Wine Wednesday: Tips

By Carrie Becker in Food on Dec 16, 2009 7:00PM

We love tasting menus and family style meals. In fact, we think this is a great way to sample a chef’s talent but also learn more about wine pairings. At a recent trip to TRU, the sommelier paired one of the most complex, multi-personality Sauvignon Blancs we have had in a long time. The 2006 Movia Sauvignon Blanc was paired with a sautéed sable in a brown butter sauce. Every sip with every bite seemed to change and all in a good way. This is definitely a ‘Wine Wednesday’ pick to mull over a few different small bites.

One issue we do have with some wine menus, either paired with a tasting menu or not, is the ease of picking up a bottle at retail. For instance, we asked around for this funky, cool Movia but no one had it on hand and a few offered to try and get it in stock. For sourcing problems like these, we turn to two great resources for locating and buying wine online, snooth.com and winelibrary.com.

Snooth.com searches their massive wine database to find where your bottle may be sold nearby or can be purchased online. In addition, the site offers reviews, recipes ideas and a great social network of wine enthusiasts.

WineLibrary.com has received great acclaim not only for their comprehensive library of wines but also for their founder, Gary Vaynerchuck. Gary takes a unique approach to critiquing wine and finds some out their pairings to try via his online web chat, Wine Library TV, think Cocoa Pebbles and Syrah. He can be a bit polarizing to those wine lovers but he is definitely worth a watch to hear his knowledgeable yet crazy point of view.