ShopEatDrink

Happy new year!  Like me, I’m sure you are recovering from the holiday 2010 season, and trying to get back into the swing of things. This post is a bit overdue, but I just had to share my most favorite holiday gift.  It is from my brother, and he wanted to be on the phone when I opened it.  Voila, the coolest shoe ever.  It’s a shoe wine bottle holder – a total wine fashionista must!  Gotta love the leopard print and the rhinestone embellishment.  I can’t believe I’ve never seen this; my brother gets major kudos for finding it!

The shoe wine bottle holder comes from Cypress Home in their High Spirits line.  There are several other styles  – but I love the leopard print best.  Such a fun gift, sure to get a big smile!  What a great way to start off the new year – cheers to 2011.

wine tasting kits

The winery tasting room.  Let’s face it.  Often crowded, it’s not always the ideal spot to taste wine.  But if you want to try a range of said winery’s offerings, the tasting room has been the place to go. Until now.

You can have the tasting room come to you. TastingRoom has created wine tasting kits with four or six little bottles, each holding 50 ml (that’s 1.7 oz). This is the size of most small perfume bottles, and I say that because these kits remind me of perfume samples. You can get fragrance samples sent to you, and can try and buy perfume without ever leaving home.  A terrific online fragrance store is Luckyscent. You can order a sample vial of any perfume on their website.  Once you get it and try it and like it, you can order a bottle.  If not, you’re out about $3.

TastingRoom works under the same concept. You can try and buy at home, without traveling to the winery tasting room, or buying the wine blind off a shelf and hoping for the best. TastingRoom takes the guesswork out of buying wine.

A sample box of Yorkville Cellars in Mendocino just showed up at my door one day last week. I decided to take it for a test run at my cookbook club meeting, to see how some wine lovers would react to the kits.  I also had a kit of Grgich Hills wines (full disclosure, the Grgich Hills kit was provided by TastingRoom public relations).

The little bottles all have screwcaps, making these kits really portable.  If you don’t take very big pours, there are enough sips of wine in each bottle for several people to try it. The two oft repeated comments were “these bottles are so cute,” and “what a great idea for a gift.”  We were all impressed by the wines in the kit, especially the Grgich Cellars samples, which included both Chardonnay and Cabernet.  The favorite wine out of either kit was the Grgich Hills Violetta, a late harvest white wine blend  that went really well with an appetizer of cheese stuffed figs wrapped in proscuitto.

Should I want to buy a bottle of Violette, I can get it from TastingRoom for $73.  Thats $12 less than the same wine on the Grgich Hills website, which is $85.  I also found this tasting kit offered on the winery’s website, for $29.99. TastingRoom sells the kit for $24.99.

Yorkville Cellars‘ kit is made up of six Bordeaux varietals, from Cab Franc to Carmenere. Winery founder and winegrower Edward Wallo tells me his approach is to showcase these varietals that are the winery’s specialty, as Yorkville Cellars may be the only winery growing these six grape varieties in the same vineyard.  They don’t blend, preferring to highlight the individual character of these classic varieties.  We didn’t do this, but you could certainly have fun making your own Bordeaux blend from these samples.  You can find the Yorkville sample kit on the winery website or in the tasting room for $34.  (While this kit was made with TastingRoom, it is not sold on that site.)

Another idea for the kits is doing a blind tasting.  I could go into all the mumbo jumbo about the technology TastingRoom uses to bottle these samples, green practices and about all the information about each wine and winery on its website, but you can check that out on your own.  The kits come with descriptions and tasting notes.  The company expects to add more wineries to their sample kit list.

Have you finished your Christmas shopping?  Most of us will wait ’till the last minute.  Thought a few more wine gift ideas would be helpful.

The hottest wine accessory, gadget…Vinturi.  It is a wine aerator that you use while pouring a glass of wine. That means it acts like a mini decanter -  it gets air into the wine and opens up bouquet and flavors. It is a two-handed operation. Uncork the wine, hold the Vinturi over the glass and pour. You’ll hear a sucking sound — that’s the wine being aerated. Best for red wines, but can be used for white wines too.  I’ve seen wineries use it in their tasting rooms so what you taste is the true wine.Comes with rubber stand and a travel pouch and retails for about $30.  You can usually find this at a wine shop, or you can order online.

I did my own taste test on a Cotes du Rhone that was really tannic.  The wine, once it passed through the Vinturi, was much softer and drinkable, where it wasn’t before.

Another gift idea — Govino wine tumblers.  Plastic wine glasses get a bad rap, but these are really cool. Govino glasses look like a famous stemless brand, but won’t break, can be used again and are recyclable.  There’s an indention for your thumb that makes the glass easy to hold [although I recommend holding by top of glass when you swirl so as not to warm the wine up too much].  One set is 4 in a box that retails for about $12,  and again you can find at most wine shops or online.

What to get the wine lover in your life who has everything?  Here’s a gadget (we all know how wine geeks love their toys!)  Nuvo Vino is an infrared thermometer you use to check your wine’s serving temp.  Super easy to use, you push the top button down and the other end opens up to reveal the thermometer.  You don’t dunk this in the wine.  Instead the infrared collects the surface temp.  

In my homegrown experiment, I had a white wine I wanted to open.  In the bottle the unchilled wine temp was 74 degrees Fareheght.  A little too warm to drink in my opinion.

After chilling in ice for about 25 minutes, the wine poured into a glass was at 49.5  degrees.  That’s in the optimal range of serving temps for this wine, a blend of Sauvignon Blanc and Viognier.   After sitting in the glass for about 10 minutes, the wine was at 55.5 degrees.  Double checked with an instant read thermometer dipped into the wine, it read 54.6 degrees.  Close enough for me.

The Nuvo Vino comes with a serving temperature chart.  Sells for around $40.