I attended the Town/Gown meeting November 12th.These are quarterly get togethers of officials from the University and the City, and includesrepresentatives from the neighborhoods adjoining the campus.They are usually held on weekday afternoons – the ne…
The candidates forum is still on for December 3rd.The folks who run the public access channel (24) have beennotified, but I did not receive a committment from them thatthey would have a camera down there. If you can’t makeit to City Hall, flip on chan…
The December FABTS meeting is scheduled for December 13 at 1:30pm. Lyle and Robyn Brown have cordially invited us to their house for the meeting. The style of the month is obviously Christmas / Hanukkah / Winter beers. I know we’ll have a few multi-…
“November 28, 2008 – NEW YORK – Police said about 2,000 people were gathered outside the Wal-Mart doors before its 5 a.m. opening. The impatient crowd knocked the employee to the ground as he opened the doors and trampled him to death. Other workers w…
It’s been a while since the website was updated. After the August Mead meeting at Kybecca (and the two days it took to recover), we had an Octoberfest beers meeting at Virginia Wine Experience in September. I really liked the setup Edwin Wyant has up…
Several people asked me over the last week or so what wine I would be having with my Thanksgiving meal. My answer at the time was I don’t know because I hadn’t had time to think about it. It wasn’t until Wednesday that a wine was recommended to me by one of the owners of Williams Corner Wine, an importer and distributor based in Charlottesville. The wine was the Pineau d’Aunis from Thierry Puzelat, a winemaker based in Touraine in the Loire Valley region of France. I already knew about Puzelat because we sell his Cot, the local name in Touraine for Malbec. It’s a wine we love not only because it’s so tasty but because it’s original. Puzelat believes in natural wine making, which means organic production and no additives in the wine. He doesn’t even add sulfites to the wines.
Pineau d’Aunis is a grape little known outside France (and not well known there either, for that matter) that I had never had before. Rebecca, Kyle, and I all loved it. The wine had wonderful brambly fruit flavors of raspberry and wild berries, plus lots of baking spice flavor, especially cinnamon. It was light in color which was deceptive because the body is not nearly as light as it appears. It paired wonderfully with the roast goose we enjoyed for our Thanksgiving dinner. We loved this wine so much you can expect to see if for sale in both stores very soon.
I don’t get it, but people up line in front of target, best buy, kohl’s and on and on for it every year. Four in the morning is for sleeping!
Members of the Greeley family pose for a portrait at outside their home in King George County. From left, mother Carole, Laura, 7, Brian, 10, and father Les are all active in revolutionary re-enacting around the area. Brian plays the role of a young Ge…
Our Enomatics machines are really causing a buzz in the ‘Burg! They are fun to use and I have customers constantly telling me how excited they are about them. In fact, I had one person remark that they are “like candy machines for adults!”
We have two more machines coming in next week, so we are looking very forward to bringing you an even broader selection of yummies.
If you haven’t been by yet, be sure to come and check us out. Grab yourself a card and a glass and come play!
Today is the day that this year’s Beaujolais Nouveau is released. Today we’ll be tasting out our Nouveau all day at both locations, so stop by and come taste some wine!
For those not familiar, Beaujolais Nouveau is an unusual style of wine that always gets released on a Thursday around this time of year. Beaujolais is a region in France that makes red wines out of the Gamay grape. There are regular Beaujolais made in traditional ways, but the Nouveau is made using a technique called Carbonic Maceration. Without getting too technical, this is when rather than crushing the grapes and then fermenting the juice, the winemakers put the grapes in large vessels and let gravity crush the grapes at the bottom. As the juice at the bottom of the tank ferments, Carbon Dioxide is released and pushes the oxygen out of the vessel, thereby creating conditions that let the juice in the whole grape clusters ferment inside the grape.
The entire process from grape to bottle only takes about 6 weeks, hence the term Nouveau (new). These reds are very low in tannin and are drunk chilled. People sometimes called Beaujolais Nouveau the red that drinks like a white for that reason. It should be consumed young – you don’t want to drink 2008 Beaujolais Nouveau in 2009.
Nouveau can be real hit or miss in terms of quality, but we have found the Domaine Manoir du Carra to be consistently good every year. We have both their regular Beaujolais Nouveau and the Nouveau Villages.
