Around the blogs: Rules, racking, and tastings
Michael Haig, winemaker at Whitestone Winery weighs in with a post from the Washington Association of Wine Grape Growers and also notes a trend at local restaurants that he likes: 1/2 Priced Bottle Night:
$80 bucks seems steep, but $40…pop the cork and pour me a glass! … We had a great time tasting through some Italian Sangiovese, and because it was half-priced night, we bought one high-priced bottle and one mid-priced bottle and compared the two.
Joe Briggs, winemaker at August Briggs Winery describes the purpose and process of racking wine in a video on August Briggs Wines blog.
(If the video doesn’t work at Briggs’s site you can try here.)
Midtown Wine & Spirits is a liquor store in Nashville, Tennessee, that has just started a blog. It’s first post describes an in-store tasting with the owner of Arcadian Winery. Among the sampled wines: 2005 Sleepy Hollow Chardonnay, 2004 Fiddlestix Pinot Noir and 2004 Stolpman Syrah.
John at Wine Peeps posts six tips to heed when you visit a winery.
Anything Wine spots and laments a trend among wineries:
I have become aware of an increasing trend, wineries not allowing outside food available on the premises. Except for a few exceptions, I have never noticed wineries posting signs stating such regulations, but 3 of the four wineries this weekend had newly placed such signs.