Monthly Archives: December 2010
It’s only fitting as the year closes out that we finish up with a brief look at dessert wines. For people less interested in champagne, toasting with port as the new year begins may be just as satisfying…and definitely sweeter.
In the below video clip, The History Channel’s Modern Marvels series takes an in-depth look at the history of port wines from Portugal’s Duoro Valley, with help from Rupert Symington of Symington Estates Winery.
Remember, however you choose to celebrate, drink responsibly and make sure you have a safe way of getting home. Happy New Year!
 New Year’s Eve is just two days away, and there are many questions you might still need to answer: “Where am I going?” “Who am I going with?” “What are my resolutions for next year?” High on the list of a wine enthusiast’s questions, however, will be: “Which champagne will I pop the cork off of before midnight?”
Your answer to this question will depend on a few factors. Are you buying one bottle for an intimate evening or several bottles for a larger party? Are you more concerned with affordability, or are you looking to impress others with your selection of a fine, pricey bottle?
Below are a handful of links to help you try and solve this conundrum. Work quickly, though—the year is almost over!
- The 2010 Champagne Information Bureau Tasting Results — these assessments are all from the March 2010 event, so keep in mind that, while a comprehensive list, not all of these bottles may still be available.
- Consumer Search — Aggregated expert reviews of champagne, spotlighting the five best reviewed bottles of the year.
- Jiles Halling — a former native of the French wine region of Champagne offers his recommendation for the best bottle produced there this year.
With the end of the year comes year-end best-of lists…if there is a topic on which people have strong opinions, you can be sure that every magazine or journal on that topic is busy compiling their lists and defending their opinions. Wine, as you can guess, is no exception. Here are links to the lists painstakingly crafted by some of the industry’s top tastemakers:
• The Wine Enthusiast 100
• The Wine Spectator 100
• Food & Wine’s Best Wines of 2010
• Wine columnist Elin McCoy’s list for Bloomberg Business & Finance
None of them agree on which of wine of 2010 was the best—so if you have the time and resources, you might want to try them all yourself and come up with your own final decision. (Or, you may decide that none of the big magazines got the #1 selection right at all!)
What was your top wine for the past year?
Level-2 sommelier Anne Strand is a far cry from the stereotype of the stuffy, pretentious wine expert—her alter ego, Wino Woman, has been steadily building a loyal audience using her disarming irreverence and occasional flair for flamboyant costumes. Don’t let the mannerisms fool you, though—she knows a thing or two about wine, and is only too happy to share her expertise.
You can catch up with her past few months of videos at her website … and below you’ll find her recommendations for this Christmas weekend and a self-composed version of a classic Christmas song just for wine enthusiasts.
Happy Holidays from everybody here at Strongbox!
 One thing you can count on over the holidays is that you will probably find yourself surrounded by an abundance of fine chocolate, gifted to you or opened and waiting for you at the holiday parties you’re attending. But you have no ordinary sweet tooth—you probably know that chocolate, like cheese, is one of those foods that goes very, very well with wine. What you might not know is how you should create those pairings.
Luckily for you, the fine folks at The Nibble, a specialty food magazine, have produced a handy chart that gives you a variety of suggestions for each kind of chocolate you could come across this weekend. It includes not only the different types of solid chocolate—dark, milk, white—but also wine suggestions for chocolate that includes caramel or other nougat.
Go ahead and indulge for both the chocolate and the wine…New Year’s Eve, and its traditional resolutions, are right around the corner!
Christmas is this coming Saturday, and although you may already have plans for how you’ll be spending this traditional family holiday, you might still be at a loss as to what you’re doing on New Year’s Eve, just around the corner. Have no fear! Here’s a list of New Year’s Eve destinations tailor-made for the wine enthusiast:
Volo Restaurant Wine Bar This moody, well-established Roscoe Village wine bar happily opens its doors—with no cover!—to wine lovers looking to share an intimate evening with close friends.
Paramount Room The Paramount Room also offers a no-cover evening, with decorations, complimentary party favors, and festive music to help ring in the new year.
WineStyles of Schaumburg If you’re out in the northwest suburbs, and looking for something to do with your evening before your real New Year’s Eve party, you can stop by WineStyles between 3:30 and 7 pm to loosen up with some fine wine tastings.
Geja’s Café A pricier option for revelers looking to enjoy the company of only one other person, Geja’s offers a “romantic” option for New Year’s Eve, including wine and carefully prepared dinner items.
For all of the above, remember that there are dozens of other wine lovers trying to figure out their plans as well. Reservations are strongly encouraged, if not completely necessary, for any event. Good luck finding your perfect evening!
In the Midwest right now we’re currently experiencing a frigid and stormy winter, causing all sorts of difficult conditions and a high-profile incident involving the collapse of the Minneapolis Metrodome. So it might be hard to believe that parts of the Earth are warm right now, and getting even warmer as a result of global climate changes. Winemakers, however, have a particular need to keep track of these climate conditions, as certain varieties of grape can be very delicate and respond poorly to change. If you’re a wine collector, you’re probably going to want to keep informed as well.
Global news agency AFP recently produced this report on the state of French vineyards in several popular wine regions, and the ways that winemakers are trying to adapt their grapevines to survive in their new climes:
Climate change is a highly politicized topic, of course, with passionate debate regarding its science and effects. For winemakers and wine enthusiasts, however, the situation is simple and personal—if the current state of the weather hinders the growth of the wine grapes, then both the winery and the consumer will suffer.
Just in time for the holidays! We’re pleased to invite you inside Strongbox for a tour of our self-storage facilities. Join host Colleen McGinty McNaulty as she surveys our services and meets some of our friendly staff – and learn about the many things you can store at Strongbox!
It’s perfect place to stash those less-than-stellar gifts from your in-laws – take that pyramids!
If you’re a wine enthusiast who also has a passion for foreign films and documentaries, we’d like to let you know about a recent film, released in it native Argentina just last month, so you can keep an eye out if and when it’s released in the United States. The film is titled El Camino del Vino (or, The Way of Wine), and deals with the incredible true story of world-class sommelier Charlie Arturaola, who suddenly and inexplicably suffered the loss of his palate. Obviously, such an affliction would be devastating to any wine collector, so you can imagine how deeply painful it was was Arturaola. The story of his fall from grace in the wine industry, and his quest to recover his palate, is documented the film. To whet your own cinematic palate, check out the trailer, and if it grabs your attention, keep an eye out for the title in the near future here.
As any discerning wine enthusiast understands, the sense of taste is especially complex and profound, capable of detecting thousands of individual flavors. For the past ten years, scientists at the University of Texas in Austin have been trying to produce a chemical system that can mimic this natural one…and now they believe they have succeeded, using wine as the test subject.
If you’re somebody who enjoys reading dense scientific papers, you should check out the published research study, Discrimination of flavonoids and red wine varietals by arrays of differential peptidic sensors. For the rest of us, though, here’s a quick summary of the research.
Dr. Eric Anslyn began his work with a team of undergraduates, and initially the idea of using wine as a focus had not occurred to them. It was seven years into the project that they realized wine’s cultivated variety of tastes provided an excellent template to continue their research, and they partnered with Dr. Hildegarde Heymann, a wine sensory specialist from the University of California in Davis. For the next three years, the team devised an elaborate array of chemicals that works like a wine litmus test—certain areas change color depending on the type of tannins and flavonoids present in the varietal. The team successfully used the array to mimic the skills of a master sommelier, blindly identifying Pinot Noir, Beaujolais, Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel, Merlot, and Shiraz.
While the researchers’ ultimate goal is to use this array to identify the lifecycle of a living cell—a breakthrough that could aid in cancer research—the current chemical system can be useful to the wine industry in helping to verify the quality and authenticity of certain wine varietals. Counterfeit wines are an insidious problem, and can be hard to combat without constant vigilance. This new tool, which the researchers believe can be calibrated to work with both white and red wines, may be very useful for wine labs in the future.
This time of year brings with it a number of familiar traditions and trappings, and the music is possibly the most recognizable of them all. Whether you love or hate being inundated with the carols from radio stations and shopping centers, you know these compositions within the first few notes and even well after the season has passed they’ll make you think of the holidays.
Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite contains some of the most beloved of holiday-related musical works, and many musicians have used all sorts of instruments to play versions of these pieces. Italian musician Robert Tiso is a virtuoso of the “glass harp,” an instrument carefully assembled and calibrated by filling wine goblets with fluid to produce a specific pitch when rubbed with wet fingers. For your enjoyment, here he is performing “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”:
 An experienced wine collector will probably have good ideas already for gifts to give to their equally-as-knowledgeable wine collector friends. But what could one give to that friend who has just begun transitioning from a casual interest in wine into full-fledged passion? A bottle you would recommend is a decent option, but something such a friend might appreciate even more is a way to increase their own acumen for wine.
Games, besides being entertaining, are also an excellent means of learning new information. Cork Jester, a game company that caters to wine lovers, has produced the trivia game Wine Teasers to both test the brains of longtime wine enthusiasts and help educate those new to the hobby. It can be played with a small or large number of players, and also features game play that’s about more than asking trivia questions.
The website includes a couple of sample quiz questions to give you a taste of what Wine Teasers has to offer. Give a copy to your novice friend, however, and by next year you might be having fascinating, in-depth conversations with a new peer…which is a bit like getting a gift in return.
Now that the winter chill has finally started to creep in, it’s time to start warming your bones with some mulled wine. Mulled wine, if you’ve never had the pleasure, is a drink made by infusing wine with spices and serving it warm. Many countries around the world serve it as a traditional holiday treat, and it’s easy for you to make your own.
Noted Food Network personalities Alton Brown and Ina Garten share their different recipes and methods…and perhaps with their guidance to start with, you’ll be able to come up with your own!
Gluten, one of the key components of wheat, can be found in dozens of staple food products. Gluten sensitivity or allergy afflicts people indiscriminately—and that includes wine collectors. Restricting one’s food choices for health reasons unfortunately also means that a discerning wine drinker has to carefully consider which wines they can consider for pairing with their food.
G-Free Foodie, a website dedicated to serving people with gluten concerns, understands this problem explicitly. For the holidays, website blogger KC Pomering has produced a short, helpful video and blog posting listing her top wine picks for gluten-free family dinners:
You can also find out more about gluten-free holiday foods through this post, written by the entire website staff. Even if you’re not suffering from gluten allergies, one of your guests might—and a really generous host will take these guests into consideration this holiday season.
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