Archive - 2010 - Blog entry

To Commemorate our nearly 2 years of wine tasting, as well as the addition of 2 more contributors, we would like to give a little extra recognition to our favourite wine experiences of the past year. And do this by having our inaugural ECoast Wine Glass Awards. For this first year we would like to give out 3 awards for red, white and specialty wines (Basically anything not general considered white or red). Along with these wine awards we are also giving one award to the best winery tasting experience we had in the past year.

This past Saturday was the grand opening of a wonderful new winery in central Virginia called the Glass House Winery. So of course this meant I was on hand to check out the newest selection of wines to come to my neck of the woods. And I have to say i was well impressed by this new comer to the Virginia wine industry. Not only are the wines delicious and interesting but the location and presentation of the winery itself is not to be missed.

A lot of us on here take the simplicity of buying wine at the grocery store for granted, but in several states in the US this isn’t the case. In these states it is illegal to sell wine inside of a grocery store and thus they get relegated to separate liquor stores, some of which must be state controlled. One such state with these laws is Pennsylvania, a state with some absolutely superb wines along with some truly corked laws (ah wine humor … kinda sad really). But now it seems the state has come up with a work around of sorts for this issue, one which is meeting a bit of resistance.

Maryland is definitely one of those interesting states when it comes to the American wine industry. This is because it has the odd dichotomy of both trying to improve and grow its wine industry while also having some odd wine shipping laws ...