Wine Club Insider back with you.

Rain, Rain, go away, come again another year…

Another day of substandard temps, buckets of rain and overcast here in the northwest. Our summers and falls are marvelous, but Spring kind of sucks until the rain ends… they give us just enough nice days so we don’t move away, but then the next wave of storms comes through, and our drought worries ease for another year!

One good thing is that it’s great for the grapes, though! Wet spring, long, hot, dry summer… maybe that’s why Columbia Valley fruit is getting such a great reputation!

In doing my normal weekly tromp around the cyber-vineyards of the Internet, I came across a new (to me, at least) site called “The Wine Society” out of England.  www.thewinesociety.com

Founded in 1874, it is reputed to be the World’s oldest wine club, and their stated goal is to introduce people to some of the world’s great wines at a fair price.

The way they work their membership is that you actually buy a share in the WIne Society for $60-ish (40 British pounds) and it is good for a lifetime, with no pressure to buy.

Even though shipping to the US isn’t an easy option, there are still plenty of other reasons to join, especially if you want a great wine education or have the option of travelling to the UK or to France at all…

Their wine list is over 800 deep, stuffed full of some of the great treasures from the US, Europe, Australia and beyond. They have a great online library, and if you live in England, they will deliver your wines with their own vans!

They also have several tastings, controlled storage for their members, and a nice futures program. They also have retail outlets in England and France if you “just have to have it today.”

I’m actually thinking about joining just for the extras, and picking up my wine when I next get there… and if I can’t bring it back with me, I guess I’ll just be forced to drink it with a nice piece of cheese and some fresh bread out in the English countryside… could be worse, I guess.

Cheers,

Wine Club Insider out

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Wine Club Insider with you again.

For the last couple of days, we’ve been talking about building a wine cellar to keep your wine club collection safe, cool, and happy. Today, we’re going to chat about some of the other “necessities” you need to make your wine cellar complete!

Number one is a good opener. I mean, what kind of fun can you have with your wine club collection if you can’t open your bottles?

I mainly use three different openers, depending on my mood, and the condition of the corks.

Lately, my favorite has been an “automatic” opener from Oster (www.oster.com). Basically, you put it over the bottle, press the button, and it grabs the cork and pulls it out. The best part is that it works on a rechargeable battery.

My second favorite is a CO2 “popper:” You poke the needle through the cork, hit the button, which releases CO2 into the bottle, and out pops the cork. It has a few limits on certain types of cork, but is the most fun, for sure.

The other important opener in my collection is the “Ah So,” which is basically a set of prongs that you wiggle down beside the cork and ah, so, out it comes. You can get almost any cork out with this.

Of course, having a very good Sommelier’s corkscrew is probably recommended, just in case…

The next key is to have a couple of nice glasses to pour your wine club collection into.

Of course, the “gold standard” is Riedel (www.riedel.com), which is often misspelled Reidel, even on so-called “real” websites. I have to say, from my experience, that while there may be some wine glasses almost as good, there aren’t any better. I also enjoy Dansk (which we use for our dinner parties), but my true favorites for everyday sipping are the Riedel “O” glasses; they are perfect for casual-and not so casual- company, and they work great for the hottub!

I’ve already mentioned before about the airator by Air au Vin (www.winebreather.com), and of course having a good crystal decanter or two to decant your vintage wines into is a must, but I think you’ve got the idea.

I’m always willing to help out, so when you’re ready, give me a call, and I’ll come by and help you test it all out with you! Until then,

Cheers!

Wine Club Insider out!

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Wine Club Insider (the blogger formerly known as “WCI!”) here again!

So, you’ve built your new cellar, got your shelves installed, and your ready to open all of the cases of your wine club collection and put them away for years of perfect aging, but before you do, you really need to come up with a system to keep track of what you’ve got, where you got it, how much you paid for it, and where it is.

Trust me.

If you’re planning on collecting more than a couple hundred bottles (which can happen pretty quickly when you belong to a few nice wine clubs, and when people are giving you wine club gifts) this becomes increasingly important for a number of reasons.

The most important reason is because, except for a very few rare vintages, wine doesn’t last forever. As I emntioned earlier, wine is a living, growing thing, and like most living things, it will reach a point where it will pass its prime, and start heading downhill.

Now, personally, I love old wines, but there’s a tendency to “forget” about some of the well-stored bottles of vintage vino in your wine cellar, and next thing you know, your bottle of 1994 Napa nectar is on its way out.

I also like to have a reminder of where and when I got a bottle of wine, or if it was a wine club gift. I also like (and this is really important!) is that it gives you a record for insurance purposes, in case of a fire or other disaster.

My product of choice is actually the wine collection database template available with Microsoft Office Access. Yup. Microsoft.

I downloaded the basic wine club template, and within a 1/2 hour, I was up and going. Okay, by then I did have over 1800 bottles, so it took me three days to input everything, and get it organized, but it was kind of fun playing. I mean, wine is one of the only hobbies where to play with your collection negates its value… hey, while you can drive your vintage car, no one is going to give you $300 for an empty bottle of Opus.

After you’ve got your wine club collection entered in the computer, another good idea is to use neck tags when you put them on the shelf. These are available from several sites. I got mine from www.iwa.com.

Organized? Excellent! Next time we’ll talk a bit about the glasses and other necessities you will need to properly finish out your perfect wine cellar!

Cheers,

Wine Club Insider, out!

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WCI back!

Okay, so now we’re all members of a bunch of great wine clubs, and our collections are building up. The small racks we bought are filled, there’re a couple of cases on the floor, and a bunch more bottles on a shelf in the basement…

My friends, the time has come to start considering a real wine cellar!

There are several ways to go about starting your own cellar, ranging from digging your own basement if you live in parts of California, to converting the small spare room. No matter which way you choose to go, there are a couple of constants that you should be aware of.

The first constant is Constant Temperature. Besides regularly shaking your bottles around, this is one of the things that can damage a nice bottle fastest. Wine is a living, growing thing; unlike whiskey or other spirits that stop aging as soon as they hit the bottle, wine continues to grow, mature, and (hopefully!) improve as it sits in the barrel and then in the bottle, and it likes being stored at a relatively cool, constant temperature.

Somewhere between 55 and 60 degrees is considered just about optimal, which coincidentally matches up with the temperatures in the wine caves in France… hmm… imagine that!

The next constant is Constant Humidity. Low humidity can increase the evaporation of the wine, and most importantly, can damage the cork, which is a really really bad thing.

The third constant is constant light. Natural and fluorescent light both give off significant amounts of ultra-violet radiation, which degrade the otherwise stable organic compounds in the wine,

Okay… we want cool, moist and dark. What’s next? Oh, where do I begin? Building a cellar can be one of the most rewarding things you’ll ever do, and we’ve got a few days worth of work to do, so that you can safely and happily store the fruits of your wine clubs, and your wine club gifts!

See you tomorrow!

Cheers,

WCI

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Welcome back!

WCI here, and we pick up our journey into the joys of wine clubs and all things wine!

So, there I was, my first shipment long since drank, eagerly awaiting my next shipment, wondering what I was going to drink for the next month, when I read a little tidbit on the bottom of the info sheet: “Wine Club Members (That was me! I was a member!) can order additional quantities of these wines at discounted prices…” or something like that.

Now, the white wine was okay, but I was already showing a (sadly uninformed!) inclination toward reds that would last for a few years, and that first red was awesome! And, at $11/bottle, it was by far the most expensive bottle I had ever drank. With my discount, I was able to get a half-case of this heavenly nectar for under $10/bottle. When it arrived, it actually created a small party, as I had to tell my wine-loving friends about this new fangled idea of wine club gifts.

Still, I was moving toward the half-bottle per day threshold, and now, not only did I want a few more bottles, I wanted some variety, too. Now, please remember that this was before the Internet was commonplace, and Google still hadn’t been imagined yet, so it wasn’t as easy as doing a search for “Wine Clubs…” this was actually going to take some work. Now, you can go to sites like www.wineclubgift.org, but back then, it took a little more leg work.

Next step, finding some people who knew something about wine. Luckily this didn’t prove too difficult, and, as funny as it sounds, I discovered that many of these folks enjoyed talking about wine! One of my first mentors was Larry, who owned “Lorenzo’s Italian Bistro and Bakery,” and he had a sizeable wine collection. Now, I had an actual store to buy wine at, where I could actually hold the bottles, and while there was something neat about the bottle-fondling, having the wine brought to me had a strange allure.

Luckily, Larry wasn’t a jealous wine-seller, and let me in on another couple of clubs he belonged to: The California Wine Club (www.cawineclub.com), which offered Italian wines as well as “upscale” California wines from some then-little known wineries, such as Robert Sinskey, Heitz and others.

He also introduced me to Sterling Wine Cellar’s wine club (www.SterlingVineyards.com), which was my first experience with a wine club owned by a single winery, and boy, I thought the world of wine was at my fingers before… my journey was just beginning!

Until next time as we meet on the dusty wine roads,

Cheers,

WCI

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Ho, ho , ho… your humble Wine Club Insider (WCI) here to share the joys of the fruits of the grape! As Ben Franklin so aptly put it, “Wine is proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy,” and what better way to share that happiness than by giving some away, and saving a bit for ourselves as well?

I started collecting wine in the heady days of the mid-nineties, when anything “Cab” from California was seemingly blessed, and the cult wine prices hadn’t quite caught up yet. Those were the days when you could buy Silver Oak from the winery for $45, and Opus for $90, and keep the glass from your tastings!

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the fortune of living in Napa, but I still wanted my wine… Oh, what to do? Feeling like I was going to be forced into buying whatever limited supply my local grocer could procure, a dear friend shared a little secret with me… he belonged to a wine club.

What, pray tell, was that, I asked? As he explained, the doors flung wide, and the light shone through. A whole new world was opened up to me! It was truly a new concept, but, being a quick study, it didn’t take me long to warm to the idea.

As it was near Thanksgiving, the season of giving was upon us, and less than a week later, I received a deightful gift: my now-even-dearer friend had gifted me with a six-month subscription to his favorite wine club, and my love affair with “wine at my door” had begun.

I was still working only on theory, but on December 18, my first shipment of wine–one white and one red–arrived on my doorstep. That wine club gift proved to be a life changing one for me. It started the growth of my 1400 label (and still growing!) wine cellar, and led me along a delightful (and still on-going!) love affair with everything wine… varietals, wine storage, wine pairings, wine tasting, wine making, wine tours… even wine glasses, wine barrels and wine labels!

It also led me to follow my passion with food, and I channeled my “native ability” with cooking, and became a gourmet chef, giving me the perfect opportunity to share two of the joys of my life; food and wine, with my friends, and now, I am looking forward to sharing this passion with you through Wine Club Journal.

We’re going to look at wine clubs, and everything else wine over the next few weeks, and I hope you’ll join me for the ride!

See you tomorrow!

Cheers,

WCI

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