine bottles A Wisconsin liquor store that lost 6,810 bottles of wine and champagne in a shelf collapse has posted footage of the incident to YouTube. Superior Discount Liquor in Sheboygan posted security camera footage of the collapse, which occurred in July as Badger Liquor Co. salesman Nick Haen was restocking the…

Read More