Food and wine pairing is not as hard as you think. Here a few tips to help get you started:

1. Don’t Worry About the Color of the Meat! It’s often said white meats must be paired with white wine, and red meats with red wine. Not so. Instead, think about the dish as a whole. Chicken served with a flavorful tomato-based sauce,  or BBQ and spicy chicken, go perfectly well with a lighter red wine like Zinfandel, or Pinot Noir.

2. Balance the weights of food and wine! The style and weight of the wine and food should match! This means simply that neither should overwhelm the other. For example, a robust, rich Cabernet will go well with a hearty New York Steak, whereas lighter dishes like fish will go well with delicate wines, like Chardonnay.

3. Don’t Be Afraid of Acidity! Acidic dishes will actually bring out the fruit in your wine, and the wine will in turn help frame the flavors of the dish. Spicy dishes work well with sweeter, low-alcohol wines like Riesling or Gewürztraminer, which can enhance the flavor of the dish without “fighting” it.

4. Consider the Most Prominent Flavor. For skilled pairings, consider the most dominant character of a dish. This tends to be the sauce, seasoning, or cooking method rather than the main ingredient – just think about all the different ways you can cook and season a chicken!

5. Experiment! Many beginning wine drinkers assume that there’s only one good pairing for a certain wine or dish. In fact there are many different possibilities, so don’t be afraid to try new combinations until you find one you like.

6. It’s Up to You! The best news is that when it comes to pairing wine and food, the true right answer is up to you. You have a unique palette that prefers certain flavors over others; it’s likely that the flavors you like will pair together well. So drink and eat the wine/food combinations that you enjoy most!

Mendocino
Lake County
The Sierra Foothills
Napa Valley
Sonoma County
Carneros
The Livermore Valley
The Northern Central Coast
The Middle and Southern Central Coast

For a wine to be at its absolute best when opened, it must be stored properly. The most serious enemies of wine are prolonged contact with air, extreme heat or cold, radical fluctuations in temperature, physical vibration, exposure to sunlight, and strong odors.

Therefore, wine is best stored under the following conditions:

1. A very cool environment. The ideal temperature for wine remains about 55° F. But regardless of cost, wine stored at between 40°-70° F. is fine, as long as the temperature doesn’t fluctuate too severely. The higher the storage temperature, the faster the wine will age, as higher temperatures increase the rate of oxidation.

2. In a dark, insulated and temperature-controlled room, each bottle should lay on its side, or upside down (but not standing upright). This will keep the cork moist, and prevent it from shrinking. A shrunken cork allows air to slip into the bottle, oxidizing the wine.

3. Banish direct sunlight from your wine storage! Ultraviolet light from sunlight causes free radicals to develop in wine, resulting in rapid oxidation.

Contact with air, or “oxidation,” spoils wine. It’s caused when a wine has been open too long, has an ill-fitting cork, or has simply grown too old. Oxidation is easy to spot; the wine will have a sherry-like smell, and will taste dull and lifeless. Red wines will have turned dull brown in color, and White wines will have turned a tawny or brown color.

An excellent question! Those boxes are specifically designed to attract bluebirds and owls, in the hope that these species will make their nests in and around vineyards. Why these two species? Because bluebirds eat precisely those insects that pray on grapevines. Owls, by comparison, help control the populations of rodents and gophers that can wreak havoc on grapevine roots, as well as plaguing the vines and grapes themselves. The natural protection of pest-eating birds makes for healthier vine-growing.  It is also vineyard management with an eye toward protecting precious wildlife.

The fastest method of chilling wine to put it in an ice bucket filled half with ice and half with cold water. Chilling wine this way takes about half the time of chilling it in a bucketful of ice alone. The bucket must be deep enough so that the bottle can be submerged to its neck in the icewater bath.

Here some guidelines for chilling wines that start from a warm room temperature, using an icewater bath:

- Chill red wines for about 5 minutes.
- Chill super-fruity red wine, such as Beaujolais, for about 15 minutes.
- Chill white wines from 15 to 25 minutes.
- Chill Champagne and sparkling wines for about 30 minutes.