Why New Jersey wines now? Not a hard question by any means, yet I froze. Not just a chill, a freeze of glacial proportions. That was the first question posed to me by Andrew Meyer in a recent radio interview on WBGO Jazz FM 88.3. My first thought was: Why not?

This week everything seems to be “super” to me, from Jersey’s own Super Bowl champion Giants (hooray!) to a category of wine called Super Tuscans.

Last week my family and I visited Penn State University and stopped by a local bar before dinner. It was our first stop of the evening, and I did not want to over indulge. In the mood for a cold beer, I asked our waitress if she knew the alcohol content of the Victory Hop Devil. Her response: “One beer is equal to one wine.”

Call me a freak, but I’m a stickler when it comes to cleanliness. And that’s especially true when it comes to wine glasses.

A festival is defined as an occasion for feasting or celebration. There are community festivals, religious festivals, and many others, but the kind of festival that piques my interest has either food or wine in the title. The Summit Wine and Food Festival this weekend meets both of my criteria. There will be celebrity chefs, sommeliers, cooking demonstrations and wine tastings.

Years ago, when I first started ordering wine, my standard request was for “a glass of Chablis.” I had witnessed an attractive, sophisticated woman order this and decided that if it was good enough for her, it was good enough for me.

“Do you live in town?” asked the woman pouring our wine at the Corks n’ Crowns tasting room in Santa Barbara, California. “No, we’re from New Jersey,” I responded, but I felt flattered that we were blending so seamlessly into this community with a wine region nearby and fabulous weather.

“What do you think of organic wines?” I asked some friends, recently. The responses ranged from “eww” to “they don’t seem sophisticated.” Yet when I avoided the word “organic” and presented the wine as “produced with no synthetic pesticides or herbicides,” everyone was ready to have a taste.

Ancestry.com is constantly emailing me with hints “that could lead you to new facts about your family tree.” The Zinfandel grape went through this experience years ago.

After discussing chilling wine in my previous post, I was asked about the subject of ice cubes in wine.

When it’s 96 degrees in Jersey, it’s time to reach for a refreshing drink. On the top of my list are cold beer and chilled white wine, but don’t serve these beverages at the same temperature. Most beer is best cold, while white wine should only be moderately chilled.

“I never thought I’d see my brother sipping pink wine while holding a miniature poodle,” quipped my husband’s brother. Are pink wines and small fluffy dogs not masculine? Looks can be deceiving. Why is there a misconception that pink wine, also known as rosé, is sweet and feminine?

Last week I wrote about aging wine and also celebrated my birthday. Instead of counting the years, I decided to focus on the newest Fountain of Youth – resveratrol – an antioxidant found in wine.

“Contrary to popular opinion, only a small subgroup of wines benefit from extended bottle aging,” according to the Oxford Companion to Wine by Jancis Robinson. This may mean that the special bottle you’ve been saving, may have been better if opened sooner.

“Every dog has its day”—and these days, so do some grapes. Take April 17, which has been declared Malbec World Day.

I like to dream big. Growing up, my dreams mimicked Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, with yachts, fabulous parties and endless Champagne. My current fantasy is to own a winery and vineyard. That dream is likely to remain unfulfilled, but there is another option to satisfy my winemaking whim.

A friend of mine poured a case of red wine down the drain recently. “Why?” I asked. She said that she was saving the wine but it had developed “stuff” in the bottle. That stuff is sediment.

Beaujolais wine deserves attention year-round — yet it gets the most attention in late November, when each year’s Beaujolais Nouveau is released. It reminds me of the movie industry with its strong promotional push around the Academy Awards at the end of February.

A funny thing happened to me a couple of months ago on my way to buy a bottle of wine. I landed a job as the marketing director of Gary’s Wine and Marketplace.

A friend asked if I was going to call this post “Get a Grip!” because that’s what tannins can be—gripping. They can also be astringent, harsh, mellow, smooth, velvety, coarse, fine or grainy. These are all tactile descriptions because you can feel tannins in your mouth, but not taste or smell them.

Good news for Rioja producers and American wine drinkers: Rioja’s exports to the U.S. have increased 33 percent in the past year according to Vibrant Rioja, an organization whose goal is “to introduce the extraordinary wines of Rioja to American wine lovers.”

“Would you like to have the green wine or the white?” That question was posed recently to me and my friend, Carla, at Taste of Portugal in the Ironbound section of Newark. “Green, of course” was our response.

How can wine have flavors of grapefruit, apple, peach and green pepper? It’s just grape juice, right? Well, fermented grape juice to be exact.

Valentine’s Day is a time to decelerate, quit texting and spend time with the ones we love. A gift of something sweet—like chocolate—is often part of the ritual. Paired with the right wine, that sweet treat is emblematic of a perfect match.

Lately, so much of what I eat and drink is fortified. My cereal is fortified with vitamins and minerals, my orange juice is fortified with calcium, and even the Port wine I drank last night is fortified, but not with anything that will make my bones stronger.

My holiday credit card bills have arrived, and I feel the need to tighten my belt in more ways than one. When it comes to wine, I look for values in the under-$15 range. Here are a few that I’ve recently tried.

If you like spicy food and also enjoy wine, I have one word for you: “Gewurztraminer.”

Have you ever gone into a wine store and apologized before you bought a bottle? If your answer is “yes,” you are not alone.

With snow still blanketing our neck of the woods, here’s part two of my discussion of ice wine.

Having grown up in Buffalo, it makes perfect sense that I love Ice Wine. And with New Jersey enduring some Buffalo-like weather lately, this might be the right time for the Garden State to warm up to Ice Wine.

New Year’s Eve has come and gone but if I had my way, we’d all find a reason to drink Champagne every day—especially if it’s a glass of Grower Champagne. I’ve had the opportunity to taste a bunch in recent months.

This time last year, I wrote that most wine lovers would probably prefer wine as a gift than any sort of clever gadget. But recently I stumbled upon two great items that are notable as much for their functionality as for their names—Whisky Stones and Wine Chill Drops.

Distilled beverages sometimes are packaged so beautifully that you want to savor every drop, then keep the empty bottles. Following are a few of these special bottles that would make great gifts—and are readily available in the Garden State.

Flipping through magazines filled with images of spruce-covered centerpieces and festive trinkets I got the idea to bring a bit of glee to my own holiday table with a regal twist on Kir, a personal favorite I normally associate with summer sipping.

If you tuned into my last post about Global Zinfandel Day, you know that this grape is a European import making wines that have become known as uniquely American. I’m happy to report that despite my initial skepticism, Zinfandel pairs nicely with apple pie.

My mother always told me there would come a time in my life when staying thin would require some effort. That time arrived a few years ago—inconveniently timed with my new career in wine and a serious deficit in the willpower department.

Sherry, as I mentioned in my last post can be light and dry, heavy and sweet, or anything in between—giving it the ability to pair with many different foods. This diversity is created in the fractional blending of the solera and by the two types of aging—biological and oxidative. Allow me a moment of geekiness to explain.

You know you’re in for a treat at a wine tasting when your mind is filled with images of mythical ocean-dwelling monsters before you’ve taken a single sip. Such was the case this past weekend as Andy Seymour of AKA Wine Geek guided his audience (myself included) through a lineup of sherries and a brief history lesson at the Summit Wine and Food Festival.

There are two wine events happening in the Garden State this weekend that make me wish I could be in more than one place at a time. Check them out and perhaps join me as I sip a favorite beverage.

There’s a classic joke in the wine business that if you want to make a million dollars in the industry you need to start with $10 million. But if you just want to try your hand at winemaking without investing in prime vineyard real estate and high-tech equipment, there are a number of places in the Garden State where you can do it for considerably less.

According to a recent report, folks in Great Britain are throwing away some 50 million liters of wine a year at a cost of about £470 million. It’s too bad: They must not be reading my blog—or at the very least they missed my earlier post about what to do with leftover wine.

With the Jewish holidays starting, I’ve been reading a lot about kosher wines, which have made major strides over the last several decades to overcome their reputation as the sickly sweet tipples of yesteryear’s blessings. As a case in point, a kosher wine—the Carmel Winery Kayoumi Single Vineyard Shiraz 2008 beat some of the world’s most renowned syrah and shiraz producers at the Decanter World Wine Awards last week in London.

Txakolina, the light and spritzy Spanish wine that I wrote about last week is widely available in the Garden State. When the temperature shot back into the 90s last weekend, I took my own advice and grabbed a bottle at my local retailer to enjoy with lightly grilled chicken, corn on the cob, and heirloom tomato salad plucked right from our garden.

I get into my share of conversations about obscure wines and grapes. But when two different people in two different cities want to talk about Txakolina on the very same day, I take that as a sign to proselytize about this crisp, refreshing wine from the Basque region of Spain, before the heat of the summer is all but gone.

Here’s a question that I am often asked: Can you chill a bottle of white, rosé, or sparkling wine, multiple times? The answer is simple: Yes, no, and maybe.

When I am not acting as your New Jersey Monthly wine blogger, fearless avenger of all myths wine-related, I try to behave like an ordinary citizen—resisting the temptation to set the wine record straight, even when the situation practically begs me to.

I’ve just finished reading “The Wild Vine” by Todd Kliman—a real page-turner about a little-known grape called Norton. But don’t let the title fool you; this is not just for wine geeks. It’s for anyone who likes to uncover a secret.

By the time you read this, I’ll be on my way to TasteCamp East 2010 Finger Lakes—an event that will bring a group of wine bloggers and writers to one of New York State’s major vineyard areas for a weekend of total wine and food immersion.

The headline read: “The Wine and Chocolate Diet.” Who could resist such a promise? Lose weight while drinking wine and eating chocolate? I simply had to read on.

I’m not a fan of sweeping generalizations—this applies to life as well as to wine. With that proviso I can state that, for the most part, I’ve never been a lover of California Pinot Noir.

I like desserts that involve the use of dangerous equipment. Crème brulée, for example, can be made with a propane torch to lightly brown its crispy top of caramelized sugar.

Imagine living in a suburban town sprinkled with picturesque hillside vineyards where you can stroll as part of your daily exercise routine. Yet you have all the conveniences of a large city nearby. That’s another reason why I love visiting the little neighborhoods in and around Stuttgart.

A year ago, I hardly knew what blogging was. This week, I’m heading to California to immerse myself in a world of food, wine, and new media at the second annual American Wine Bloggers Conference.

My friend Amelia said it best: If a wine could be a parfait, it would taste like the Henri Prudhon Saint-Aubin 1er Cru Sur Gamay 2003—a white Burgundy from a tricky vintage.

Hannibal invaded Umbria during the second Punic war. This week, it’s my turn.

The varietal wine Grignolino does not garner a lot of press attention. But last night, as I enjoyed it with a plate of roasted chestnuts, it earned a special place in my heart.

Sherry comes in a range of styles from bone dry and light to syrupy sweet. In this second of two posts on the topic, we look at the different Sherry styles and how they are served.

I grew up a tomboy in a neighborhood full of boys, four of whom were my brothers. I memorized sports statistics, played some outfield, and wore my bruised shins with pride. But the one thing I would never do was spit.

I experienced quite a bit of Europe on a backpacking trip before the onset of adulthood. Alas, I never made it to Greece until last night, when I finally got my first taste of Santorini.

Last year I walked away from a twenty-year career and a six-figure salary to work at my local wine shop. This being the 21st century, I’ve now been invited to share my passion for wine through this new blog.

Before I write anything about Gary Vaynerchuk, I need to send you to winelibrarytv.com. There's nothing I can put here that would capture him the way any of his daily ten-minute web videos do. In each one, he uses a gonzo-journalism approach to convey his latest feelings about wine—doing tasting showdowns and going off on tangents about everything from his beloved Jets to the WWF battles of his youth. It's as fun as you could imagine an intellectual wine discussion can be. And now that energy is focused in print, in the pages of Vaynerchuk's new book, 101 Wines to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World.