Aaron A. Wallace

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.