My friend (and a friend to many to of you, too), Peg, sent us an email thanking us for a wine that she gave as a gift, observing that, “[w]ine has the power to transport people to places, experiences, and people that are held in the heart.” In that case, a bottle of Sicilian wine propelled its recipients to a grandmother’s time and village, allowing them to celebrate her life as they remembered her from their porch in Apalachicola, FL.
Category: Thoughts
Marty’s thoughts on wine.
Autumn Thoughts: Shop Where You Live
Everyday we are thankful to live in this state whose identity is associated with preserving both non-human nature and small communities. Just as non-human nature needs protection by humans (mostly from humans) to survive, small communities need the support of local residents to prosper. If we want to continue to celebrate Vermont’s small towns, to those volunteer efforts noted above we need to add mindfully shifting our shopping to support local merchants.
Small producers promote wine diversity
Exploring varieties, promoting diversity
We are ending the season of tremendous growth and fresh, healthy fruits and vegetables. Among those fruits are grapes; it is harvest time in the northern hemisphere. It corresponds as well with our two seasons of industry wine shows, where we taste the new vintage wines and new wines that our distributors are bringing into Vermont. At the shop, our portfolio of wines shifts from mostly whites and ross, to about two-thirds reds, the rest whites, ross and sparklings.
April 2018 Wine Club sample
We have a lot of regions and styles to cover in our wine journey together. As I was considering where to head after the February clubs, I was discouraged by some industry articles that pointed to trends in California that are recurring in other wine regions as well, namely, wineries being purchased by nouveau-wealthy people for whom a vineyard is a hobby-investment and the tension between wine industry interests and environmental concerns in developing wine regions. In a somewhat circuitous route, these led me to pay attention to and want to celebrate some really interesting producers from California’s Central Coast region whose fingernails are dirty from work in the vineyards and who are engaging in environmentally sensitive practices in both the vineyard and the cellar.
Cheers! Santé! CinCin! Prost! Celebrate throughout the year with Sparkling Wine
Gruner Veltliner
One of the great things about owning a wine shop is that we have to try a lot of different wines. (I must say here that the greatest thing about […]
20 Wines Under $20, Winter 2017
We are very excited about this list of winter favorites for $20 or under. We tasted throughout the fall, selecting wines for the season as we shifted the shop’s focus […]