Happy New Year!

New Year's Eve is fast approaching, and I'm sure that more than a few of you will be opening a bottle of champagne to ring in the new year. Champagne will get a full blog post in the future, but for now, the issue at hand is getting the bubbly out of the bottle and into your glass.

Beaujolais for Turkey Day

Its coming up on Thanksgiving here in sunny Seattle, and every place that sells wine is trying to sell you the perfect wine to pair with your Thanksgiving turkey.
 
There are many fantastic choices and popular favorites, and it seems to me that the wine that seems to cause the most confusion is Beaujolais (BOH-zho-lay). 

Beaujolais? Beaujolais Nouveau? Aren't they the same? Kinda? Sorta? 

Well, no, not really.

Manchego: A Spanish Classic

The story of Don Quixote takes place in La Mancha, a hot, arid plain in south central Spain. The novel mentions cheese 13 times, and the cheese on Don Quixote's mind was Manchego (Mon-CHAY-goh), one of Spain's iconic cheeses.

Brown Ale for Thanksgiving

I'm back to blogging after taking some time off to prepare for the Craft Beer Institute's Cicerone certification exam - just in time to talk about beer to serve with Thanksgiving dinner.

I know what you're thinking: Thanksgiving is a special celebration so you should pull out the wine, right? 

Don't think that you have to, because there is historical precedent for serving beer instead. Do you think that the Pilgrims ran down to the corner store for a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau? No, they did not. They drank the beer that they had brewed. 

Honor the Pilgrims by serving beer!

There are plenty of great beer choices for Thanksgiving dinner, but I'm going to suggest something that isn't terribly sexy, esoteric, or beer-geeky: Brown Ale.

Grenache is for Autumn

Happy First Day of Fall!

As the seasons change, what we eat changes, and so the wine we drink will change too. Grenache is a perfect autumn wine – its a nice transition from lighter wines drunk on the patio during the summer to fuller bodied wines best enjoyed sitting by a fireplace during winter.

Grenache (Greh-nosh) is thought to have originated in northern Spain, and from there transplanted to southern France and the islands of Corsica and Sardinia. There is also a school of thought that Grenache is indigenous to the islands and was brought to Spain after the Spaniards invaded in the 13^th Century.

In more recent history, Grenache has been transplanted in Australia, California, and Washington. 

Emmental, the original Swiss cheese

It's hard to imagine a drawing of cheese that does not involve a few holes.

While Swiss cheese has become a generic term, there are actually several different tasty types of Switzerland-made cheese that deserve your attention.

Emmental (EM-mawn-tall) is one of the world's classic cheeses. It's the Swiss cheese that all other Swiss cheeses are patterned after.

Oktoberfest!

Munich, Germany's Oktoberfest is the world's most famous and imitated beer festival, and it's name has become synonymous with the style of beer served there: Märzen (Mayrt-zen).

Before refrigeration, it was difficult to brew beer during Bavaria's hot summer and the quality of the beer suffered. In 1553, Bavarian law decreed that beer could only be brewed between September 29th and April 23rd. Beer was brewed in March (Märzen in German) to be stored in cellars and caves for drinking during the summer.