Wine For Newbies

Alder over at Vinography wishes someone would stop the madness.

This is rather cool: Enobytes has put together a small compilation of wine regions that you can visit using Google Earth.

Benito has a different take on how to pick wines for the Thanksgiving dinner. While it lacks the coolness of a free PDF download it is full of good advice.

Good Wine For Under $20 is an outstanding resource for anyone looking to get the best bang for the buck in wine. Like many others, I’ve tightened my wine budget recently, and thus Good Wine For Under $20 is quickly becoming must-read material.

To all those in government and business who helped trash the economy (regardless of party affiliation–plenty of blame to go around), thanks for nothing.

I need to make sure people understand–while it’s fine to subscribe to this site’s RSS feed, doing that alone will not give you the same benefits as signing up for the email list. There are three reasons you may want to do it.

First, you’ll get the 2008 Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday wine guides. Those are not available with the RSS feed or anywhere on the web site. They are an email list exclusive.

Second, you’ll receive articles and other information you won’t see on the web site. I’ll send you an email each week or every other week with good resources, commentary, and wine ideas. Don’t worry, I’m not going to flood your mailbox–and again, I never, ever share my email list with anyone. If it gets to be too much, you can always unsubscribe.

Third, you’ll be the first to know about upcoming projects here at Wine For Newbies. There are some great things in the pipeline that you probably will not want to miss, including genuine actual wine classes available online–think “podcast taken to the next level.”

So, be sure to sign up with your email address so you don’t miss out!

Alder at Vinography.com has posted his second article on the wines he tried in South Africa. The thing reads like a catalog! Alder somehow managed to sample about 500 wines in the course of a week, which just blows my mind.

Take some time and go read the article. You could also print it out and use it as a shopping list.

With Thanksgiving just around the corner here in the U.S., we wine enthusiasts begin to think about wines to serve. Since I love giving information away for free (yes, I know I’m somewhat insane), I decided to put together a quick and easy guide to Thanksgiving wines.

To get it, you need to subscribe using your email address in that box just to the right (the “powered by FeedBlitz” one). The guide is only available to email subscribers; RSS subscribers won’t get it unless they sign up with their email address. Email subscribers will also have access to material that is otherwise unavailable, such as the 2008 Christmas wine guide that’s in the works.

Don’t worry–the only email you will EVER get after you subscribe will come from me. I do not share my email list with anyone. Never. I hate spam in my mailbox as much as you do.

Be sure to hurry, though–once Thanksgiving arrives, the guide is gone!

Don’t forget, Pinot Days comes to Chicago’s Navy Pier this weekend. There are a lot of small producers on the exhibitors list, which will be a great opportunity to try some wines I haven’t had before.

This is a new event to me, so I’ll be interested to see how they put it together and deal with large crowds.

Anyone going to be there?

Thanks to Fred Ordway of Allan Scott in New Zealand, I can share this New Zealand Wine web site with you. This resource has tons of information and helpful tools throughout, including a wine aroma wheel specifically for NZ Sauvignon Blancs [pdf file]. There’s plenty of in-depth research reports as well as a whole vineyard’s worth of links to other web sites of wineries and organizations.

Add this one to your bookmarks!

I discovered a really cool new Web 2.0 thingy today, posterous. It’s sort of like in between Twitter and full-blown blogging. You kind of need to see it in action to fully understand it.

Anyway, Catherine and I fly out on October 17 for a week at the Epcot International Food and Wine Festival. I’ve  previously raved about it being a great way to learn about wine, so I won’t do so again here.

With my own posterous web page, I can use my iPhone to take pictures, notes, etc. and email them so they will appear on my page. Posts will also automatically show up on Twitter.

Posterous may be just the trick for sharing quick wine experiences that don’t deserve a blog post but that also aren’t quite Twitter-appropriate. Stay tuned!