Storefront of Perry’s Fine Wine and Liquors in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Walking down Provincetown’s bustling Commercial Street is entertainment in and of itself. On any given day in the Cape Cod beach town’s busy summer season, you’re apt to see kids with dripping ice cream cones, gay and lesbian couples holding hands, and maybe even a drag queen posing for pictures and inviting you to purchase tickets to their show. Walking toward the town’s West End, the street’s ample collection of bars, restaurants, clothing stores, and art galleries thin out and transition into a quieter section of pi ..read more

Tasting flight on the outdoor patio at King Family Vineyards With an itch for a change in scenery, we recently planned a long weekend getaway to Charlottesville, Virginia. We first visited Charlottesville several years back to tour Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and we found ourselves charmed by the small city’s mix of history and college town life fueled by the University of Virginia. Add in some award-winning wineries with views of the Blue Ridge Mountains and what’s not to love? The drive to Charlottesville from DC is a about two and a half hours, and it becomes rather scenic after getting ..read more

As any chef will tell you, better ingredients yield better dishes. The same is true with cocktails, starting with the base spirit. Looking at rum in particular, if you’re aiming to step up your cocktail game, the stuff used to accompany bright-colored sugary slush on spring break is not the rum you’ll want to use to stock your home bar. We recently had the pleasure of trying Ten To One’s white and dark rums. The white rum is smooth, clean and a touch floral—perfect for a classic daiquiri, one of our favorite cocktails. Done right, they’re sweet and sour, but not overpoweringly so. The drink’s ..read more

Inside Grand Cata’s Shaw wine shop. Like many Washingtonians, Pedro Rodriguez and Julio Robledo moved to the city for work. In their case it was to work at a media development non-profit, where they met and became friends. As their friendship developed they began talking seriously about what both had discovered their true passion to be: wine. Julio made the jump first, taking a job working for a wine wholesaler/importer, followed by Pedro who began working at a local wine retail shop. Their goal was to get to know all aspects of the business before making the even bigger leap of opening their ..read more

Source: Virginia Wine, https://www.virginiawine.org/governors-cup/awards Last night the Virginia Governor’s Cup was awarded to Barboursville Vineyards for their 2015 Paxxito dessert wine, which is made from hand-picked grapes that are air-dried for up to 120 days before being crushed and pressed. The Governor’s Cup is the most prestigious annual wine competition for Virginia wine, with the winner having been selected from more than 500 submitted wines from upwards of 100 Virginia wineries. The competition begins with each wine being tasted by seven judges over a ten-day period. The judges scor ..read more

As we ready our Champagne flutes to toast the new year, we thought today would be the perfect occasion to provide a quick overview of sparkling wine. How it’s Made There are several techniques for making sparkling wine, depending on the region and the overall quality attempting to be achieved. The traditional method starts with bottling a dry, still, high acid and low alcohol wine. From there, a second fermentation occurs in the bottle itself, with the addition of yeast and sugar. As fermentation occurs, the yeast cells die, releasing the compounds that provide the toasty and nutty flavors sp ..read more

With the holiday season upon us, we thought it would be fun to do some experimenting and create a new seasonal cocktail. As the gatherings we’d all normally be filling our December calendars with probably won’t be happening this year, we figured it’ll be extra important to find ways to get in a celebratory mood. So without further ado, we present “The Winter Bloom.” It’s a floral and herbal concoction with some winter citrus flavors and a touch of sweetness that would be perfect to serve to friends at a holiday party. Or more realistically for 2020, you can whip it up for yourself to enjoy on ..read more

Learning about wines and discovering the ones you like among the myriad of options is an adventure unique to the contours of your palate. While discovering which wines please your taste buds most is fun, with so many options to choose from it can also be a bit daunting. So to cut down on some of the complexity, we thought we’d focus this post on two red wines and two white wines that are called different things, but are actually the same. By shrinking the world of wine down just a little, hopefully it will seem more manageable. The Reds Syrah/Shiraz Put simply, Syrah is the name used in the ..read more

Like kids who look forward to the loot of candy they’ll collect trick-or-treating, every fall we get excited about pumpkin ale season. With their warm orange colors and autumnal spices, a good pumpkin ale is like fall in a glass. Like the hundreds of pumpkin-flavored products that line supermarket shelves, some pumpkin beers are more about marketing than anything else, but there are also some savory gems that truly stand out. Pumpkins have a long history when it comes to American beer, having been used as a substitute for the barley colonists had greater access to on the other side of the pon ..read more

Fall is in the air in the Mid-Atlantic region of the country. Leaves are beginning to change, pumpkins adorn porches, darkness falls earlier, and there’s a chill in the air most mornings. October is also officially Wine Month in the Commonwealth of Virginia, which made a Saturday afternoon trip to Linden Vineyards particularly fitting. After clearing the DC suburbs, the 60 mile drive out to Linden on Route 66 is a pretty one, with a landscape of rolling hills and old horse farms. The windy road up to Linden Vineyards sets the pastoral scene for the view that awaits from the deck of the winery ..read more