Aaron A. Wallace

What is a super Tuscan wine? The quickest answer that I can give that is also correct is: A wine that is made in tuscany that doesn’t conform to the DOC or DOCG rules for Chianti or Chianti Classico. To go into more detail about the wines that make up the broader Super Tuscan style you have to know the history of Chianti. Until 1996 Chianti had to have at least 5-10% of white grapes in the wine. Currently Chianti and Chianti Classico must be at least 80% Sangiovese and up to 20% allowed red grapes. Any wine made in the Chianti region that doesn’t meet the grape composition that makes up the definition of Chianti can be a super tuscan. In the contemporary marketplace super tuscan has two meanings: one, the revered producers that played a role in changing the rules surrounding Chianti in the eighties and nineties bringing the wine into the modern era; and, two, any wine produced in the IGT toscana. Sassicia is an example of a classic wine first produced in 1968 with a blen...

In this video I discuss the many different types of wine that come out of the piedmont region of Italy this is a pretty big list of varieties and major regions. I think that it would make a lot of sense to break it up into three separate videos: Red, White, Sparkling.

Burgundy was my first love in the world of wine. I really liked the crisp clean citrus and green apple flavors of great steely inexpensive French Chardonnay. In this video I give a very basic overview of the way Burgundy is organized with regional appellations, village appellations, and single vineyards that have been declared premier and grand cru. I also talk about how the various winemakers and negociants have house styles that are apparent throughout the various levels of wine that the merchant produces. These videos where I start to discuss the various regions of famous wine producing countries really show the limitations of the very short youtube videos, to really explain a village in burgundy it will take many minutes just to list all of the various vineyards that have premier and grand cru status let alone to describe why they were elevated to that status.

This is a question I often spend time thinking about, having spent something like six hundred dollars on my various lapel pins occasionally I am up late at night thinking was it worth it. I think it was worth it, I know for a fact that I get interviews based on my experience and those certifications where I might not get those interviews without the certifications. I also know that I am the only person in the (very small) state of Delaware that directly interacts with the public with an advanced award from WSET. That translates into a lot of confidence on the sales floor and I think it really helps me sell the super premium and luxury bottles in my store.

I have always liked sailing ever since I spent a summer with my local sea scout troop, getting my small boat sailing merit badge in boy scouts and hanging around the Newport Beach Sea Base scouting facility pretty much continually until the siren song of teenage romance called me away. So lately I discovered the joys of sailing videos on YouTube and I started to read books about sailing originally I read books by solo circumnavigators such as Bernard  Moitessier's  The Long Way and John Kretschmer's books and then I discovered the historical fiction of the great age of sail by Patrick O'Brian. I still read a lot of nonfiction books by sailors but I absolutely devour the Aubrey/Maturin books, I dare anyone to stop after the third novel.

While I am not to happy with the video quality of this it does convey a truth that bourbon hunters need to know, buying fancy high end bourbon is mostly about building relationships with the stores that sell it. You are not going to have consistent luck with just calling all the stores within one hundred miles of your location and hoping to get bottles held for you. There is a whole world of less rare seventy five, one hundred and, one hundred and fifty dollar bottles of bourbon that stores have a difficult time selling because they just are not as rare and desirable as the buffalo trace offerings, the crazy thing is these other bourbons are also very good and pretty helpful to have around when you do have those super rare bottles, so you don't drink them! Those bottles let the clerk know who is serious about having a collection of rare and interesting bottles of bourbon and who is just looking to flip bottles that have serious grey market premiums. This notion of the grey (or...

Nemours Mansion and Garden is the largest french formal garden in America. It is located in New Castle County, Delaware. It is a former estate of the Duponts, and was built over 1909 -1910 for Alfred Dupont's Second wife Alicia. The estate is done in the Rococo Style of Louis XVI. If you like grand estates and the excesses of the original American Gilded age (which sadly I feel like we are entering into again) this is an amazing example of the gaudy excess of robber barons and Rail Tycoons. The Duponts made their fortune in the production of gunpowder I am glad that they plowed so much back into the community in the form of grand estates, many of the local cultural amenities are housed on their former homes. Nemours is pleasant since it is still so rarely visited almost all of the locals I have met have never been there, I want to get a season pass so I can go jogging on the nearly two mile paved path that follows the perimeter, in the spring and summer.

I suffer from a chronic autoimmune disorder called Ulcerative Colitis it causes inflammation of the lower intestines. Stress is likely the biggest trigger that I have but I need to keep a detailed food diary to try and track my symptoms moving forward and hopefully find out what sort of food triggers the condition so that I can avoid this outcome.

The Pinnacle Overlook in Holtwood, PA one of the most stunning views I have seen in the greater Delaware and Susquehanna Watersheds. This lake was created by the creation of the first hydroelectric dam on the river. I saw one fishing boat go around the wooded island while my family and I were eating a late lunch at the picnic tables. We should have gotten lunch here, in the heart of downtown Lancaster, this is about thirty minutes north of the Pinnacle overlook and a great place to get fixings for your picnic. We brought food from home since I couldn't remember what the make up of the stores was like. The Central market has a good mix of raw ingredients and prepared food. They have charcoal grills at the Overlook too so you can get really fancy if you want. Lots of good shopping in the immediate vicinity. This is the door to the Lancaster Visitor center the people who work here are very knowledgeable about the areas tourist attractions. I walked in and asked for a place wi...

As one of the oldest industrialized parts of America the rivers of wilmington need to be freed from literally centuries of dam construction. I can think of at least 5 partially ruined dams along the various creeks that feed into the brandywine, some of these dams are effective barriers to the various fish populations. I believe that without the dams that the quality of the riparian recreation will increase throughout New Castle County. 

I support Hillary Clinton for the Presidency of the United States of America! She is the only person running who is even remotely qualified and of the correct temperament to command the most powerful military the world has ever seen. I believe that she has learned her lessons from the adventurous and foolhardy interventions in Libya, and Iraq, I hope her eight years in office will be marked by a strong commitment to multilateralism and diplomacy.

Well at least I thought I might have injured my back but really it was just a pulled muscle and a few trips to a physical therapist they taught me a couple of stretches that really helped with the back pain and now I feel a hell of a lot better, plus I also learned a few occupational safety things, when I am doing inventory at the store I need to remember to work on both sides of my body, I lifted 50 pound boxes of wine on the left side of my body for four hours in a row and hey my left side hurt for two weeks, shocker, I also need to work on the right side, if I had used both sides evenly I doubt I would have hurt myself. This is a video I took at biddle point, it took about half hour to film, most of it was waiting for something to happen. It also proved to me that to get this shot I really need a camera more sophisticated than a galaxy note 4 cell phone to get a nice video of the sunset. Which neatly brings me to the desire portion of the title, I would love a decent point and...

I am starting to get an idea of what I want the VLOG portion of my youtube output to be, I still have long way to go when it comes to making content that I am really proud of but I am starting to feel around the edges and come to know the shape of the product I want. I am thinking that I need to research good stories about the places I walk through to tell my audience about. While I am doing a lot of these at the moment I am going to return to the stuff that is more directly related to my job soon enough. Next week I am going to be giving a speech about the london gin craze and an early attempt at prohibition. 

So what isn't talked about in this video is that I took the train up to philly to go to the vintage wine tasting, where I had a lot of fun, and drank too much. This is the great challenge at these big 'professional' wine tastings, they do provide spit buckets but you might not be able to get to them easily enough to make it seem like spitting (while the right thing to do) is too difficult. So hopefully my liquor store is going to be the exclusive source of white girl rose in Delaware. I can't believe that wine brand didn't make a bigger splash here but then I am also not surprised since I am maybe the second youngest wine buyer in the state.

This is a photo of the Washington Street bridge and the Brandywine Creek in downtown Wilmington Delaware. I went down to the creek to shoot a youtube video, and I was successful in that but I did realize that I cannot just go and wing these walk and talks. I need to come up with a plan and then execute it I only managed to get a 2:45 video out of a hour long walk and at least 20 mins of raw footage. I am starting to get better at the filming portion of the skill but I still need to pause more between expressed ideas I talk at about the right speed maybe I could get a hair faster, but I need to figure out how to have a coherent topic and perhaps even a structure to the discussion. Hopefully, by this time next year an hour long walk will make at least a ten minute video.

Delaware is blessed with quite a bit of revolutionary history that is still largely intact and if you look in certain directions you can be transported back to the days of General Washington and Lafayette and the American Revolution. Sadly much of the riparian wilderness is deeply impacted by suburbanization and industrial development, directly behind the tree lined riverbank to the left are office buildings and industrial sites ranging from a lumbar yard to car repair. The house itself is hard to take a good photo of since it is maybe 10 feet from this section of the old capitol trail road and is about half a mile from an abandoned bridge and what looks like on google maps to be either some pretty built up squats or old houses without street access any longer, which is a shame this place could make the start of a very nice park. This region of Delaware, Stanton, seems to be one of the more interesting places, with lots of little out of the way corners, old houses, blue and brown ro...

This is a basic overview of the differences between Champagne (sparkingly wine from a protected place with a specified method in the north of france) and sparkling wine (which can be made anywhere in a variety of methods). The major French champagne houses have property in America and produce great sparkling wine at about half the cost of their French bottles. One of the defining characteristics of champagne is that the secondary fermentation takes place in the bottle that it is sold to you in.

A first attempt at a Southern Rhone River Valley Primer, I cover the names of the most important AOC and I talk about the permitted cepage of the region. I speak a little too fast to get anything across rather than Chateauneuf Du Pape is the best AOC in the region and the style is red fruit with varying degrees of bramble, and dried fruit aromas with balanced medium plus acidity and tannins. Uniformly a good value French, wine across a multitude of price points versatile with american food.

This is a pretty dense video where I talk about the legal definition of Cognac. Cognac is a spirit distilled from wine, where that wine is sourced from a particular region of France. The three basic age statements of bottled Cognac; VS or Very Special is two years in cask, VSOP or Very Special Old Pale with four years in cask and XO or Extra Old at six years of cask aging. The Fine Champagne class of Cognac has fifty-one percent of its wine sourced from Grand Champagne, a subregion exclusively for the production of Cognac to the northwest of Bordeaux, the remainder must be sourced from the surrounding Petite Champagne. Brandy is spirits produced from wine that is not from the Cognac region of France.

This is a little video I took of the Battery Park area of Historic Old New Castle. This is actually two trips on the same day once for lunch and again at sunset to go for a walk, this is a about a fifteen minute drive from our front door without traffic. Someday I would like to go before sunrise, I think as we get further into late summer and early fall I will have the opportunity to go take that video. A paved walkway stretches off a few miles to the south along the Delaware River ending before Army Creek, it branches off to a few other off-road bike and walking trails in southern New Castle County.

A quick overview of bourbon with the legal definition of what Straight Bourbon Whiskey is (two years in new charred oak cask) I also talk about the maximum proof that bourbon can be distilled to and that the mash bill must contain at least fifty one percent Corn. To be called Kentucky or Tennessee bourbon it has to be made in the geographically designated area and it has to conform to the traditional production method of the region, maple charcoal filtration in the case of Tennessee Bourbon Whiskey.

I cover in this video three major styles of IPA and various sub styles that are popular in the American Craft Beer scene in the Summer of 2016. I talk about west coast, and east coast styles and I also mention belgium, black and imperial stylings of India Pale Ale.

I went on a walk on the Fourth of July, along the old creek road which I got to from the Rocky Run gate to Brandywine State park. This a good gate since it drops you off at the top of the valley and if you follow the path to the brandywine river you are roughly in the middle of the path along the river. if you turn right you have about a mile walk to the smith bridge parking lot and a walkway under Smith bridge road and onto the woodlawn property. As this all gets absorbed into the First State National Park hopefully there will be more money for trail development. You can easily put together walks of three miles to a dozen miles on the combined trails that make up Brandywine creek and Woodlawn. We got out early enough in the day that it wasn't oppressively hot but the grade at the beginning and end made it a bit of a slog.

Bordeaux is the classic French homeland of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. Some of the most expensive and longest lasting wines in the world exist here. Many perfect scores from wine reviewers as well, Robert Parker's championing of the 1982 left bank vintage made his career. In this video I give an overview of the three major regions of Bordeaux. Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc, are the principal grapes of the Graves and Pessac-Leognan regions. Saturens makes a famous dessert wine with Semillon and the process of noble rot.

The Loire Valley is a diverse and giant french wine growing region. Consisting of four major zones: Central Vineyards, Tours, Anjou, Pays Nantais, each producing their own wines of note. From continental to maritime climate and a multitude of soil types the Loire valley produces an immense diversity of wine.

On a Rare Friday off, August fifth, 2016, Christine and I went on a road trip to Turkey Point Lighthouse at the end of Elk Neck in Maryland. To access the lighthouse you have to drive to the end of state route 272 in Maryland which is about an hour drive (forty miles) away from Wilmington, Delaware. This is a great location to do drone filming and the walk is pretty easy and just under a mile, they even have two chemical toilets out by the lighthouse. We had to hustle to get to the lighthouse with usable sun, I am looking forward to going back in the fall, hopefully by then I will take some video and also not have to rush so much. There is a small path that leads off the western end of the lighthouse's meadow this leads down to the waters edge and back to the main trail, there are maybe three or four well secluded spots that were occupied by couples as Christine and I walked back to the car having lost the light for Cell Phone photography. When I get more video equipment I thin...

The lush rolling limestone hills of the Macon form a natural interlude between the Cote d’Or and its satellite the Cote Chalonnaise. As in the Cote d’Or the white grape is Chardonnay, while the Red grape can be either Gamay, or Pinot Noir. The more serious wines are produced to the south of the region under the appellation Pouilly-Fuisse and its satellites.The wine is classified in three broad tiers: Macon, Macon-Villages, and Pouilly-Fuisse and its satellites.

In a store like mine that does pretty significant volume you are going to see some pretty strange behaviors by customers in the process of buying their beer, wine, and spirits. One of my pet peeves (of which I honestly have too many) is customers who would rather not ask a member of staff but would rather search around the interior of the beer cooler (or even the back of the store) looking for their product. I also often get asked; will this beer go bad if I let it get warm? I tell people that unless they are going to get the beer very hot they won't change the flavor of the beer. Light is a bigger source of off flavors than heat you would find comfortable. This blog post has given me an idea I can't do too many of these, since I am sure to offend a customer eventfully, and no amount of youtube fun is worth that drama. Post your opinion should I do wine and spirit strangeness or should I private these videos and only link to them here to spare the sensibilities of my c...

In this six hundred page tome you encounter an encyclopedic examination of the entirety of french winemaking in the year 2000. One might think that that wouldn't be enough room to cover all of france but Mr. Coates does a great job. The book is divided into eleven sections with forty maps The maps are some of the best I have seen covering the wine regions of france and they also show the locations of famous estates. One of the ways I like to solidify my knowledge of wine regions is to trace maps so that I can really spend some time getting immersed in the geography of the region.

So far I have made two videos about Chianti The first one talks about Sangiovese the principal grape of Chianti and that it can be found in a multitude of named regions in Italy. Sangiovese is the main grape in: Chianti, Brunello, Morellino di Scansano, and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano. Each of these regions has its own typical style and the geography of each region plays a part in the resulting wine.

In this video, I state a portion of the legal definition of Scotch. Scotch is a whiskey made in Scotland that has been aged in cask for at least three years. Single Malt Scotch is made exclusively from malted barley at a single distillery. I also give an overview of the four broadest scotch regions: Lowland, Highland, Speyside, and Island.

German Riesling is my favorite white wine, I will always have a spot in my heart for white burgundy but I can afford to drink much more prestigious vineyard sites from more prestigious winemakers. That and that an off dry lower alcohol wine is conducive to getting up earlier in the morning and having a life outside of work (I close the liquor store I work at). In this video I talk about the german ripeness classifications that appear on wine bottles. There are two broad categories (qualitatswein, and pradikatswein) qualitatswein is wine where sugar can be added to the unfermented grape juice to increase potential alcohol, and pradikatswein cannot have added sugar. There are great examples from both categories of wine.

In this video I talk about Red Burgundy for cooking. Often people are looking at (older) recipes that call for red burgundy in the ingredients, and then when I show them the red burgundy in the store the sticker shock is palpable. If the customer never asks for help they often end up buying a bottle of Carlo Rossi Burgundy which is about as far away from Pinot Noir as you can get in the wine shop. This video tries to help explain what red burgundy means and your options for finding a suitable wine for cooking.

I have been making youtube videos for the last few months. These are simple short information packed videos about topics in wine beer and spirits. I don't have any fancy equipment most of these have been shot on a ten dollar Joby smart phone clip attached to my six foot tall cat tree, others filmed by my long suffering wife standing on a coffee table. I occasionally try to do more traditional vlogs where I talk about something in my life but I am still just barely getting comfortable in front of the camera, and I haven't figured out how to frame my daily life in an interesting enough manner. Though as I have time and my health permits I am going to continue this creative outlet. I really enjoy writing the scripts and talking about the products I sell at work. Here is a link to my youtube channel. https://www.youtube.com/user/awallace230

This is going to be my personal blog that is going to serve as a place where I can post all of my digital content that I have created, even if that content appears elsewhere. I have spent the last few years becoming credentialed in the Wine and Spirit industry most recently passing the WSET Level Three Award. I believe I am the only person in the state of Delaware that works with the public that has that distinction. I have a multitude of interests, I try to closely follow world current events, domestic politics, I love long walks on the beach at sunset, but who doesn't.