AvoidBadWine.com

You want some wine that doesn’t taste like grape juice and lighter fluid. And you only have 5 or 6 dollars to spend on it. What do you do? Some would say punt the wine and buy a six-pack of beer. Not a bad suggestion, but there are alternatives it you really want drinkable wine.

Petite Sirah, not to be confused with Syrah, is a full bodied red wine. The first impression on one of big fruit flavors. It is dark, even opaque, and purple when young. You will mostly see Petite Sirah from California, although it is made elsewhere. Most do not show a great deal of mouth puckering tannin which is often seen in full bodied wines. Drinking Petite Sirah has been compared to putting on silk pajamas. That’s probably a little fanciful for me, but it is usually a wine with the right fruit flavors to go well with red meat. I had the pleasure recently of attending a tasting of 4 wines made from this grape.

There is a difference in a wine geek and a wine snob. At least I think there is. I started wondering while flipping through the latest Wine Spectator magazine where I ran across Matt Kramer’s column. Kramer also has an online column on the Wine Spectator website called Drinking Out Loud. In his column called “The Dirty Little Secret”, Kramer raises an issue that has plagued knowledgeable wine people for decades, or maybe centuries. At its most basic, the question is this: should we serve the good stuff to people who won’t appreciate it?

There is a difference in Champagne and Sparkling Wine. Geography.

Much of the best wine from Washington comes from the Columbia Valley AVA – American Viticultural Area. It is a huge area that runs from central Washington east toward Idaho at Lewiston and west along the Columbia River (Oregon border) to Columbia Gorge.