Fun / Food and Drink /

Wine


Wine can be intriguing or just plain fun, a lifelong interest or an easy way to add depth to a good meal. But knowing, buying, storing, and drinking wine can be a challenge, since wine bottles sit mutely on the shelf, leaving you to do the work of determining the quality of their contents. And dealing with wine can be intimidating. The Web can help.

The Best

The Wine Home Page is a very good starting point for the wine aficionado. This Seattle-based home page is built around thumbnail pictures that link to notes on wines, information, interesting articles, and other offerings. The extensive tasting notes are written in language that will be familiar to veteran wine explorers but may bewilder neophytes; a forms option allows you to add your own notes. You can read an essay on oak or a FAQ (frequently asked questions) list on wine, take advantage of a fun opportunity to rate the work of well-known wine critic Robert Parker, peruse an interesting set of notes on Washington state wineries, and join a virtual tasting group. This last is an opportunity to try out wine tasting and then compare your comments to those of others; a good, low-risk way to start tasting wine. The Wine Home Page also offers links to a number of other wine-related pages.

Robin Garr writes about wine for Louisville Magazine. He wrote the wine column for The Louisville Times and The Courier-Journal for 10 years. His Wine Bargain Page is a good site if you're looking for a wine recommendation or information about a wine. Garr offers tasting notes and guides to good wines and bargains, all written to be accessible to those who aren't used to wine-speak. According to the banner, Garr will try to reply to questions about wine within 24 hours.

If you want to stay in touch with wines and winemaking in the U.S., American Wine on the Web is worth reading regularly. It's a semimonthly Internet wine magazine with this credo: "We believe that wine is an everyday drink with everyday food for everyday people, and that American wines are among the best in the world." AWW offers an eclectic mix of articles: "Rock and Roll in Sonoma" (subtitled "Huey Lewis, and more in the Valley of the Moon"), book, CD, and video reviews, suggestions on wine and food pairings, and reports of wine country happenings. The writing is good, though the articles are a bit short; photos and labels are interspersed. The pages are easy to navigate through, and the wine recommendations terse but interesting.

Virtual Vineyards is an on-line offering modeled on the chatty, informative newsletters sent out by so many small, knowledgeable wine merchants. This page is the work of Peter Granoff, a wine specialist in northern California. It offers interesting wines, well-priced sampler cases, and a number of discoveries you're likely never to have heard of. The design is a good one for Internet purchasing, with buttons next to each of the items making it easy to order. This is one of the few sites using Netscape's SSL encryption technology, which allows users of Netscape 1.1 to transmit encrypted credit card numbers. This is a wine newsletter that's about a lot more than just ordering wine.

If you can handle the challenge of red type against a cloud-motif background, the real value of vino.com is the Wine Net News newsletter. Its goal is to be an alternative to Robert Parker's newsletter and Wine Spectator. It succeeds; you'll find here a very broad range of knowledgeable one-paragraph comments on wines. Read on a regular basis, it's quite useful. Unfortunately, it's not easy to consult for reference, since individual wines aren't indexed. Three back issues are available. (Wine Net News' current issue is easier to read in a text version. Wine Net News welcomes reviewers.)

The Rest

Napa Valley Wineries, one of the links from the Napa Valley Home Page, offers a clickable map you can use to select wineries you'd like to know more about. You can also find wineries by production level, making it easy to search out the small guys, wineries off the beaten path, family-owned wineries, and producers of bubbly.

The SteveO's California Wine Touring is the noncommercial home page, put together by an enthusiast, of guides and tours. It has nice artwork and a long list of links to other wine pages.

The Grapevine is an Internet vendor based in California wine country. This page has lots of links to interesting wineries and events, with a Sonoma focus. Another collection of wine information is Wines on the Internet .

If you're looking for information on the wine of a particular region of the world, look at the best set of geographically indexed links, found on The World-Wide Web Virtual Library: Wine. Whether you seek Long Island or Croatia, there's a link here for you.

At Wines of Spain, you can get a thorough grounding in Spanish riojas, cavas from Penedes, and of course the sherry wines of the region around Jerez. You'll see good descriptions of the wines as well.

Evaton Online is the place to check if you're interested in Portuguese wines, including port. This company specializes in the sales and marketing of imported wines and spirits.

If American wines means only California and the Pacific Northwest to you, check out VineNet, which provides information on wineries, regular tastings, merchants, and events in Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. The listings are brief, usable mostly as pointers in planning a trip or calling for more information.

The World Wine Web Home Page is the home page of an informal wine-tasting gathering of students, faculty, and staff at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. This site offers a wine database of previous tastings. Unfortunately, the tasting notes aren't very accessible, and there are no overall rankings of the wines tasted.

If you're a Francophile, love French wines, or just want to test your French, check out the home page of Club Oenologie Francois Rabelais, a French wine-tasting organization.

The Burgundy Cellar World Wide Web Server has very interesting offers on burgundies and ports.

At Intellectics - Casa del Vino WorldWide Winery , you can get information about and order Austrian and central European wines.

by Alan Kay

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Internet Life Vol.1 No.1 Winter 1995