Sauced

Better Boozing: Free Wine Class at Dish It Up!

Practice wine sniffing (and drink for free) this Saturday night in Ballard.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Jan 04, 2011 at 10:18AM 5 Comments

Know your aromas Stop by Dish It Up this weekend to sharpen your sniffing skills.

Something cool this weekend:

Shannon Jones is winemaker at Woodinville winery Hestia Cellars. He is teaming up with sommelier Cole Sisson this Saturday, January 8 to teach a free wine-sniffing class at Dish It Up’s Ballard location.

If you tend to scratch your head like a monkey when you hear people discussing wine aromas, you should definitely stop by. Wine aromas are described using foods and objects such as honey and chocolate and various berries and wet dog and skunk and cloves and bootstraps. Jones and Sisson are bringing some of these things (probably not the skunk, but who knows) to the class. You’ll smell what they bring, and then smell the wine themselves. Suddenly, everything will make sense. Bonus: You get to drink the wine.

The class is from 6 to 8pm. Since it’s held on the second Saturday of the month, Ballard Art Walk will be in full swing. So you might want to check that out too.

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Tags: Tastings and Classes, Wine Tastings, Ballard, Free Drinks, Free Stuff, Better Boozing in 2011

Better Boozing: Cask ‘N’ Comfort Mondays at the Hopvine

Once you go cask you’ll never go back.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Jan 03, 2011 at 09:00AM 0 Comments

Monday means cask beers and fine soups at the Hopvine

A new year is a time for fresh starts and second chances, or so I hear.

If you’ve ever been burned by less than stellar service at The Hopvine Pub on Capitol Hill, you might consider giving it another shot. I’ve been doing just that for the past few weeks and have been impressed. I’ve had great encounters with the staff and am loving the new menu and the daily soups for which Hopvine is famous—a rich Southwest pumpkin, a celery concoction funked up with roquefort cheese. So right on a cold day.

And there’s this. Every Monday at 6pm, the bar is tapping a different cask from some fine brewer. Go by there for a pint once a week, and you’ll develop your beer palate quickly.

The reason to get excited about drinking beer from a cask, as opposed to a regular keg, is that the beer goes in unfiltered and undergoes a second fermentation in the container. (Keg beers, on the other hand, are filtered and “force carbonated.”) Cask beer is thus always super fresh and usually produced locally because the beer can only last a little while in the container. In other words: once you go cask you’ll never go back.

Happily, Cask ‘N’ Comfort coincides with Hopvine’s happy hour, which runs from 5 to 7pm daily.

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Tags: Pub grub, Capitol Hill, Beer, Better Boozing in 2011, Cask Beer

Wine Tasting 2011: Gilbert Cellars at Taste

This is the year you become a wine expert. Get started on January 7.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Dec 23, 2010 at 01:37PM 0 Comments

Taste’s monthly wine tastings are $10. First up in 2011: Gilbert Cellars.

Let’s really get into wine this year, shall we? I want to seriously focus my wine study in 2011, and I’d like to take you along with me.

Here’s something to start us out. On January 7 from 5 to 6:30pm, Taste at the Seattle Art Museum is hosting Gilbert Cellars for the restaurant’s monthly wine tasting.

The tasting costs $10. For this you get two glasses of wine along with a little tutorial about what you’re drinking and three snacks—two of them savory, one of them sweet.

Gilbert Cellars is a Yakima Valley winery that makes a bunch of wines—the cab franc is consistently well-rated, and of the 2007 cab sauv, critic Jay Miller writes: “a medium-bodied wine with layered fruit, spicy flavors, good volume, and some elegance.” He gave it 91 points.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting attending casual wine tastings is going to turn us into Jay Miller. What I am thinking is that thinking about wine, taking notes, and approaching these little happenings as opportunities to taste and talk more about the wines we encounter does, little by little, help us become more educated drinkers. And I don’t know about you but the more I know about wine, the more I really enjoy drinking it.

Call Taste to reserve your place at the tasting or email tasterestaurant@tastesam.com

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Tags: Wine, Wine, Wine Tastings, Wine Tastings, Wine and Food Pairings, Better Boozing in 2011