Since learning about wine is all about drinking it, the learning can be pretty hard on your bank account. However, unless you live in a dry county, you might find that there are more free wine-tasting opportunities around than you’d known. Wine stores and wine or culinary schools are two prime places to look.

Wine Stores

In states where it’s legal, wine stores will often have wine tastings, where they will open up half a dozen bottles and pour you a taste of one or all. These casual tastings are almost always free, and the pressure is nothing; you can come in, taste, and leave without so much as buying a bottle. The store’s hope is that you’ll love one of the wines enough that you’ll buy something, but even if you don’t, the tasting gives the store a chance to educate their consumers, and a savvy consumer is the best kind.

Wine Classes

Running a wine class takes lots of energy and lots of help. There are a lot of glasses to set out, fill, and then wash. If you don’t mind getting a little wine-stained and washing dishes, you might want to volunteer as a pourer. You’ll be a little too busy to take as many notes as the students, and you might not even get to sit down, but you do get to taste the wines when you’ve done your duties, and listen to the lecture as you work.

Look for wine classes at culinary schools and in adult community education programs, or ask your local wine merchant where to look for classes in your area.

Uncategorized discount wine, free wine, wine sample, wine samples, wine sampling

Don’t forget about the upcoming Wine Club give away! In only 33 days, one very lucky randomly chosen person that pressed the “Like” button on our Facebook page will win a whole year’s subscription! The big question is: what will you do with your Wine Club Subscription for a whole year?

Who will you share it with? Who will you tell about it?

Get excited, because someone is going to be a winner on Oct 31, 2010! And, if you clicked on that “Like” button, you could be the chosen winner of the membership with Cellar’s Platinum wine club. We are counting down the days.

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If you’re in Las Vegas tonight (September 25, 2010), don’t miss the Wine Amplified Festival. It’s the 5th year in a row for this celebration of wine at Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay Beach. Last night’s events kicked it off, making this a first year for an extended weekend Wine Amplified Festival; instead of one night one fun, they have decided to make it two.

Don’t worry if you missed last night’s fun, though. Tonight, you can join in the festivities, wine tasting, celebrity chefs, and live music performances (including Third Eye Blind) between the hours of 7pm and 11:30pm. There are six restaurants that are joining in the fun, offering plates for only $6 each. The wine tasting will begin at 7pm and end at about 10pm. Tickets are $65.

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For a perfectly light orange wine drink to display in your punch bowl at your Halloween party, grab your favorite bottle of white wine and pour it into the bowl. You can purchase a great Chateau for less than $25 for an inexpensive party drink (you may even find a bottle in the $10 range).

Orange liquer is the key to attaining the appropriate Halloween color. Add a few tablespoons of the liquer for the color effect. You will then have an orange hued wine to match the symbolical colors of the holiday without any loss of flavor and your guests will be wondering how you did it.

How do you make your colorful holiday drinks?

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It’s almost like mixing oil with water, just a slight bit different. The effect that oxygen has on wine, from the moment that the skin comes off of the grape, is tremendous, according to reports from all around the world.

Wine makers are known to protect their processes from these effects by controlling the amount of oxygen that the wine is exposed to. So, even though the Wine Club Guide Facebook “Like”-ers never leave their vintages with a drop left in them, let’s just ponder the idea of a half-full bottle.

The oxygen inside the bottle that is half full spans more area of the wine than a bottle that is completely full. Does this have any affect on the wine? Researchers and expert wine tasters say yes. What do you think?

Uncategorized does oxygen have an affect on wine, oxygen and wine, oxygen inside bottle wine, the effect of oxygen on wine, wine and oxygen

This red wine recipe that will have guests begging for more is simple to throw together, but it’s so mouthwatering that people will think that you spent hours cooking it. If you have a crock pot, you are in luck. If you love beef, you’re in luck. You’re going to want to add this to your weekly meal schedule as soon as you smell it, let alone taste it.

You can get already chopped beef that is prepared for beef stew at the grocery store. Then, you will want to get some meat tenderizer and your choice of vegetables, too. Once you make the recipe, you can certainly modify it to your own taste, add extra ingredients like pasta, or change the type of vegetables that you use in the future.

Basically, all you need to do is set your crock pot on low, put the beef in, sprinkle it with meat tenderizer, and let it cook for an hour. Open the crock pot after an hour, add the vegetables and anything else you think might taste good, and then douse the food with red wine. One or two cups is plenty. Close the cover and keep it on low for three to four hours.

Be prepared! The aroma will make your mouth water. Check the meat after the two hour mark; you don’t want it to get tough.

You can add noodles to the mixture in the crock pot towards the end of cooking to absorb some of the marinade, if you desire. Or, simply fix a plate of spaghetti and top it with the meat and vegetables. With or without the pasta, the meat and vegetables cooked in red wine is absolutely succulent! (Broccoli also tastes divine marinated in red wine in the crock pot).

The beef and the red wine are the two main ingredients that “make” the recipe, so to speak. Have fun with them and try out various renditions and come back and let us know what you think!

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As if you needed another reason to pour a glass of your favorite red wine…

The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) journal just recently reported that both of the drinks, red wine and green tea, put a dead stop to prostate cancer growth. The key ingredient? The antioxidants called polyphenols.

This is extremely exciting news for people that aren’t even wine (or green tea) drinkers. Decades have been spent studying cancer and cures…coming a step closer to answers is definitely good news.

According to reports, there is a signaling of the cells that is vital for prostate cancer growth, and the polyphenols found in the red wine (or green tea) halt those signals.  This isn’t just for prevention, either. The research is proving that the “miracle ingredient” in these two drinks retard the progression of the cancer as well.

According to these studies, the polyphenols are actually killing the prostate cancer by inhibiting a cell pathway that encourages the cancer to grow and thrive. Going even one step further, this particular pathway plays a roll in gastric cancers, breast cancer, and colon cancer as well, according to the FASEB Journal’s editor in chief, Gerald Weissmann, M.D.

So, pour yourself another tall glass of that Bordeaux, Burgundy…or any other favorite…and keep in mind that, one day, it might provide the answer to many people’s hopes and dreams.

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Even though many of us seem to never have any wine leftover, there are certainly several ways to use it-if, by chance, you ever end up with some. In most cases, you will want the wine to be freshly opened, with a window of one or two days.

1) Poach some fruit with red wine that has been open less than two days.

2) Marinate some strawberries in your favorite red wine. Add a little sugar and refrigerate.

3) Add leftover red wine to your favorite Italian recipe; spaghetti, lazagna or a marinara sauce, for an added twist.

4) Throw some beef stew sized chunks of meat (and meat tenderizer) into the Crock Pot with your favorite vegetables. This is a must-try for people that love meat and red wine!

5) A little white wine mixed with some seafood makes the wine and seafood lover’s taste buds more than satisfied.

If you happen to forget that you had some leftover wine for more than a week (who does that?), you can still use it for a tasty salad dressing.

Uncategorized leftover wine, quick wine tips, what to do with leftover wine

You may have already figured out that the more you know about wine, the more you realize you don’t know. I’ll warn you now: It only gets worse from here. The only thing that you can ever be sure of is that you have more to learn.

The wine world is getting harder to keep up with, too. Advances in knowledge and technology are making it possible to grow better wine in more places than ever, and in some cases, even grow it where it never grew before. And whereas it was once unlikely that you’d find wine outside of the region it grew in, let alone the country or continent, wine today is shipped all over the place—and typically gets there in good shape.

Add the sheer number of wines to the simple fact that each vintage brings something different to a wine, and the possibilities really are endless.

The upside of this realization is that it means the possibilities of excitement, discovery, and new and delicious sensations will outlast your ability to get through them all. You’ll never, ever be bored.

If you keep drinking wine, and thinking about it every time you taste it, you can’t help but continue to learn. Things will go a little faster, though, if you keep actively working at it—and you might create an encouraging network of wine-loving friends, too. That’s fun, and it’ll help you through those times it seems like there’s so much to know and so many bad bottles.

Uncategorized learning about wine, Wine Education, wine knowledge, wine lessons

Small, intimate, but fun, wine tasting parties can be the events of the season that everyone wishes they were invited to. Without the pressured requirement of being a wine tasting perfectionist, these parties can also be light and fun. Try the following tips and ideas for your next wine tasting party.

· Keep the party under sixteen people-you’ll want enough wine in each bottle to be able to pass around about 2 oz. to each person.

· All you need is about half a dozen wines to taste.

· A themed party can be a lot of fun.

· Hand everyone a pre-printed scoring sheet to rate each wine with, then announce the winning wine.

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