Aaron A. Wallace

The Right Bank of Bordeaux is the spiritual homeland of merlot in france. The wines of Pomerol and St. Emilion are famous for their long lives and intense flavors. The satellites of Pomerol and St. Emilion Along with Canon-Fronsac and Fronsac are known for their respective value. The wines of Pomerol tend to be the most expensive since so many of the Chateau are very small and scarcity drives up the value of the wine.

I constantly have to convince people that there is a world of really good sweet wine out there. Moscato D' Asti and Riesling being the easiest two examples since a lot of people already drink sweet plonk it is easy to convert them to better examples. If you see a person buying still moscato (pretty much any magnum bottle) you can be confident that if you put a bottle of Moscato d'Asti in their hands that about half of the customers will never go back to the still. Reisling is a little different, the low acid style that you see in a lot of premium priced rieslings is compelling to many customers and the high acid style from Germany and Alsace. I do have some success with the medium sweet german wines, but those have a lot more to do with explaining the providence of the wines to customers. The fact that excellent examples of famous german vineyards can be sourced for less than twenty dollars retail helps, when you can paint the picture of the steep vineyard behind the church o...

This is my very quick video that gives a rundown of the major styles of Valpolicella wine: Amarone, Ripasso, and plain Valpolicella. It is nice to get back into recording YouTube videos and I am going to try and get at least another couple up this week and hopefully make accompaning blog posts like this one for each of those videos. I really like Valpolicella as a versatile red wine from Italy with a fuller less acidic wine than Chianti these wines do very well with rich tomato based food and also can stand up to steaks and other wines that you want a rich food bodied wine to go along with. Tart cherries dominate in the nose and palette, they are all full bodied wines but the Amarone can be described very easily as giant. The appasimento process that Amarone uses to dry the grapes before vinification results in a wine with a coating mouth-feel and high alcohol. The style is still evolving and examples from the 60s 70s will be different then bottles from the 80s and 90s and those ...

I am starting a project on american wine region videos and I am going to have to see if there is anything I can do to make the videos more interesting then me staring into a camera talking. I can now incorporate still images into my videos, I haven't figured out a solution for animations yet, but when I do I think that will be the natural evolution of the channel. Then I can get a script and a microphone, and really cut up the audio, so I don't sound like the stuttering mess I am.

So yeah I got hospitalized again (last time was three years ago) for my Ulcerative Colitis in November which isn't how I want to spend a week in the busiest time of year for the liquor industry. I started to have my flare up when my parents came to visit, in October and I barely kept it together for the month that it took me to check all the boxes to get admitted to the hospital. Though at least now I know how it needs to proceed in case this ever happens again. The moment I start to think that it is a real flare up I need to start making appointments with the GI doctor and not think that if I control my diet I can get back to something like normalcy. I ended up on a new biological medication remicade which is shockingly expensive but thankfully I have real cadillac insurance through work so I am okay with the fact that each dose of my medication is twenty thousand dollars and I need six doses a year, hopefully with the repeal of the ACA I won't end up on a plan with a lif...

In this little video I talk about the left bank of Bordeaux. Medoc and Haut-Medoc contain some of the most desirable wines in the world and is the spiritual home of Cabernet Sauvignon, though many of the wines blend in Merlot and Cabernet Franc. The greatest of these wines can live in a well stored bottle for fifty years or more. The wines of Bordeaux have great examples in all of the various retail price points so just because mere mortals can't afford a bottle of Chateau Margaux doesn't mean you shouldn't try the ten twenty and thirty dollar bottles from the region.