There are two great reasons to be a wine lover in the Nashua area this week.
If you’ve read The Telegraph at all this week, you may have noticed several ads boasting the sale of a bottle of wine for $1.40 at the Coliseum Avenue liquore store Monday.
No, it’s not a bottle of junk wine they’re trying to get rid of. It’s a promotion for the Liquor Commission’s 75th anniversary.
The bottle is a 2005 Chateau de Macard Bordeaux.
I’ve written a few posts about the deals the Liquor Commission has been offering over the past couple of months, but this may be the best one yet. Check out the Saturday article in The Telegraph for more information. And make sure to get there early (and bring a few friends, since you can only get 1 bottle each). I don’t think supplies will last long.
The other deal is being offered by the Black Orchid Grille on Temple Street.
The restaurant is holding Wacky Wine Week from Aug. 16-21. Some bottles are being marked down to half-price. It’s a great opportunity to relax at the bar with a bottle or go for lunch or dinner. (Check out Michelle Collins’ post in Live Free or Dine about the food Black Orchid serves.
This fall, NH.com is throwing the first ever Wicked Wine and Brew Fest at Mel’s Funway Park in Litchfield. It’s being held Saturday, Sept. 12, from 2-7 p.m. and will feature wineries and breweries from New Hampshire and around New England. There will also be food, music and cool vendors to check out, and a portion of the proceeds will go to Meals on Wheels.
I’m particularly excited about this festival for two reasons: I don’t have to trek down to Boston, where most beer and wine festivals seem to be held, and it’s the start of fall, which means that hopefully there’ll be some fresh autumn-inspired brews and vintages to sample. I know it’s a bit early for pumpkin-flavored ales, but a girl can dream, right?
Other brewers that will be at Mel’s on Sept. 12 are Shipyard Brewing Co., Smuttynose Brewery and Woodstock Inn Brewery (plus more to be announced). And don’t forget about wineries: attending will be Candia Vineyards, Farnum Hill Ciders, Piscassic Pond Winery and Zorvino Vineyards.
As part of The Telegraph’s Marketing and Events Committee, I’m helping to plan, promote and put on this event. I think this is the event I’m most excited to be involved with, especially since I’m a homebrewer and regularly attend New England beer festivals. My favorite so far? Beer Summit’s Winter Jubilee in Boston. Definitely keep your eye out for when tickets go on sale in late fall.
Tickets for Wicked Wine and Brew Fest for adults 21 and older who will be sampling alcohol can be purchased in advance online or at The Telegraph’s office at 17 Executive Drive in Hudson for $20. For a limited time, when you buy tickets online, enter WWB09 at checkout and get $5 off each sampling ticket. The ticket price includes admission and unlimited sampling of beer and wine. And, the best part, the first 1,000 sampling tickets will receive a super-awesome sampling glass with our Wicked Wine and Brew Fest logo on it. Sweet!
The day of the event you can also purchase tickets for $20. We’ll also be selling tickets for designated drivers and ages 20 and younger for $5. Children 5 and younger are admitted for free.
Though a wine and brew festival isn’t exactly the event most people would bring their children to, this one is being held at Mel’s Funway Park, which has mini golf, battling cages and an arcade, so there’s plenty to do besides imbibe.
October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so drink up!
Almost every major company these days seems to have a line that donates proceeds toward the fight against breast cancer. Here’s another that’s joined in:
Photos of breast-cancer survivors adorn Cleavage Creek wine bottles. What a great idea!
Cleavage Creek Cellars is run by a California man, Budge Brown, who lost his wife of 48 years to breast cancer in 2005. He’s taken his anger and turned it into a line of wines, and he donates 10% of the sales toward research.
The line is now in its second year, with the second set having just been introduced this month. The new wines include a 2006 Reserve Napa Cabernet Sauvignon, a 2006 Reserve Napa Petite Sirah and a 2006 Reserve Cabernet-Sirah, as well as a 2006 Secret Red and a 2007 Secret White.
Each bottle of Cleavage Creek wine honors a breast-cancer survivor with a picture on the label. You can find their stories on the Cleavage Creek Web site.
To date, Cleavage Creek has donated more than $37,000 to research.
Know of any other wines or drinks that help out a good cause? Please share!
A few weeks ago, one of my friends invited me to Harvest Fest at Flag Hill Winery in Lee. I didn’t know much about it, but she said we’d get to work out in the winery all day (hmmm…) and then get free food (yay!). The second part of that sold me on it.
Well, that, and the fact that I’d be surrounded by wine all afternoon.
It was a little early to be out at the Seacoast around 9 a.m. last Saturday. But it was a gorgeous New England fall day. I caught up with friends in the registration tent, and I was surprised to see maybe a hundred or 200 people in the tent by the time the day was about to start. I bought my $6 T-shirt (really, you can’t go wrong at that price), gathered my pruning shears, and I was good to go.
The employees brought us to one area of grapes where we were asked to start shearing. We were each given bins to fill with grapes. (It’s a good thing I’ve been working on my arms at the gym — those things got heavy quickly!) With so many people and only so many rows of grapes, it was almost amusing to see people race around to try to grab at more grapes.
After we finished the first section of grapes, we moved onto another type, and then a third. The third section was the most difficult to get at, as there were more leaves covering the grapes, and some of the fruit didn’t look as good as the first two sections, so we were in that area the longest finding the perfect fruit.
The atmosphere was great. Most people were really friendly and having great conversation. It was a great day to get pictures with your friends in a casual, relaxing environment. Only a few louder noises were made when people accidentally got clipped with the pruning shears (yup, I injured myself) or were stung by bees (that was me, too!).
The couple hours we were out working went by quickly. I couldn’t believe we had finished in such a short amount of time. But it was almost lunchtime at that point. I could smell food, but wasn’t exactly sure what was coming out of the kitchen.
Everyone was also given a commemorative wine glass to mark their participation in the event. Here is one of ours filled with the raspberry wine. (Thanks for the photo, Jen!)
In the meantime, we did — what else? — sample some wine. It took me a while to make my decision from the wine list, as well as because I was silently poking fun at the people in line who were ordering beer. (Hello?! You’re at a winery. Get wine.) I chose a glass of the strawberry wine, and what a great choice! It was so light and fun to drink. My pals at the table had bought some bottles of wine, choosing the raspberry and apple. The raspberry was a close second to the strawberry in taste, and the apple wine was very subtle and could probably be paired with a better variety of foods.
Then the food was ready to be served. YES! The meal consisted of delicious homemade rolls, cole slaw, pasta salad, bone-in chicken, and beef carved by the chef. Now THAT’S what I’m talking about. And not only did we get to fill up our plates with that, we also were given a great selection to choose from for dessery. I chose a slice of raspberry cheesecake, while some others at my table opted for the pumpkin, which was fantastic!
The day ended just as casually as it started. I popped in the store again to bring home a bottle of strawberry wine (about $11) to enjoy later, and I was ready to go home and nap.
Flag Hill is beautiful. The owner mentioned that weddings are being done there. (Maybe I should have looked at Seacoast locations when I was deciding where to hold my own upcoming wedding!) It would be a great backdrop for wedding day photos, too. And it would be fun to offer guests local wine.
I’m excited to go to more of these events in the future. Do you have one to recommend? Please share!
Popping open a bottle of bubbly makes any night feel like a celebration. I think it’s the whole anticipation of the corking flying off the bottle (and hopefully you aim the bottle at something other than your rented apartment’s window… yikes…) and all those tiny bubbles flowing out the top.
So when I got my hands on a bottle of Barefoot Wine’s new Barefoot Bubbly Chardonnay champagne, I decided to pop the cork on a Thursday night mid-September. The occasion? A full moon? Spike was playing a marathon of “CSI” episodes I’d never seen? I didn’t burn my homemade macs and cheese? Sure! Cheers!
For those of us who have no idea what makes champagne a Chardonnay champagne and find the world of Champagne vs. champagne confusing, I consulted my favorite little wine book, appropriately called “The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Wine.” (Who you callin’ an idiot?) My pint-size guide says that because the bubbly isn’t from the northern French region of Champagne, it’s a sparking wine, denoted by the lower case “c” in “champagne.” Got it. And it’s called Chardonnay champagne, because Barefoot used Chardonnay grapes to make the wine.
It becomes bubbly through the method the vintner uses to carbonate the wine. In Barefoot’s case, they use the tank method or Charmat method (named for the French dude who discovered this nifty technique). I know this because it’s written right on the bottle (smart! I know). “The Guide to Wine” says that the wine is put into a pressurized tank, and yeast and sugar are added to provoke a second fermentation, which produces the bubbles. Then the bubbly is bottled under pressure to keep it bubbly. Apparently, this is the most popular way to make sparking wines, as it’s the most inexpensive, and the bubbles last the longest. Perfect for a winery that wants to produce an affordable, long-lasting champagne that can be stored on supermarket shelves.
So, now I’m sure you’re like, “Bla, bla, bla. WHAT DOES IT TASTE LIKE?”
I’ve tasted everything from Andre (three bottles for $4, baby!) to Dom Perignon. To me, it’s all drinkable, but not my first alcholic beverage choice. However, Barefoot’s sparking Chardonnay is so mild and subtly sweet, that I actually enjoyed drinking it for the flavor, not for the “let’s all drink Champagne”-feeling of camaraderie. It’s not dry at all or have that kick-you-in-the-taste buds tartness, and it tastes more like a champagne-flavored Cleary Canadian (you know, that fruit-flavored soda) than a bottle of bubbly. The after taste is really pleasant and smooth.
The bottle tells me that this sparkling wine has the flavors of green apples, pears and a hint of vanilla. I can taste everything but the vanilla, but perhaps that’s the ingredient that smooths out the tartness of apples and pears and makes it incredibly drinkable. This is the kind of treat I’d buy to go along with apples, grapes, Camembert and a chick-flick comedy.
