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Unique Services:

Wine Club including wine, a newsletter, dinners, and web forum.

Blast Fax/Email Service where we BlastFax or Email the newest and hottest wines that come into the market place. All you need do is be a regular customer and give us your Fax or Email number.

Delivery Service: In the central Ohio region we normally can offer two hour service to either home, caterer, or even your party. In Ohio, UPS normally gets you your wine within one to two business days. We will deliver throughout the United States according to local law.

Catering Firms: We will meet with you and/or your caterer when you have an event and will compute your beverage needs, and create a wine-menu. For this service there is no charge, and we will even deliver the wines right to the caterer's door.

Basically...Wine Excerpts:

Basically...Wine is book that takes a course approach to the basics of wine - its appreciation, enjoyment, and characteristics. This book, written by Roger Gentile, is over 134 pages and is tailored to the learning wine student covering such areas as regional laws, labels, grape types, wine types, and food affinities.

This is a must have book about wine which eliminates the mystique of this wonderful and healthful beverage. Chock full of wine information, and presented in an easy to read, and entertaining style.

Call us at (614) 891-3284. Price is only $24.99 plus tax.

What is Wine?

While I hate to burst the bubbles of the snobs, wine is ONLY processed grape juice. Instead of leaving the juice alone, some person, or even nature, introduces a bit of yeast, and another process begins which converts the sugar in the juice to alcohol. While most biochemists could duplicate this natural process in their laboratory, the results would never be the same. Sure, they could add water, yeast, acids, esters, minerals, alcohol, aldehydes, tannins, sugar, and about 300 other organic components that constitute wine, but they would never recreate the symphony of flavors that various wines can produce; nope, no way. For some reason, this beverage just never tastes the same out of a test tube as it does out of a barrel. If you don't believe me, try it. Even more proof, if it could be done well enough for the public to buy it, you can bet your grandmother's heirloom ring that some enterprising firm would try it.

After this process, known as fermentation, takes place, the winemaker (food processor) may filter it, bottle it, age it in wood, or let it lie in stainless steel tanks until the time for release. The type of wine determines how it is to be handled.

As wine is viewed as an agricultural product, some facts should be realized. Some microclimates (the total view of the growing area with factors such as temperature, waterfall, soil compensation, the land's lie in relationship to the sun) produce better wine than others, and some grapes grow better in one type of microclimate than others. This is a technical determination arrived at through experimentation, or comparing one unknown region to other known microclimates. Unlike corn or soybeans, the best tasting wines need slow, cooler growing climates, are usually on acres which are underplanted for maximum soil nourishment, and should be stressed for water. The wines from such grapes will have more intense flavors, albeit there will be less juice from which to make wine. The best analogy of this set of circumstances is frozen orange juice. If your parsimonious Aunt Hazel adds three cups of water to the frozen concentrate when two are the recommended amount, then your morning O.J. will taste diluted and weak. The fruit has been ameliorated to the point of being insipid. The same is true for wine. When the grapes get too much water, the wine's flavor is diluted, and vice versa.

One of the reasons that wine takes on an aura or mystique which is quite out of proportion to its substance is the terminology, much of it foisted by the obnoxious experts who try to use words that are above the layperson. Terms as "austere...pretentious...redolent...etc.," have little meaning to the chap who wants a wine to make his ham taste better. Such verbal wine upmanship is a waste of words because all we should really concern ourselves with is "Do I like it?" That is a function of the grape, how the wine is made, and the drinker.