Food & Wine — Wine Blog

  Dive into Plume Ridge Bottle Shop’s cellars and you’ll find a number of hidden gem varietals that are beloved in their growing region and worth tasting. For whatever reason, these grape varietals and the wines made from them have not yet received the fandom of recent wine pop stars such as Pinot Grigio, Shiraz and Rosé. Fame is on the event horizon…as many of these varieties grace the wine list at top restaurants. To know these wines is to love them as the locals do.   Assyrtiko: (ah-seer-tiko) If you don’t have the drachmas to visit the Greek isles,...

5 Fast Facts: Countdown these facts from 5 (commonly known), to 1 (geek level), with frequent Plume Ridge Bottle Shop blog writer, Patty Lyn Tweten. Find out how much you know about Chardonnay — the grape, the wine, the phenomenon. Check out our Chardonnay selection here.   5. It is ubiquitous: Chardonnay is everywhere and grown in every continent except Antarctica. The biggest producer is France—also its origin—with 126,000 acres under cultivation. The US, currently in second place with 106,000 acres, momentarily took the lead in the late 1980’s worldwide Chardonnay boom. In the 1990s, Chardonnay became a victim of...

One of the fasting growing varietal and popular in the last 10 years has great history and a wide variety of styles. Here are 5 Fast Facts for Sauvignon Blanc. Check out our Sauvignon Selection Here. The Wild Bunch. Sauvignon Blanc takes its name from the French words sauvage, meaning “wild”, and blanc, or “white”—an accurate description of the white grape’s penchant for unbridled, enthusiastic growth. It is often conflated with Fume Blanc, which is a marketing term coined by Robert Mondavi to rebrand the varietal for the American audience. There’s a Sauvignon Blanc for everyone! Noted for its crisp...

Our Founder Christina Coulourides recently sat down with Gene Valdez of CEO to Rainmaker and shared her success as a wine importer and retailer. Get the scoop on the history of Plume Ridge and the mission of Bottle Shop.  Click here for the Podcast.  

There are wine reviews, and then there are wine scores. Ostensibly, consumers have time to read the often beautifully written review before noting the score and making an informed purchase decision based on review, price and score. Most wine publications describe their scoring method in great detail — and nearly all of them point out that the score alone does not reflect the relative quality of a wine.  However, wine buyers are bombarded with wine scores in the absence of complete reviews. Magazine advertisements with breathtaking bottle-shots shout out 90+ point scores in bold type, along with the name of...