Are you having trouble finding wines to go with your favourite Asian flavours? It can be a bit of a challenge, as Asian dishes often have a complex sweet/sour/bitter/spicy dynamic that can clash with many wines. White WinesGenerally, the most reliable matches are the rich, often slightly off-dry whites from Alsace in France and neighbouring…
Why would you pay aged Cheddar prices for Velveeta? Well, you wouldn’t, would you? But countless Edmontonians are doing just that, in a wine sense, every week. After spending a few hours touring some chain stores in the South end of the city, I came away amazed at how little “real” wine was on the…
Just about any liquor store you walk into has products stacked around with signs telling you what a great deal it is. In almost every case, it is a mass-produced industrial product that the store has bought on sale and is using in its flyer hoping to sell lots of. We use our stack space…
If there is one wine region that is getting the quality/value balance right in the last few years, it has to be France’s Rhone Valley. Home to appellations such as Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Lirac, Gigondas, as well as the more humble Cotes du Rhone, the Rhone Valley is already well known as a place to look for…
We, like everyone else in the wine industry in Edmonton, were stunned to hear of the sudden passing of Spike Maynard of Harvest Vintage Imports last week. As well as being the importer of some of the best Aussie wines in the market, such as Mollydooker, D’Arenberg, and Small Gully, among other things, Spike was…
A great afternoon with a top flight Piedmont producer
In the $15-$35 range, this overlooked corner of France produces some of the best values in the store. Do yourself a favour and explore!
Anyone who loves wine in this town can be forgiven for thinking that Edmonton is often the forgotten city when it comes to worthwhile public wine shows, dinners, and producer visits. Both Calgary and Vancouver see far more activity in this regard than Edmonton does and everybody in the industry knows why; Edmonton buys far…
As we have all heard by now, Alberta has banned the import of BC wines into the province as part of an ongoing disagreement over pipeline policy. The media jumped right in and began to spew out endless statistics explaining what this ban would mean for Alberta and for BC wineries. It was rather disappointing, but hardly unexpected, to see so much misleading information given out in the media.
As we head back into the tasting season after the summer break, I thought it would be a good time to explain our tasting program. I have been asked on several occasions why we organize our public tastings differently from the traditional paid-ticket/program-based format that many other shops run. As many of you know, almost…
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