Five Tips for Buying Wine Online
Whatever your reason for shopping online, we think it is time to update the wine buying advice to an increasingly virtual world. So here are my five tips on how to shop for wines online.
The Ultimate Guide to Sancerre, Part 3: Kimmeridgian Limestone
Perhaps no other soil holds as much appeal to terroir-focused wine drinkers as Kimmeridgian limestone. It's a key ingredient in all the Grands Crus of Chablis and many of the greatest Champagnes of the Côtes des Blancs. You also find it in Sancerre.
Our Complete Guide to Madeira: Bottled History
Madeira is a wine of history, made by mistake and crafted by circumstance. With the ability to last for hundreds of years, sometimes it is, quite literally, bottled history. It’s a region whose great fortune was mirrored in its near extinction. Now these singular wines and their makers are experiencing a resurgence into the hearts and glasses of wine drinkers on the hunt for the authentic.
The Ultimate Guide to Sancerre, Part Two: Silex
To get a better look at the terrors of Sancerre, there's no better place to start than the flinty (aka "silex") soils on the eastern edges of Sancerre. This Q&A should give you a good idea what Sancerre on Silex is all about!
Ultimate Guide to the Terroir of Sancerre, Part One
Over the last several decades, the name Sancerre has become synonymous with premium dry white wine, making it the safe choice for consumers with no other requirements. As such, it's become one of wine's greatest hits, a wine region with nearly unparalleled brand recognition and customer devotion. This is fair, as virtually any Sancerre is taut, articulate, and often of reliably good quality.
Complete Guide to the Northern Rhone Wine Region
How to use this guide:
1. Read the previews of each blog post.
2. Click the title links to read the entire post.
3. Become an expert in the Northern Rhone.
4. Follow the links in each post to purchase some NR wines.
5. Become a lover of the Northern Rhone.
(It's that easy!)
The Ultimate Guide to Cornas
For years, Cornas was just another “value” village of the Northern Rhone, with a reputation more like St. Joseph, say, than Cote Rotie or Hermitage. It was deemed “rustic” and a source for “country” wine. Things have changed!
This is a story of a vicious cycle finally flipping a switch to become virtuous.
Flatiron's Ultimate Holiday Gift Guide
Welcome to our Holiday 2019 Gift Guide! Our goal is to alleviate some of the stress that holiday wine gifts can bring. Hopefully you can have some fun while choosing the perfect bottle for everyone on your list. We've got these lists split into three categories: Gifts for the Wine Geek, Gifts for the New (but interested!) Wine Drinker, and--my personal favorite--stocking stuffers.
Simple Guide to Hermitage Wine Region
Hermitage may be the greatest wine made from Syrah anywhere in the world. In this post, Jeff takes a close look at Hermitage, focusing on everything from its history and terroir, to its vineyard sites, top producers and more.
Rosé At Home: Taste With Us
We want to take a moment, as the holiday weekend dawns on us, to talk with you about how to organize an at-home tasting! There's no better way to experience wine than with friends. And there's no better time than...you guessed it....NOW!
Flatiron’s Rose FAQs: our simple guide to the best pink wines
What gives rosé wines their pink color?
Rosé is usually made with red-wine grapes, which have pigment in their skins.
All the color in rosé wines come from the skins of those grapes. (We’ll talk more about wine making later in this post.)
Well, is Rosé more like white wine or red wine?
While the color of rosé wines can run the gamut from almost white to light red, people tend to drink them more like white wines than red wines. We drink rosé with a chill (the exact serving temperature depends, as with red and white wines, on all the particulars). Like white wine, many rosés are perfect for outdoor, hot day drinking: that’s why they’re mainstays of seaside vacations.
Guide to the Northern Rhone
At Flatiron, in the shops and in our newsletter, we talk a lot about the Northern Rhone. We love it, and based on our sales, we’re pretty sure you do too. It’s also a personal interest of mine: this is a region that provides quite a lot of the wine that I drink and cellar. I’m definitely not special in this regard. I don’t think of myself as a trend-follower, but the Northern Rhone is definitely a trend. As a region it ranks up there with Burgundy and Piedmont as one of the wine regions that gets us wine folk most excited these days. If you haven’t paid attention to the region yet, it’s time to start.