Everyone always wants to find the perfect holiday gift. They usually want their friends and family to not only receive and enjoy the gift, but also to remember them throughout the entire year. Fortunately, for those among us with food and wine lovers in our life, a wine club can offer an outstanding gift which fulfills both of those requirements.

A wine of the month club can be shipped often on either a monthly, a set number of months or even a quarterly basis. Extending shipments to a longer time period allows your gift giving budget to go quite a bit further and allows the receiver to open packages at least four times throughout the year instead of solely on Christmas morning.

A wine club at its core is suppose to help the avid wine drinker explore new and exciting wineries while offering the novice the ability to enjoy wine in the comfort of their home. What should you look for in a wine club, if you’re using it as a holiday gift? To start, make sure you’re ordering with enough time so that the receiver will receive their first shipment before the holiday. Secondly, you need to make sure the quality of wine is high. A wine of the month club should also offer a higher quality of wine than you can reasonably find at your local grocery store, or even your local wine store. If they aren’t doing that much, then why should you be paying extra for shipping? Lastly, please make sure there is an adequate amount of customer service. Does the company owner or proprietor have a direct email or phone number on their website?

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For collectors of valuable wines with long term potential, the best solution is probably a combination of off-site storage in a secure facility with ideal temperature and humidity conditions, with some small amount of temperature-controlled storage in the home for those wines which are ready to be enjoyed at the peak of perfection. Before we reviewing the Abruzzi wine and cheese that we were lucky enough to purchase at a local wine store and a local Italian food store, here are a few suggestions of what to eat with local wines when touring this beautiful region. Before reviewing the Trentino-Alto Adige wine and cheese that we were lucky enough to purchase at a local wine store and a local Italian food store, here are a few suggestions of what to eat with indigenous wines when touring this beautiful region.

Before reviewing the Molise wine and cheese that we were lucky enough to purchase at a local wine store and a local Italian food store, here are a few suggestions of what to eat with indigenous wines when touring this beautiful region. Reviewing the Latium wine and cheese that we were lucky enough to purchase at a local wine store and a local Italian food store, here are a few suggestions of what to eat with indigenous wines when touring this beautiful region. Before reviewing the Piedmont wine and cheese that we were lucky enough to purchase at a local wine store and a local Italian food store, here are a few suggestions of what to eat with indigenous wines when touring this beautiful region.

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If you are looking for fine French wine and food, consider the world famous Provence region in southeastern France. You may even find a bargain wine in this sun-drenched ideal tourist location, marred only by the number of tourists. I hope that you’ll have fun on this fact-filled wine education tour of this French candidate for paradise in which we review a local red wine based on the red Mourvèdre grape.

Among France’s eleven wine-growing regions Provence ranks ninth in acreage if you include the island of Corsica, which most people do in spite of their considerable differences. Provence is synonymous with rosé wine, and although its percentage is declining, happily according to many wine lovers. Over 50% of Provence wine is rosé, or as some might say, pink. Many of its wines are pink and flabby, but others are not. The region is home to dozens of grape varieties, often not found elsewhere. With an average of three thousand hours of sun a year, a lot of Provence wines taste baked.

One secret to making fine tasting wine is limiting its production. The Bandol AOC reviewed below and its high-quality neighbors are capped by law at 180 cases per acre (40 hectoliters per hectare). In this area growers could generate at least twice as much output, almost without trying. But any gains in quantity would be lost in quality. Voilà. Limiting Corsica’s wine output has helped reduce Europe’s famous, or rather infamous, wine lake.

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