Monthly Archives: September 2010
 In recent weeks, we’ve spotlighted a number of websites that offer regular discounts on wines. Although the world wide web certainly opens up a number of possibilities for your bargain hunting, it’s also smart to remember that wine deals are also happening out in the real world, too—sometimes right in your own backyard. We’ll be taking a look at some local establishments in the future where you can find a physical bottle and take it home then and there, instead of waiting for delivery.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t alert you to the Wine Discount Center’s monthly flyers of excellent and affordable bottles. This month, they feature a selection of eight different 90-Point wines, an exceptional rating, all for under $10 a bottle. The group includes a trio of 2009 Sauvignon Blancs, a 2008 Shiraz, and a 2007 Reserve Merlot.
Pick up a bottle tonight and let them know that we gave you a heads-up about these exciting low-cost, high-value wines!
Wine Discount Center
1826 N Elston
Chicago, IL 60642
(773) 489-3454
 So let’s say you’re an experienced wine enthusiast now. You’ve trained your nose to savor the aromas and your tongue to separate the notes in each glass. You’re able to suggest the proper bottle to go with any meal being served, and you know how long to wait before serving it. You know which wines you can keep on your rack in the dining room and which you needed to place into storage, and you keep a very detailed database (perhaps at Cellartracker) to let you know where you put all of it. With all of those experiences behind you, maybe it’s time to try the next frontier, and make your own wine?
Making your own wine doesn’t necessarily require the optimal conditions you find in the wine countries of the world—you’re not likely to produce a new varietal that takes the market by storm and becomes a legend of the industry. Home winemaking is primarily about using your knowledge and particular tastes to create something that’s maybe just for you and your friends over a special dinner. To that end, remember to have fun with your experiment—and if you don’t succeed the first time, don’t be afraid to try again. You might even try making several different kinds of wine at the same time to see if you discover something you hadn’t expected.
Here are a handful of links to get you started.
- Homemade Wine, a comprehensive resource on the subject
- A highly rated homemade wine recipe from Allrecipes.com
- Crushpad, a Twitter-based do-it-yourself winery
 In any American restaurant with even a basic wine list, you are likely to find a bottle of Pinot Grigio available for your enjoyment. What you might not realize, however, is that as recently as 30 years ago most Americans were unaware that such a varietal even existed. The presence of Pinot Grigio in our marketplace today can be credited to the discerning palate of Anthony J. Terlato, a longtime Chicagoan and a pioneer in teaching America to appreciate the nuances of fine wine.
Terlato first experienced the wine industry through his father, who owned Chicago’s Leading Liquors wine retail shop, one of the city’s first self-service liquor establishments. After learning about the finer European wines through the merchandise his family sold, Terlato set about revolutionizing his family’s wine import business, specifically spotlighting the underrepresented wines of Italy. In 1979, on a trip to Italy, Terlato discovered the Italian’s Pinot Grigio varietal, sampling several bottles in one evening and then choosing one, the Santa Margherita, as the best of the bunch. He negotiated with the winery to import their Pinot Grigio to America, and it steadily caught the public’s attention, becoming an extremely popular imported wine.
Today, Terlato Wines International runs a number of California wineries and continues to tantalize American wine aficionados with imports of fine European varietals. Terlato himself maintains a hands-on presence—no doubt spurred by his passion for the art of wine—and his company works constantly to shape tastes by releasing, each month, ratings for new vintages.
The next time you open a bottle of your favorite Pinot Grigio, you might want to take a moment to toast the man who made that bottle’s purchase possible. To Anthony Terlato!
Since 2004, Tom Thornhill, Tim Thornhill, and Paul Dolan have run the Mendocino Wine Company, a California vineyard notable for its dedication to environmentally sound and sustainable wine production. The three men had come together from worlds of organic horticulture and preservation, and their vision of a truly green winery was realized when they purchased the Parducci Wine Cellars, the oldest winery in Mendocino. Today, their business practices and philosophies serve as an example and inspiration to other like-minded wineries the world over.
Check out the below video for a look at the wine production process at Mendocino. Winemaking may be an ancient art, but as these men are proving, one can always find ways to innovate.
In the United States, California enjoys a particularly robust reputation as a wine producer…but what many Chicagoans might not realize is that there is a burgeoning wine country just across the lake, in Michigan.
As one of the leading fruit producers in the nation, Michigan has largely focused on producing sweet fruit wines, and is especially well known for wines made from their famous cherries. However, Michigan has also recently been developing more vineyards that grow a healthy variety of different European grapes—some of the varieties produced include Chardonnay, Merlot, and Riesling. You can learn quite a bit just by visiting the official site of Michigan’s wine industry, which offers you a stunning gallery of its vineyards, a calendar of upcoming wine events, and more. Or, if you’d like to check out where others find the best Michigan wines, you can check out reviews and tasting profiles over at Cork’d.com
There are well over 100 wineries operating in Michigan today, and recent estimates show that they produce nearly a million gallons of wine yearly (425,000 bottles). With that kind of output, it’s hard to ignore Michigan’s contribution to the American wine industry. If you are already a fan of Michigan wines, let us know your favorites, and we’ll share your recommendations with the rest of our readers.
One of the great things about advances in social media networking is that it’s become incredibly easy to locate like-minded individuals on any topic you can think of—including, of course, people who love wine. Twitter, with its real-time interface and “hashtag” grouping system, is one such ideal networking environment for wine enthusiasts—at least, those who don’t mind sharing their thoughts at 140 characters per “tweet.”
 WineTwits uses Twitter as a platform to create a centralized forum for its users, allowing them to converse at will on any number of topics. If you’re on Twitter already, follow @WineTwits to learn more about what discussions are currently happening. If you haven’t tried Twitter because you’re a little intimidated by the onslaught of conversation, this might be a good place to ease yourself in…surrounded by people who have the exact same passion for wine as you.
WineTwits also has its own “deal” site for users at WineTwits Deals. Instead of being a “daily” deal, however, WineTwits offers one bottle of wine at a 30-80% markdown rate until that wine is sold out…and then they put another one up on the sale block (no more than six per day, though, so pace yourself!).
Great conversation and good deals on wine—isn’t that part of why you enjoy wine in the first place?
We hope you had a great time this past weekend at The Windy City Wine Festival or 2nd Story…or perhaps both, if you’d been so adventurous. If you have any stories from either event you’d like to share, please tell us all about it in the Comments section.
Coming up in the rest of the month, we’ll profile some more daily deal sites for you, and introduce you to some other interesting wine personalities from around the Chicago area.
For today, though, you should just enjoy this amusing bit of wine-related cartoon history—an animated short featuring The Beatles visiting a French winery. Hijinks, and a rock concert, quickly ensue:
 One-time Chicagoan Kevin Lynch and his partner Amber Share are on a mission. Combining their years of expertise as restaurateur, sommelier, and culinary specialist with a cultural curiosity, the pair created Native Food & Wine, a site where they post stories of their travels around the world, examining the means of producing the food and wine that you might be enjoying in your own home. Since spring of 2009, they have been regularly spotlighting innovative ways that certain regions manufacture their culinary specialties, focusing not only on unusual methods but also environmentally conscious ones.
Native Food & Wine is also uniquely interested in sharing stories of the people involved, and the history they have to share. Take a look at this short interview with Sofian Himeur, owner of Gruet Winery in New Mexico, about how his family first began to produce their line of sparkling wines:
More recently, Lynch and Share have been exploring Tuscany, and reporting on fascinating aspects of its food and wine culture such as the renowned Tuscan bistecca cattle and—of particular interest to our readers—the Vernaccia di San Gimignano winery, owned and operated by Tuscan royalty and with a past that includes noteworthy connections to the Renaissance.
Follow along at their website…it may inspire you to follow them along in real life!
 As you might expect, the owners of the simply-named wine.com have some experience in the field of online wine commerce. Their site, which began as eVineyard in 1998 and transferred over to its current web address in 2001, has steadily grown into the #1 online wine store by annual revenue. From the home page, you can access several wine deals and sign up for a number of wine clubs.
Wine.com is set up to help the novice make informed decisions about their purchases. However, for more knowledgeable clientele, the site also offers their secret, members-only Wineshopper section, where the extra special deals can be found. Don’t let the members-only label intimidate you, though—membership is completely free and takes less than a minute to set up. In fact, to give you a full report of what awaits you behind the Wineshopper door, we signed up ourselves.
What you’ll find on Wineshopper are a number of daily deals and limited-time offers on all sorts of wines, including both wines for casual dining and those for special occasions. At the moment, you still have four days to pick up a bottle of Chateau Ste Michelle 2008 Indian Wells Cabernet Sauvignon, a 90-point rated wine, for the low price of $12.99—and you can be sure that other such deals will be coming in the future. The best part about the membership system, though, is that you don’t have to check back all the time…the day’s events are emailed directly to you, and you can then decide if you want to partake of the offers.
Are you a current Wineshopper member? How have your experiences been? Let us know in the comments.
 After you’ve sampled the seven-course meal that is The Windy City Wine Festival, you might want to save some room on your palate to check out this weekend’s installment of 2nd Story, happening on the evenings of September 12 and 13 at Webster’s Wine Bar. Serendipity Theatre Collective’s popular storytelling and wine tasting event has been enchanting connoisseurs of both fine wine and fine art for several years now. If you haven’t checked it out, you owe yourself the experience.
Although the evening is undoubtedly theatrical, 2nd Story isn’t the sort of event where you buy a ticket and then sit watching a blank stage, waiting for the show to start. Each evening is dedicated to the sense of honesty that can be found in a pleasant night out with your friends in a relaxed environment. You’ll slowly imbibe a quality wine, snack on cheese or other small items, and engage in the art of conversation. A few times in the middle of your evening, however, the lights will dim, and somewhere else in the room, a talented performer will share a true story about themselves, enhanced by expert light and sound design. When the story is over, perhaps what you just heard will inspire you to share something of your own with your table.
This weekend you’ll be regaled with stories from such performers as 2nd Story mainstay Megan Stielstra, among others. You’ll also get a chance to sample wines from Maysara, Seven Hills, and J. Bookwalter. If you have to miss this weekend, though, don’t worry—2nd Story happens a couple of times a month at various locales, and changes all the time. For a sample of the sorts of stories you might hear told, check out some of these 2nd Story videos and podcasts.
 As nice as it can be to open a new bottle of wine in a carefully set indoor environment, there’s something to be said for enjoying wine in the fresh, open air…especially at an iconic sight in Chicago. Unfortunately, law and propriety will tend to prohibit you from pouring yourself a glass at most such outdoor attractions.
This coming weekend, however, you should check out The Windy City Wine Festival, which will give you the opportunity to experience not only one bottle of wine, but dozens, while relaxing by Chicago’s beautiful Buckingham Fountain.
You can check out a full list of wineries and the bottles they’ll be bringing for your enjoyment here. All of these wines will also be available at a special discount price, so if you happen to find that wine you didn’t know you were always looking for, you can buy yourself several bottles to uncork in the future. More than simply an elaborate wine tasting, The Windy City Wine Festival also features seminars and classes taught by wine experts from all across Chicago and live music events in the evenings. But most importantly, it’s a chance to join one of the largest gatherings of wine enthusiasts in the Chicago area at a gorgeous locale, and share the atmosphere.
Two days only and tickets are on sale now! We hope to see many of our customers there, soaking up the afternoon and evening as the summer begins to transition into fall. And remember—if you do find that bottle of wine you need to buy a dozen of, don’t forget us when you’re trying to figure out how to store it!
 This week we’re spotlighting the reliable “Daily Deal” site Cinderella Wine, which distinguishes itself from many other similar sites through its partnership with Wine Library. This partnership allows Cinderella Wine to find the best quality wine you might not have heard of, and then offer it to you for one day only at a beautiful price.
Cinderella Wine is the brainchild of that charming rogue of the wine world, Gary Vaynerchuk, who has made a career out of sharing interesting wines with his audience. The site encourages open dialogue about the wines offered, the better to build an online community of people just as passionate about wine as Vaynerchuk is himself.
Today’s deal is on a two-pack of Syrahs, one a 2007 Rasa QED and the other a 2006 Neyers Syrah Cuvee de Honor. You save over $40 on this wine deal and get a pair of wines rated higher than 90 points. But remember: like any Cinderella, this deal only lasts until the stroke of midnight…so get on it right now!
 Some of our regular readers know that blog surfing can be addictive, especially considering how many people may have blogs devoted to a singular interest in wine. If our regular features aren’t enough for you, but you’re wary of seeking out other bloggers, allow us to make one recommendation for you—you should be reading Maggie Bernat Smith’s posts at the Chicago Examiner.
A wine buyer at Just Grapes in Chicago, as well as a continuing oenology student, Maggie is quickly becoming an excellent resource for wine enthusiasts looking to find out more about specific varietals. Check out her posts on the distinction between Syrah and Shiraz wines, for example, or her defense of Merlot—a rebuttal, of sorts, to the film Sideways.
Maggie’s background allows her to approach wine both from the perspective of passionate aficionado and practical purchaser, so often you’ll get a great mix of discussion about the qualities of the wine as well as what you should be paying for a bottle of it. Whether you’re a novice or an expert, you’re likely to get some useful information from her posts.
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