My favorite drink is 7 and 7. Seagram’s 7 and 7-Up. I’m not a big fan of the sweet stuff, so this is perfect for me.

No “goodnight, Joe Walton wherever you are”?? I thought for sure that would be the winning tag line!
Great episode, as usual. I always enjoy them more when you have a strong reaction to something, either way. Don’t start faking, though. We can tell.
QOTD: non-alchoholic-I have been drinking seltzer with a splash of pomegranate and lime lately. Alchoholic-good sugar cane rum on the rocks with a twist of lime.

Hi Gary!! Will you please do Greek wines on W.L.TV My wife and I will be touring Greece and would love to taste some of the great wines of the country!! I enjoy your videos and I’m learning a lot about wines!! Thanks,Peter Markos

Southern Comfort with lime on the rocks.

Great episode.

QOTD: Brewed iced tea (no-sugar) with a fresh lemon wedge (squeezed). The lemon is the key.

Great episode Gary, with 2 good wines it’s a 95! Besides wine my beverage of choice is beer, preferably a stout or porter that I have made myself.

chopin vodka up in a chilled glass with olives

Another great episode. I’ll be looking out for the Clos Mimi…My favorite drink (other than wine) is Diet V-8 Tropical Splash. TO DIE FOR!!!!! Sooooooo refreshing and like biting into fresh fruit. Yummmmmmm…….. :}

Favorite non wine drink: Diet Dr. Pepper

Hi Gary,

My name is Richard Periut, and I’m a critical care & pulmonary physician at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. However, I live in Little Ferry, NJ.

I’ve been enjoying your blog for quite a while now, and have learned much from your episodes.

With respect with your last episode, I must tell you how I clean my stemware; I clean it with an iota of non perfumed dishwashing liquid, rinse it with very hot tap water (I keep my heater pretty much next to max,) then I rinse it with RO water (reverse osmosis.) Being a keeper of a reef tank, I have to supply my expensive livestock with very pure water. The RO filter (I add DI as well for the fish,) DI = deionizing (an extra step,) leaves the water virtually devoid of any minerals. Thus, the final rinse does not even need any drying with paper or towels.

As far as my favorite drink besides wine? Puerto Rican (I’m Cuban-American BTW,) El Barrilito 3 stars Rum, along with a Cohiba Lancero cigar (when I can get my hands on them,) after a nice heavy supper.

Keep up the excellent work, and hope to meet you one day.

Regards,

R

if i’m not drinking wine,then a grey goose martini,dry with blue cheese stuffed olives is my favorite

Another solid episode, 92. I can’t believe it’s 80 already, started watching around 6 or 7 I think.

Drink according to moods, Juengling, if I want a beer, Bombay Sapphire martini, dry with olives when I want something harder. WhenI’m really going all out, you know, on that really special occasion, a nice glass of chocolate milk, the powdered kind. It really brings me back.

Gary – I was excited that you were tasting the 2002 Chateau Souverain Cabernet Sauvignon, as I had picked up a few bottles at a discount from my LWS a year or so ago. My assessment was exactly as was yours. Terribly disappointing. I then thru a bottle into a blind wine tasting we had of 8-10 inexpensive cabs to see what our friends would think (so, it was a ringer in this lot, costing 2-3x’s more than the other cabs. Again, disappintment, as it came in near the bottom of the heap, even below–yep–2buckchuck. The remaining bottles I gave as gifts.

The fine Oregon local microbrews are our alternate choices in our fam.

Great show. I definately will try the Mimi. I know what you mean by “cat piss”. I have a term for some reds — “barnyard manure” — which is a good thing in my book.

One of my favorite non-wine drinks is a “shandy”, expically in the summer after mowing the lawn. Mix lemonade with beer (proportions vary – find your own best mix). I first had this on a vist to England many years ago.

When are you going to do a “blind” tasting?

Great episode Gary. My favorite carbonated beverage has to be Dr. Pepper. It goes amazingly well with Taco Bell or any Mexican food for that matter. One of my favorite food/drink pairings is Dr. Pepper and Doritos. Unreal. I even found an outfit in Texas that makes Dr. Pepper with the original recipe — no High Fructose Corn Syrup is used.

My favorite non-carbonated beverage is apple cider. Not that crappy pasteurized stuff you find in the super market. I want the fresh squeezed stuff — directly from the apple to the glass. I drive up to Wisconsin to get it since it’s illegal in Illinois.

Gary, great episode. I have heard wine snobs refer to it as “cat pee” but like that you call it as it is -cat piss.
QOTD Jack Daniels with a little Diet Coke, 20% of the time, 80% wine.

Hey Gary et al.,
I really love green tea with honey. Preferably cold, but hot’s great when you need a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

I tried the Koura Bay, I loved it a lot. It’s aromatics, including the cat piss, equalled a great aroma and flavor of nothing but passion fruit; I think that’s a typical kiwi wine flavor. If I had the money(I’m a student) I would buy two cases. I had even asked Gary to try it a couple of episodes ago. I’m glad he did. I highly recommend it.

I’m actually much more of a beer fan than a wine fan. I like wine, but it’s mostly Gary’s wonderful perspective to tasting that draws me to the show. I am a true beer fanatic, however. I love Belgian and California beers the best, with my favorite breweries being Alesmith and Stone (I’ll be at the 10th anniversary, anyone else?). I also have brewed my own for the last year.

Another drink besides wine? Gotta be beer from Belgium. My favorite is Kwak, which when served properly comes in a test-tube like glass that can’t balance on its own, so it requires a wooden holder. Sounds gimmicky, but it’s fun and tasty!

Hey y’all,
I hear that some german and belgian beers are sweet. I have been dying to try one, but I dont know which ones they are. As a Rugby player I chug my share of coors and enjoy guiness, but I’d love to try some of the other styles. Does WL carry any?

Gary, read the WSJ article and love these segments – I’m sharing them with friends – they are great.

The WSJ article quoted someone as saying that WL would ship for $1 per bottle, and I was excited to try out the $15 Mimi, but when I ordered 2 bottles, my shipping charge at first was shown to be $0 (I’d be fine with $2/bottle, even $3/bottle), but then after I’d entered all my information, the order summary on the last page said shipping would be $13. Can you comment on the WSJ quote on your shipping charges?

Low shipping charges would make a huge difference to me – thanks in advance for your comments here!

–Terry Whalen

QOD: I like a nice margarita on the rocks with salt and fresh juice – Cazadores tequilla.

Gary, I have an oak question. Some wines use American, some Hungarian, some French. I ask the wine makers why and they mostly associate a region to a “spice” level in the oak. However they seem to disagree on what is spicier Hungarian or American. I think it has more to do with cost of oak. Can you pass on some knowledge here because I am finding when they say American oak I tend to shy away from the wine – my pallet anyway.

Andre #45 – In the US New Belgium Brewing makes a Triple that is sweeter. So does DogFish Ale. Try them and then move on to the real Belgiums.

Thanks,
Mikeme

You know, you’re really missing out with beer. I was a wine fan myself, and still enjoy it to a great extent but I have found my palate more adapted to beer. Most people in the world don’t go past the level of cheap swill but there are many examples out there of a quality that rivals the best wines. Being from France I think I have adapted most readily to Belgian styles rather than American, Germans or Brits. What I love is not only the complexity but the diversity of flavors and textures that you can find. In the comment I left on the previous episode I suggested Gueuze which is probably one of my very favorite alcoholic drinks. It’s a style made in the region of Brussels through spontaneous fermentation. That is, the yeast comes from the air at certain specific times of the year to ferment the beer. The beer is matured in oak casks. To make gueuze a skilled blender will use samples from casks of 1 year, 2 years and 3 years of age in order to mix the sweetness of the young and the bouquet and subtlety of the older vintage. The result of this process is a beer with very little resemblance to Corona and a similarity with Champagne. The flavor is relatively sour with lots of fruity tones of apricot, apple but also brown sugar and vanilla, some terroir-like odors of smelly socks and Gruyere. Incredible stuff really. I would recommend Girardin or Drie Fonteinen if you can find them.

Hey Gary,

another great episode. For me, a favorite drink besides wine is a gimlet. It’s a combo of Vodka and Lime juice. Best before food. Why? Because it will yield 2 results. 1) Get your appetite revved up even more. 2) Get you drunk super fast on an empty stomach … Point 2 got us almost thrown out from “Aqua Grill” down in Soho. By my 3rd gimlet, I was calling it “Hamlet” and was demanding that Ophelia and Ophelia ONLY brings me the next one.. this is besides the cushion pillow fight at the same place about an hour later..but I don’t remember much of it.

2 part Question for you… How do you commute to and from work on daily basis – how do you deal with traffic??? and also I am sure you must have some sort of an email-based PDA (like Blackberry, Treo, etc). Do you find yourself on that thing the minute you leave work and does your wife yell at you for spending too much time with it instead of her? 🙂

GeneM.

Gary,

My favorite drinks, when I’m not drinking wine, are: (1) Seltzer with a slice of lemon or lime – I drink 2 to 3 liters of this a day, (2) Filtered or bottled water, and (3) A 20 ounce cup of dark roast coffee every morning. This is pretty much a comprehensive listing, I drink little else. The variety and diversity of drink in my life is all in the wine segment.

By the way, I know you have free-run at the Wine Library store, but I really find surprising the revelation that you don’t have your own wine cellar. Doesn’t that mean you are forced to regularly drink younger wines without bottle age on them? I have a large cellar, and it took a long time to get that way. It’s not to impress friends, it’s because I love the complexity fine wine gets when it ages. So in order that I might have an nicely aged bottle every night if I so choose, I’ve had to collect and store over a long period of time. I primarily like Bordeaux, but have never collected the first growths because of the expense. Instead, I cherry pick the 2nd and 3rd growths – buying futures based upon the barrel samples and on my personal preferences in appelation and chateau style.

Thanks for WLTV, it’s a “must watch” for me every morning, and I’ve been with you from your very first show in February this year (I was the overall 6th response to WLTV since the its inception. (see the very first episode of WLTV in which you perform a 2001 Verite horizontal tasting.

Keep up the good work, and hope to see your stor in person (and meet you) soon.

Thanks,

GUY