New trend: drinking locally
Here’s some interesting news about more wine shops opening that feature region specific wine. I’m looking forward to a the day a shop opens in Tacoma featuring “wines of Cascadia.” Someday.
The Oregon Wine Tasting Room in McMinnville, Ore., opened Labor Day 1980 and says it is the state’s oldest tasting room selling wine exclusively from Oregon wineries. Officially known as the Oregon Wine Tasting Room and the Bellevue Market, it’s owned by Amity Vineyards and managed by Patrick McElligott, who teaches in the Chemeketa Community College wine program. Amity owns the tasting room under its winery license through a law like Colorado’s that’s intended to help local wineries market themselves and each other and the state’s industry. More than 100 wineries are represented, with about 20 wines open at any time for tasting, from dry whites to dessert wines. When it opened, Mr. McElligott says, the tasting room had “20-plus wines from 12 wineries. Now we have more than 300 from more than 100 wineries. The growth has been rapid with many, many extremely small wineries. Even I have a label, Pinot Nowar.”
The Lodi Wine & Visitor Center in Lodi, Calif., has more than 100 wines to taste and buy, all made from Lodi grapes. The center, which opened in 2000, is funded by the Lodi-Woodbridge Winegrape Commission, according to Mark Chandler, the commission’s executive director. Open daily, the center offers nine wines that change every Wednesday. “Basically, we’re trying to keep the nine wines new and exciting,” says Michael Perry, manager of the center. The center, which has an interactive educational component to it, features the wines of about 80 wineries. Three tastes cost $5, and beyond that, $1 per taste up to six wines.
link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120302207155669373.html?mod=googlenews_wsj