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 ...