I’ve decided to use the blog to occasionally highlight certain wines that I think deserve far more attention than they get. Wines such as Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and so on make the vast majority of wine sales in America, but as a proportion of the types of wines made these are a small minority. Some wines aren’t popular because they don’t deserve to be, but there are a few out there that are really hidden gems. My pick for this week is Gruner Veltliner, a grape native to Austria that is used to make white wines. Nearly all Gruner Veltliner you will see in the U.S. will be made in Austria. There are two ways to make it: in a low yield style which produces a full, lush wine, or high yield which produces a much lighter, crisper wine. The latter is less expensive, and is actually one of Gruner Veltliner’s most attractive characteristics – it’s a heck of a deal. Inexpensive Gruner Veltliner is almost always dry (ie, not sweet), with a crisp citrus flavor, perhaps a bit of peach, and its characteristic white pepper flavor. It’s this last bit that gives Gruner its reputation as a great wine to have with food, especially fish.

Oh, and I should add that one of the wines in this month’s 6 for $60 (theme: staff picks) is a Gruner Veltliner. It’s called Hugl Weine.

July is American Beer Month (for obvious reasons), so the style will be American Ales.  This includes American Pale Ales, American Ambers, American IPA, even American-style Barleywines and American Wheat beers!   Below are the BJCP ale s…

We beat the heat on Saturday, 6/14/08 at Kybecca, with a few “Summer Beers!” So, what are summer beers? Lighter, crisper, and typically lower in alcohol so you can drink ’em all afternoon and stay upright. The best summer beers are custom-tailored fo…

That’s right, it’s back. That elusive beer the Achel Trappist Belgian Abbey Ale. Trappist ales, for those of you who may not know, are beers brewed by a select few Benedictine monasteries, most of which are in Belgium. Chimay is the most famous and most easily available. Then you have Orval, also fairly easy to get, Koningshoeven, Westmalle, Rochefort, which is a bit more difficult to get, and Westleveren, which is the most difficult to get because you can only buy it at the monastery. Of the ones that are exported, Achel is by far the most difficult to get because it only comes around once in a while. In our case, we got our last batch about 2 years ago and have been sold out for months. Anyway, it’s back. Get it while you can.

Next we have a new beer from one of my favorite Belgian breweries, Gouden Carolus. The Hopsinjoor is that most elusive of beers – a hoppy Belgian ale. Brewed with four different hops, this one will appeal to hop heads and Belgian ale lovers.

How about tasting some amazing wines? This Thursday, the 26th, we’re holding a wine seminar at our Plank road store. For those of you who have never been, these seminars are basically wine tasting events where we invite a guest speaker to talk about the wines and the wineries that produce them. This week we have Nicolas Maestre, who heads Williams Corner Wine, a distributor based in Charlottesville. It is no exaggeration to say that the line-up of eight wines we have for this seminar is overall the best selection of any seminar we’ve had to date. These are wines you would never normally see open for a tasting. The star of the show is a $70 Barbaresco – a type of Italian red aged for 5 years in oak barrels. I’ve tasted it and it’s amazing. If you’re a wine novice don’t be intimidated – you don’t need extensive wine knowledge to enjoy the seminar. But even if you fancy yourself an educated wine consumer I think you will find these wines quite different from what you’ve tried before.

We’ve done these seminars for a while and every time people tell us how much they enjoyed it. If you want to see the full line-up of wines and a bit more information, click here. The seminar starts at 7pm and goes until about 8:30. Cost is $25 per person.

So this week I yet again have brought in a British beer aged in oak casks. This one is by J.W. Lees brewery in Manchester, the very same one that brought us the Harvest Ale aged in Sherry that I raved about a while back. This time, it’s the 2007 Harvest Ale aged in Calvados casks. Calvados is a region in Normandy that makes apple brandy. You can really taste the apple brandy flavor in the beer, too. As always with J.W. Lees

Next is a Bohemian Pilsner, the Czech Rebel. Some of you may recall that we used to carry Czechvar as our flagship bohemian pilsner, but unfortunately there is a dispute between the distributor and Anheuser-Busch, who recently bought the import rights to it. Luckily we found this nice little pilsner for fans of Czech lagers.

Veritas poured just over a dozen wines. They charged $5/person for the white wine tasting and $5 for the red, and every $5 tasting fee applied as a discount on a wine bottle. Toward afternoon’s end the Veritas staff began decorating for an evening wedding. Beautiful day, elegant setting for a wedding. Maybe in 10 years or so, the happy couple can return on Father’s Day — with their children.

Airplane Passenger Etiquette.I believe that these words create an oxymoron.I consider myself a patient traveler. Which is a good thing, because most everyone else traveling by air these days seems to have a real issue.I’m not quite certain what the pro…

I receive a lot of email. Too much email. A portion of it is junk mail (although my email program seems to do a good job of catching most of that). A lot of it gets deleted after reading the first sentence or two. Some of it never even gets read, but s…

Kyle worked his butt off, dodging pitfalls…..with a determination like I’ve never seen! The misters are in and working – AWESOME JOB! :o)