In the following article titled: Murphys - The Other Wine Country & Calaveras Big Trees State Park there is a great description of the Ironstone Vineyard Experience. Ironstone is located in Murphys, California near the Calaveras state park and they are located in a less nationally known wine country than the popular Napa and Sonoma Valleys. Ironstone Vineyard has a restaurant, museum and jewelery center and their public concert series is quite popular. Read on to discover more about Murphys, California and their most famous vineyard.

This is a really fun day trip, but could require a designated driver for visits to all the wine tasting rooms! From Groveland head down the hill on Route 120 to Highway 49 north, then follow to Angels Camp, about 45 minutes. Take a right onto Route 4 and follow past Murphys, and Arnold to Calaveras Big Trees State Park.

If touring the Sierra side of California, the groves of Big Trees from this park are wonderful, we think they are far better than the Groves one finds in Yosemite. The trees are easily accessible from the parking areas and there are far fewer tourists to contend with for the trails and photo opportunities here. There are miles of trails, and not all of them go up and down hills. We enjoy tramping about the wilderness for an hour or two before heading back into Murphys for the rest of the day.

When finished with a Big Trees adventure, head west again on Highway 4 to Murphy's. Entering Murphy's you will see a sign that claims to be the "other wine country." We fully agree. Our last trip to Murphy's we did a stop at most of the vineyard tasting rooms, starting with the country-side setting of Ironstone Vineyards, the only tasting room surrounded by their hillside grapes. To reach Ironstone, take a left at the old Murphy's Hotel and follow the signs, anther 2 miles.

Once at Ironstone, enjoy the tasting room and surrounding gift shop. Ironstone is a great location to have a nice lunch from the deli counter with views of the vineyards. We enjoyed the calm setting along with a glass of the reserve chardonnay. Ironstone is famous also for their 500,000 daffodil bulbs that all bloom together in March and their well-kept year round flower displays.

While at the Ironstone complex, take time to explore the museum and jewelry center. Having done two summer seasons of gold panning in a pre-innkeeper life, we were thrilled with their gold specimen, a huge 44 lb flakey nugget found in 1992 at the Jamestown mine and housed in true bank vault.

Ironstone has oodles of regular public events including concert series, black and white movie nights, parking lot sales of wine and more. From Ironstone return to Murphy's and explore the many tasting rooms in the downtown area. We always make time for Zucca Winery, found just off the main street up a bit from the park stepping down into a cave. The ambiance is warm and the wine most tasteful! We left with a bottle of port.

Next walk around the corner to Hatcher, one of our favorites both for the wine and the charm of Matt and his tasting room team. Victor thinks this year's Zinfandel is most outstanding. We bought a magnum. Twisted Oak with their whimsical gift shop and fun approach to everything is another worthy stop and their wines are good too!

Murphy's is a great walking village with good window shopping. We ventured into several galleries and antique shops and even found a good sign to use at the hotel: Gone Fishing carved in the side of a wooden fish. If we ever do get out fishing, we are now ready with a proper sign!

Don't overlook the antique plumbing store on the left, just beyond the old Murphy's Hotel, for bit of fussing about old porcelain and plumbing pieces. Even I had fun here. Amazingly they have the clawfoot tubs on the third floor, how did they get there and why the third floor? The Murphy's Hotel is a true step back in time. Here we tried an Australian wine and another local wine and enjoyed the impromptu guitar-sing-a-long performed by some regulars.

Lynn Upthagrove, along with her husband Victor, own the Hotel Charlotte, in Groveland, on the way to Yosemite. http://www.HotelCharlotte.com

This article is about how to do budget wine tours in Sonoma County. There are many different viticultural areas in California and each one has their own unique experience. Sonoma County wine tours are no different, as each area has their own wine tour experience. You can do a bicycle tour or a rental car. This article talks about the advantages and disadvantages of each type of budget Sonoma County wine tour.

Their Day in Wine Country: A Concierge and Tour Guide Manual for Visiting the Wineries of Napa and Sonoma

If you love wine tours then you will absolutely love the ones offered by the wine growers of Sonoma Valley. However, unlike some of the other wine tours offered elsewhere can be extremely expensive and price those on a strict budget out. Budget Sonoma wine tours can be taken with a bicycle or with designated drivers at the wheel of a rental car. If you do not want to scrape your knees then the latter may be the best option for you!

There are distinct disadvantages associated with both types of budget Sonoma wine tours. You will obviously be prone to falling off a bicycle if you take up that budget Sonoma wine tours option. However, choosing a designated driver presents a hazard for the person that cannot sample the wines. He or she often will sample the wine regardless and thus are at risk of having an accident and harming someone. However, you can actively choose either as part of you vacation plan. There are plenty of companies willing to come up with a budget Sonoma wine tour for you, even if you have the lowest budget going!

Choosing to go on budget Sonoma wine tours is easy, but choosing the tour for you may prove to be more difficult! There are so many options for you out there to choose from. There are local companies that will provide almost any vehicle going for budget Sonoma wine tours, from limos to cars to buses. You can really tailor your budget Sonoma wine tours to suit your very specific wants and needs

You can hire a stretch limousine for around $50 per person if there are a few of you looking for good budget Sonoma wine tours. This option is far more luxurious and better than having a designated driver. You are in a limo for a start, but also have a chauffeur so you will not have to worry about the designated driver drinking and endangering all of his or her passengers. These budget Sonoma wine tours encompass a whole range of wineries and thus can give you a proper taste of the valley.

Budget Sonoma wine tours will take you on trip to several wineries that have a vast range of wines available for tasting. You can find almost every wine type under the sun there, and all produced by family owned businesses that have been alive for generations. They hold secrets and stories that you never had dreamed of, and these will vastly improve your budget Sonoma wine tours. To top off your trip, you can actually buy wines that are only available at the wineries and thus will give you an exclusive memento of your budget Sonoma wine tours!

You can also find more information at Napa Valley Wine Tasting Tours and North American Wine Tours. Bestwinetourguide.com is a comprehensive resource to known more about wine.

Ever since the news has come out on the Internet about the Charles Shaw wines, or as they are also affectionately known 2 buck Chuck, the wines have been flying off of the shelves at Trader Joe's. Many people who are not wine experts insist that this wine tastes just as good if not better than the $40 bottle of wines. You can get it at Trader Joe's.

Here is the opinion of someone who doesn't share the popular view of the Charles Shaw Wine.

clipped from www0.epinions.com

Charles Shaw Wines - Give Me A Break

The Bottom Line Yes, the wine is cheap. It's value-priced, fine for large parties, but I will not be buying more. Don't believe the internet rumors.

Price and Availability: $1.99 per 750ml bottle at Trader Joe's.

Cellared and bottled by Charles Shaw Winery, Napa, California.

And, finally, as to all six bottles (two of each varietal) that I tried: I found, in each and every instance, that the corks used to seal the bottles were of inferior quality and flaked easily. If you buy this wine, drink it now. Avoid the 2001 Merlot (the 1999 Cabernet Sauvignon is better). The 2000 Chardonnay is "okay," but simple. I don't recommend any of these wines, but I did enjoy investigating the rumor.

Tags: charles shaw wine - charles shaw winery - trader joes

Wine clubs are a great way to get a taste of specific types of wine. There are many wine clubs both national and international that allow the members to experience a special niche wine. Some wine clubs are Reds only, some Whites only. Others are from a specific country, region or state, and others still may focus only on award winning wines or on wines that are in a certain price range.

Wine clubs of America are wine clubs that focus on wines made only in America. There aren't very many of them that are well known. I will list a few of them here.

Boutique Wine Club

Discovery Wine Club

90 Point Wine Club

Tags: wine clubs of america - wine clubs - wine

I thought this article was very interesting. I knew vaguely about counterfeiting in the wine industry and taking expensive bottles and switching out the wine with cheaper wine, but I didn't know the extent to which it was done. This is because for most of us wine drinkers, we don't run across this issue very much. Wine counterfeiters don't bother with wine in anything that is not in the highest tier as it's just not worth their time, and most of us get our wine from reputable distributors at the local liquor store. Usually this is a problem with rare vintages that command tens of thousand of dollars that you would get at an auction house, or some other private sale. Anyway, read on for more!

ARGONNE, Ill (Aug. 1, 2008) — When the Roman historian Pliny
the Elder wrote " in vino veritas " – in wine, there is truth – he must
not have been drinking from a counterfeit bottle. Researchers
Roger Johnston and Jon Warner of the U.S. Department of Energy's
Argonne National Laboratory have created a device to ensure that
modern wine connoisseurs can have faith that they are drinking
what they pay for.

In the past few decades, bottles of rare premium vintages have begun
to command tens of thousands of dollars apiece at auction, and thousands
of other wines retail for hundreds to thousands of dollars a bottle.
Although there may be no match for quality of the product inside,
the ease and accuracy with which fraudsters can pass off bottles
of "two-buck Chuck" with ritzy labels have allowed wine
counterfeiting to grow into a booming criminal enterprise.

This work represents an offshoot of the work by the Vulnerability
Assessment Team (VAT) in Argonne's Nuclear
Engineering (NE). While
the VAT conducts R&D on broad security issues, including nuclear
safeguards, Argonne 's NE division has a long history of addressing
nuclear safeguards and security issues.

"As often happens," Johnston said, "R&D on one
problem can lead to unexpected inventions; that is what happened
here. We were working on tamper and intrusion detection projects
for nuclear safeguards, courier bags, and cargo security, and also
on security for pharmaceuticals. Various concepts and technologies
that were developed for those projects led to the current wine application."

"One of the biggest problems buyers of very expensive wines
have at auctions is that they have no way of being absolutely sure
if the bottle contains the wine it purports to without actually opening
the bottle and taking a swig," said Johnston.

To combat this problem, Johnston and his colleagues in Argonne 's
Vulnerability Assessment Team (VAT) have created a cap that winemakers
can fit over the bottle's cork. The cap contains a small circuit
that completes when it is removed, triggering an electric pulse that
creates electronic evidence someone has tampered with the bottle. "There's
no alarm that screams at you if the wine's been opened," Johnston
said, "but there's no way of getting rid of the evidence of
tampering because basically, when tampering occurs, information is
erased—a kind of anti-alarm."

By connecting the cap to a laptop through a USB cable, the auctioneer
or the consumer can check whether or not the wine has already been
opened or altered. Each cap has a unique bottle number that is registered
to the winemaker, preventing wine counterfeiters from putting the
Argonne caps on their fake Bordeaux and Burgundies.

In addition to the outright counterfeiting of fine wine, buyers
face another potential problem when assessing the purity of a bottle.
To preserve the life of some of their wines, some winemakers will
remove the cork from the bottle and blend in a small quantity of
wine from a newer vintage in a process known as "reconditioning."

Although reconditioned wines may have longer shelf lives, some winemakers
try to pass off their reconditioned bottles as purely the older vintage,
Johnston said. With the Argonne cap, bottles cannot be reconditioned
without the buyer eventually finding out.

Because the vast majority of wine fraud targets the very highest
tier of wine manufacturing, the Argonne cap could become a "status
symbol" among wineries potentially interested in the Argonne
technology, said systems engineer Jon Warner, who works alongside
Johnston in the VAT. "Our device may be able to generate a certain
snob-appeal factor among winemakers; they can say, 'our wine is so
good, we needed to spend money on this security device, although
only a few dollars of parts are used in the device."

Johnston and Warner plan to enhance the security of the cap even
further by connecting it to a high-quality color sensor chip. The
top of the cork would then bear a tie-dye pattern of color swirls
that the chip would have to recognize. According to Johnston , the
sensitivity of the color sensor would make it extraordinarily difficult
for someone to open the cap and put it back close enough to the original
position to fool the sensor.

By Jared Sagoff.

Tags: counterfeit wine - wine - high end wine

In the article below titled "Delivery Of Wine As A Gift - Send A Surprise" the author discusses how sending wine as a gift is certain to impress. One of the most popular ways to send wine is to send it in a wine gift basket. These usually include extras like chocolates, cheese and crackers and other tasty accessories. The wine selection is important as well and if you are not sure and you don't know your friend's tastes in wine, then you should maybe replace the wine with something else or ask your friend in a casual conversation what their favorite wine is. The rest of the article is more detailed so read on to find out about delivery of wine as a gift and wine gift baskets. It is especially timely for the holiday season

Take advantage of 1 cent shipping on gift baskets!
wine.com


A delivery of wine as a gift is certain to surprise and impress. Whether it is for a special occasion like a wedding or anniversary, giving wine as a gift is never out of place. It matters not if the person your are giving the gift to is not a wine connoisseur as receiving a gift on that special day will echo your sentiments. After all, giving is always better than receiving but again they could be wrong when talking about a fine bottle of wine.

If you are not really sure which wine to include in your gift basket, don't worry. The staff at the gift shop should be able to assist you. If you know your wines, you can choose any type you like and you can even change the packaging to add that special touch. If you want to go the extra mile and really make it special, add a few little extras that you know the intended receiver would like.

Wine Selection

If you can tell a fine bottle of wine from an average one, then selecting the wine should not be a problem. Wine selection is an integral part of the message that you are trying to achieve and it usually helps if you know the person's tastes and likes. However if the gift is for a person that is not very close to you but you know that they drink wine, try to stick to old favorites. If they like reds, then a fruity wine might be the go. If you are really stuck, just go down to your liquor store and narrow your choice down to wines that are "easy drinking" and wines that a connoisseur will appreciate.

If the person is a non-wine drinker, that should not stop you either. Instead just replace the wine bottles with champagne or even something more exotic. To make your delivery of wine as a gift, really stand out, add a bit of "luxury" to it. Fine imported chocolates or any other small luxury items can all be added. Let you personality shine through and your mind run wild. Another classy touch would be to add a beautiful arrangement of flowers to your already special gift.

Timing And Packaging

If you have gone to great lengths to making sure that your gift will be a stand out, don't ruin it all by neglecting the packaging and not ensuring that your delivery of wine as a gift will arrive on time.

Fist impressions always count and sending your wine gift in a "plain" cardboard gift box will definitely not help the goal that you are trying to achieve. If you want to make your delivery of wine as a gift special, pay close attention to the packaging also. Make sure it fits the occasion or the person the gift is intended for even if you have to spend a little more cash doing so.

The other matter that you need to focus on, is to make sure that your delivery of wine as a gift arrives on time. Usually early in the morning or just after the person arrives at home after a hard days work are the best options with arrival after the event rating as a very poor third on the list. So shed a little extra money a send it with a very reputable courier company.

Michael Marchand owns the website Just Wine Gifts. For many other articles and resources related to the delivery of wine as a gift or wine gift baskets, please visit our site.

Tags: delivery of wine as a gift - wine gift baskets - holiday gifts - wine baskets - wine

Vendange Wine from California is made by the Canandaigua Wine Company out of New York, which is a division of a larger conglomerate company. The Vendange wine was the 15th most popular wine in the United States that was ordered by restaurants in 2005.

Vendange comes in a variety of styles of whites, reds and blushes.
They produce the following types of table wine:

Whites
-Symphony, which is a new type
-Chardonnay
-Pinot Grigio
-Sauvignon Blanc
-Semillon-Chardonnay

Reds
-Cabernet Sauvignon
-Merlot
-Shiraz
-Zinfandel

Blushes
-White Zinfandel
-White Merlot

The Vendange Merlot
has a classic varietal nose of tart cherries, toasty oak and smoke. A medium plum color, it is very dry with herbal and red fruit flavors and light to medium tannins and body. A youthful wine with soft oak and medium acidity.

Stone Cellars wine was listed as being the 21st most popular restaurant wine in 2004. This is significant because that year the top 100 brands represented 48% of all of the wine sales in restaurants. Most of these wines were from the US, which is encouraging for the local home-grown wineries.

Stone Cellars wine is produced by the Beringer Blass Wine Estates here in the United States and their popular table variety is their Cabernet Sauvignon. The winemakers feel that Stone Cellars Cab can be intense and overwhelming for those new to drinking red wine. It is a friendly wine while still keeping the integrity of the varietal. It's a smooth, robust and classically structured Cabernet.

If you have tasted this wine in a restaurant and have had trouble locating it at your local liquor store, it may be because it is a brand that is exclusive to restaurants. However, keep looking as these brands pop up with online retailers from time to time.

Inglenook wine is a restaurant house wine from Centerra Wine Co that you can usually only find and enjoy in restaurants that carry this particular brand of wine. The grapes of this wine come from the Yountville Vineyard and the consumer clone version that you can get in your local liquor store is called Grgich Hills. As is stated in the Grgich Hills literature...

"...The Cabernet from our Yountville vineyard is the Inglenook clone on St. George rootstock. These dry farmed vines have pushed their roots deep into the rocky soil, which creates intensely flavored grapes. Our organically grown Rutherford and Calistoga vineyards also contribute to the blend to create a true Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon...."

So if you had Inglenook wine in a restaurant, especially the Cabernet Sauvignon, you should be able to get the consumer version of this wine as Grgich Hills (I'm not even sure how to pronounce it!).

Buy Grgich Hills Wine Here

In this article, personalized wine bottles are discussed as being great for many occasions. Weddings, anniversaries, promotions or for almost any special occasion. While this article discusses several occasions, I will concentrate on using personalized wine bottles as anniversary favorites. For the couple who love wine, sending them a case of their favorite wine with their own label on it that is especially unique to them adds a special touch that most other gifts just don't have.

Here is the article that is titled "Uniquely Yours - Personalized Wine Bottles".

Personalized wine bottles offer individuals, corporations, wineries, and restaurants, among others, the ability to create their own unique custom wine bottle labels. Choose from a variety of personalized label options guaranteed to meet each person's custom requirements. Custom wine bottles make beautiful, unique gifts or can be used to add that special touch to someone's personal wine collection.

Whether you are celebrating a wedding, anniversary, promotion or just want to say "thank you", personalized wine bottles make it personal and special. You can take the hard work out of choosing presents by giving custom designed wine as gifts. It is easier than you think to do with the large number of festive and special occasion label templates available through online retailers.

If you produce your own wine at home you not only want to communicate information about your product, but you will also want to draw customers' attention to your bottles. Custom designed and personalized with eye catching labels these are a great advertising solution.

Personalized wine bottles will have your custom created label with your corporate logo or family crest or photo emblazoned on it. You are able to select the font and create your own design. If you are not gifted or creative there are sites that will help you from the create and design stage to beautifully finished labels. Most sites offer wine labels that are custom printed on water resistant, matte or high gloss paper.

Some sites offering customized gifts not only offer your own product for the home wine vintner but also offer a line of premium wines with delivery to your doorstep or the person you are honoring. Online shopping provides a unique shopping experience guaranteed to provide you with a great bottle of personalized wine or case at an affordable price. Let them help you leave an everlasting impression with a gift that has been customized and personalized.

Find the latest information on wine and wine making visit Fruit Wine Making as well as Personalized Wine Bottles

Tags: wine bottles - wine accessories - personalized wine bottles - personalized wine bottles anniversary