The Wine Knows

Have you ever considered trying to earn a Master of Wine degree?

The "MW" is the most prestigious two letters that can follow a wine lover's name - and it's really difficult to achieve.

We have launched a new wine events calendar on winepressnw.com.

We'd like your help testing it out.

Our old system consisted of wineries, wine shops and organizations submitting their items on a form, then us adding them to a page in chronological order. When an event passed, we had to manually remove it. It was an arduous system that wasn't exactly friendly to us or to you.

Last week, we created a Facebook fan page for Wine Press Northwest.

If you're on Facebook, you can get to it here or by searching for "Wine Press Northwest" once you're on Facebook.

Wine lovers thought it was crazy enough when Zinfandel crossed the California border into Oregon (which, frankly, has been growing Zin in the Gorge for a century).

When the red variety made famous by California jumped the Columbia River into Washington, that was outrageous - made even more so when those Washington Zins started winning awards in NorCal competitions.

Pacific Northwest wines fared extremely well last week at the Grand Harvest Awards wine competition in California's Sonoma County.

At least 37 Northwest wines brought home gold medals in the competition, which takes a particularly close look at how wines show a sense of place, or terroir.

I've been working on a new feature that compiles feeds from a variety of blogs whose posts focus on Northwest wine.

I put this together with Yahoo! Pipes, a tool I'm still fooling around with, trying to learn. So I have some refining to do still, but I wanted to share this with you.

It was another year of interesting stories and big news in Pacific Northwest wine country. Weather was a big issue for growers and winemakers throughout the region. Wineries and vineyards came under new ownership, a giant in the B.C. wine world stepped away, and we lost Papa Pinot.

This week's cold snap means ice wine producers in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley will have a merry - and likely warm - Christmas for the second time in three years.

Mission Hill Family Estate near Kelowna, B.C., reported that it had two crews out picking frozen Riesling and Vidal grapes in both the central and southern Okanagan Valley. They are working through six inches of snow that fell and in temperatures between -12 and -21 celcius.

I've pretty much figured out what I'll be opening for Thursday's big meal.

One issue I have is that our Thanksgiving dinner will be a bit smaller than usual, just six adults. Thus, I have too many wines on my list and might drop one or two before the turkey hits the table.

It was not long ago that the Canadian and U.S. dollars were at par, an economic event that had not occurred since 1976.

When this happened, I wrote a blog item lamenting the fact that B.C. wines generally were no longer the great deals they had been.