Vineyard Wine Shop

A wine bar in a vineyard wine shop is very different from a restaurant or bar that charges a corkage fee. Just the idea of looking for the different selections in a wine shop is sure to spark interesting conversations with a well-versed merchant. If you are looking for that bottle of wine for a special ocassion or the mature wine to keep in your little cellar, undoubtedly, a wine shop is the place chosen to buy it.

Wine

The wine vineyard shops that I have been to have employees who are knowledgeable and helpful, and above all enthusiastic and can generally give you tips on different wines to buy. Wine doesn't have to be priced in the stratosphere to be of outstanding quality. Wine Spectator has surely rated thousands of wines between 84 and 93 points (usually accompanied by a one- or two-sentence-fragment “tasting note” so unhelpful and irrelevant to the wine that it’s no wonder most consumers’ eyes glaze over and only pay attention to the points). Wines will vary in price, anywhere from $6 to over $200, and of course they carry red, white, and pink wines, as well as champagne.

Tasting

Most vineyard wine shops offer wine tasting. Wine tasting is becoming more and more popular, and these events have a tendency to sell out early. Wine tasting is often more educational, not to mention fun, when enjoyed as a group. Wine tasting is all about completely cleaning and clearing the mind, palate, taste buds, septum and mouth in advance of experiencing the deep complexity, intricate and softly perceptible subtleties and essences of each wine. What unique pleasure do you experience as each wine aromatically allures your senses and seductively dances over your tongue?

Tasting wine is a different kind of thing: you’re focusing on the subtle flavours, aromas, and other characteristics that make one wine different from another. At a tasting whether at home or in a store, it’s best not to rinse your glass with water but to rinse with a tiny bit of the wine you’re about to taste. Of course, Tastings carries many traditional oakey chardonnays, but for hot days, unoaked chards and other white grapes will be lighter and, perhaps, more refreshing. If your curiosity can’t pass it by, just take a sip or two and then dump it; you don’t have to drink it, even if you have paid for the tasting. Also, after tasting a lot of different wines, they begin to taste the same and maybe even better than they really are.

Trying a new wine is really the same thing as tasting an unfamiliar food. Much has been written about blind tastings that reveal no correlation between price and taste. When tasting wine at a vineyard wine shop its helpful to have a good wine reference book handy to look up words on the label you don’t know and to reference the different varieties of wine.