Champagne Event! Terra Mia Dinners! Offsite -Hush-Hush- Nickel & Nickel Affair for a Few of You!! -

Good morning! Welcome to another Wine Steward video. Thank you for watching. I have a lot to tell you. I'll try to be brief about it, but we have not one, but several events coming up within this month of May. What is happening on May 17th? Sunday, May 17th at 4 30 p.m. Many of you have already signed up. We're already more than half full, I believe, but some may not yet have heard. This is our semi-annual, formerly known as annual, sparkling wine and champagne event. Yes, not all sparkling wines are champagnes, but all champagnes are champagne. Kind of like the tequila thing. Anyway, we are going to present no fewer than a dozen sparkling wines. We'll probably start with six non-champagnes from different parts of the world and then focus in on perhaps the most famous and, well, easily the most famous and perhaps the greatest place for sparkling wine in the world. That would be, of course, champagne. We're doing this at 4 30, May 17th, right up here on this mezzanine. And the cool thing that we've learned to do recently is to confront you or present you, however you're feeling about it, with not one but two different glass shapes for your sparkling. You can move the wine from one to the other to find out the difference a glass makes for sparkling wine. This, of course, is a little more conventional, kind of a tulip flute, not a pure flute. Flutes are banned from the store now. My nose won't fit into a flute. I can't smell anything from a flute. But this tulip shape accommodates a bit more of a nose and still keeps the wine pristine and lean. You can perhaps see the bead or the bubbles going up the middle there. Yeah, that works pretty well. So in this glass, we get the vibrancy, the brightness of this beautiful dry rosé that will almost certainly be a part of the event. From this glass, we get more nose. Yep, it's more opulent, more fruit, and probably a softer palate because of the way that this glass aims the wine onto your tongue. It's a tie. I like them both. So we'll provide both glasses to each of you attendees. This is easily our most sought-for event of the year in that we used to do it just once a year and the demand for it has been so high that here we are six months after we typically do it, doing it again. Sparkling wine in the form of six non-champagnes with a perhaps intermission wine that is not bubbly. Just we'll break it up a little bit and then we'll have the champagne and have the so-called good stuff, which costs more. But yes, we're going to try to accommodate different price points, too, so you can have your weeknight champagne or sparkling, your weekend, afternoon sparkling or champagne, and your holiday champagne. It's probably gonna be champagne for the holidays, right? So, May 17th, Sunday, 4 30 p.m. Go to dinner downtown afterwards. How about that? What else are we doing? We're really cramming it in, but we love our events. We're gonna go off-site for one, for two. We're going back to Terra Mia Restaurant in Livermore for a beautiful not four-course but five-course dinner. Normally, when I give Luca the list of the wines that we have chosen for the event so that he can work on the menu, he says, okay, here you go. This time he's saying, mama mia, Jim, you gave me five courses worth of wines, not four. We usually do just four. Well, we're gonna splurge here. We're gonna have five courses. And I did this especially because I want a lot of representation from two different importers. We have two friends. I can call them friends now. Benedetta and Mattia. Benedetta is from one company. Mattia is from another. Importers, small importers, friendly, intimate, Bay Area importers of fantastic Italian wine. Viniti and Siena Winery Company. They're both gonna be representing wines. They'll both be on hand on those two evenings, the 12th and the 19th. In this case, you can go to thewinestore.com to read more, but you're gonna see a link that takes you to Terra Mia in order to reserve your seats. We are not administering just to prevent confusion. We're not administering the actual signups. We are just informing, providing a link over to Terra Mia so that you can sign up there. And I will be on hand on both evenings to help out. So I look forward to sharing a great five-course dinner with you, encompassing the little country of Italy, little country with bravado, right? A lot of great, great wines from there. We're certainly gonna be visiting Tuscany and Piemonte, perhaps having this Barbaresco right here, a beautiful Nebbiolo and so on. It's gonna be good. So mark your calendar. Don't even mark your calendar until you have signed up. Go to the Terra Mia website, unless you just find our link and go that way. The 12th and the 19th, those are both Tuesday nights. Now something very, very special I haven't told anybody, except for a precious few about so far, is that we are going to have another off-site event that takes us to a home that is also a winery out in Livermore, about six miles from here. And pretty soon you're at the home of some very, very good friends who are also opening their winery very soon. They've been making wine for quite a while and are going to be releasing, having chosen their name and created a new label. At any rate, we're gonna visit that winery in interestingly enough to taste the new 2023 releases of Nickel & Nickel Cabernet and who but Terry Bancroft should be doing that for us. And in fact, Terry will be coming from the winery to represent these wines. This is an event we usually do upstairs here on the mezzanine. We thought it would be fun to go off-site and do it at the home of these friends of ours that is also a winery. So only 10 spots are available because I've already told a few people who we really, really want to have there. And there are a few spaces remaining. So if you would like to do this, you go to thewinesteward.com to sign up. And then once you've signed up, we reveal to you the address, the location. I can tell you that this begins at three o'clock in the afternoon on May 24th. I think that's a Sunday. Yes, it is. May 24th, 3 p.m. At that point, you get to meet the proprietors of this winery and the residents of this wonderful home and head underneath the home into their winery and have a little tour. So we're going to check that out first, probably do some barrel tasting, knowing these guys. And then as of 4 p.m., we'll head over to their tasting room where we will have set up classroom style or presentation style the room for the tasting of the wonderful 2023. Fantastic vintage, guys. Everything from 23 in Northern California is awesome. 2023 nickel and nickel single vineyard Cabernets. The cool thing about nickel and nickel is they make all these different cabs that are 100% varietal and 100% from particular locations. And so on every nickel and nickel bottle, you see Cabernet Sauvignon identified and the location, in this case, Branding Iron Vineyard. But all these single vineyards throughout the Napa Valley are represented. And as you have one after the other, you witness the effect of place. You get to find out that Cabernet can taste so many wonderful different ways based on where it's from. It's a cool level playing field. All of these will be 2023 cabs, all of them 100% Cabernet, all of them Napa. But the difference starts there where each comes from a different particular vineyard. Now, again, 10 spaces left for that. That happens on May 24th. So sign up early and often. William, I'm going to run over there, grab a bottle of wine to tell you about one more event. This is an event that happens every day at the Wine Steward when we're not putting on some other kind of event. This event is called our Wine Bar Menu. And let's just represent two wines to you that are on this week's Wine Bar Menu. The whites, the white plate includes a rosé, the brand new vintage of Muga. This is a Spanish Rosado. That's what they would appropriately call rosé in Spain. And this one's fairly unique. It's not unusual to add some white wine to a rosé for certain effects. And that's what in fact happens here. This Muga Rosado is about 70% Garnacha, otherwise known as Grenache, and 30% Viura. Viura is the white grape of Rioja. Now we have Tempranillo Blanco these days, but that's a newcomer. But Viura has been the mainstay white grape of Rioja, and that is included in this Muga. Viura, never heard of it? Maybe you have if you've had Cava and you've heard what that Cava was made of, and you remember that grape Macabeo, same grape, as grown over there in Catalonia. But this is Rioja Rosado, beautiful stuff, part of the so-called white plate. This is the exception to the white rule this week. The new 2025 Muga is here. It's delish. This wine will just represent five. How about that? Five wines that we believe do very, very well in this glass. This New World Pinot Noir glass allows certain wines, especially fragrant ones, to be even more fragrant. And this is a flight of five reds that aren't necessarily the biggest. This is the biggest, and it goes at the end. But everything along the way is kind of medium-bodied, but super fragrant. And you experience that fragrance, especially in the New World Pinot Noir glass. So this time the theme of the red flight is a bunch of reds that go nicely in the New World Pinot Noir glass. And only one of them, by the way, is a Pinot Noir. How about that? So come on up, be part of our event that we do every day of the week, unless we're putting on some special event, and sign up early and often for the ones I've described before. Thank you so much for watching. Have a great day. Come on in to The Wine Steward. We need you!