Rosé in winter, whaaaaat? I know, it’s an unusual take. But winter is exactly when dark rosés should be a go-to part of your repertoire, especially once the holiday indulgences are over and meals shift back toward balance. With, you know, vegetables other than potatoes. We’re well into that curry, soup and stew-y time of year, and it’s also the season for brassicas like cabbage, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts and kale, which aren’t known for being the easiest wine pairing-wise.

Enter: dark rosés, the Swiss Army knives of wine selections. There’s room on your table for wines whose color ranges from beet juice purple to candy-bright pink-fuchsia to almost-a-light-red-wine. The ones you might be afraid to pick up off the shelf, for fear that they’ll be sweet or unpopular. This tasting is for those wines.

Prestige Champagnes. The name alone says it all. This is a splurge of a tasting. If you’re the type to pop fancy bubbly on New Year’s Eve, this tasting will be right up your alley. If you, like me, prefer a low-key New Year’s Eve, a quieter way to reflect upon the year that’s passed and usher in the one to come, this tasting might be something you tackle at a different time of year, bringing some luxury and “special-ness” to less-traditional seasons. However you do it, I just hope you savor it. These are Champagnes that are quite literally years in the making.

I will forever maintain that body is a weird word to apply to liquids, but since we don’t have words like skim and whole or categories like lager and stout in wine, I’ll leave it alone and accept that it is what it is. For this tasting, we get to focus on full-bodied whites: the white wines that feel as weighty on your palate as most reds, with richness that is sometimes buttery, sometimes oily, and always decadent.

If you’ve shied away from the very much untrendy full-bodied white wines, take this as your sign to give these wines a chance. What have been at times homogeneously overripe, buttery wines are now often richly nuanced, with clear varietal and terroir expression in addition to the luscious effects from winemaking choices. They’re the wine equivalent of a succulent, satisfying bowl of lobster bisque.

Syrah, Shiraz, tomato, tom-ah-to. Whichever name you give it, it’s a grape variety that makes some of the world’s greatest (and in my totally biased opinion, sexiest) wines.

The thing is, I’m a total sucker for a great nose on a wine. I was the kind of teen who lifted the lid to sniff every single candle in the White Barn Candle Co. store in the mall, even though I had zero intention of buying anything. Drugstore shampoos and body lotions, melons in the grocery store, even cleaning products all needed to pass my sniff tests as a young adult. I haven’t changed a bit, so it’s not at all surprising that sticking my nose into wine glasses is an activity endlessly entertains me.

Even if you reserve your sniffing for more “normal” activities like perfume or cologne shopping and cooking, I encourage you to let yourself abandon all self-consciousness about your wine expertise (or lack thereof) and to just stick your noses deep into these glasses of Syrah and Shiraz to experience how incredibly fascinating these aromatic red wines can be.

If “fortified” made you think of those cereal ads in which vitamins are somehow added back to crunchy grains (or sugar bombs, let’s be real), don’t worry, fortified wines are not the same thing. In wine’s case, fortification is essentially the process of adding a spirit to a wine, which creates a ‘fortified’ wine with higher alcohol. From there, other winemaking decisions around when to add the fortifying spirit, aging, blending, oxidation and the addition of aromatic herbs can further alter the original wine, creating something entirely new, complex and delicious.

These are the wines that sit somewhere between wine and spirit, best between dinner and bed. Whether treated as digestifs or bodily fortification against winter’s chill, fortified reds are for everyone. If you thought Ports, Vins Doux Naturels and Barolo Chinato were only for fusty old Brits who call each other ‘gents’ in smoking rooms with heavy wood paneling, think again. I love me some history and am a total sucker for all things romantically aged, but fortified reds are very much worth bringing into your present, especially at the holidays.

Some of the wildest tasting notes I’ve ever taken are from Rioja’s Reds. It’s a region that’s as famous and historic as any in the world, yet somehow frequently under-valued…which means you can find insane prices on some stunners. One of the misperceptions that affects Rioja’s popularity is that its aging classification system, with the Crianza, Reserva, and Gran Reserva categories, is the primary - and sometimes only - way to understand its wines.

I’ve taken an alternative approach in this tasting, focusing instead on the two factors that have the most impact what you’re tasting in the glass:

1. Location, location, location

2. How the wine is made

If you get red wine teeth as easily as I do, take your selfies before this tasting really gets going. American red wines are known for being some of the wine world’s biggest, boldest, ripest reds. That means your teeth could end up looking like you’ve befriended Dracula. I can also recommend wearing dark clothes or busy prints, because red wine spills and splashes are real, even for the highly experienced among us.

That said, more and more American producers have dialed back on the ‘bigger is better’ approach, making extremely elegant, nuanced and restrained styles of red wines, so consider mentioning your preferences when shopping for this tasting if you already know that you like one style more than the other.

Either way, this American Reds tasting is going to focus on monovarietal, or single-variety red wines. There are plenty of fantastic red blends in the US too, they’re just not the focus of this tasting, which will help you get to know the differences between the best-known varietal wines in the United States.

If you’ve made it this far without running away from the word “sweet,” congratulations! You’re in for a real treat. Sweet Rieslings, like most sweet wines these days, are just not all that popular, despite the unassailable fact that humans both love and crave sweets.

Even in Denmark, right next door to Germany, where the crème de la crème of sweet Rieslings are made, these wines aren’t exactly flying off the shelves. Wines that were once among the most premium wines in the world are simply not commanding the market interest or prices commensurate with the high level of effort and risk required to produce them.

Selfishly, part of me wants to gatekeep these wines from the massive American market, since increased interest will drive prices back up. But the dedicated producers of these wines deserve the sales, and let’s be real, I couldn’t gatekeep if I tried. I guess that’s the American in me, always ready to share a good find.

I feel that I should clarify upfront that I unabashedly love Rieslings. I know they’re not everyone’s cup of tea (yet), but Rieslings are for sure amongst my desert island wines, the ones I’d absolutely need to include if I were ever forced to whittle down my wine selection to just the barest of minimums.

That said, my love for Riesling is not actually the reason why I’m creating two Riesling tastings back to back. This tasting is focused on dry Rieslings from around the world, while next week’s will focus on tasting through the styles in between dry and fully sweet, because there is quite the range on offer.

Rieslings are wines that I reach for again and again. I hope that after this tasting, you will too.

November has indelibly become the month of Beaujolais. Thanks to Georges Duboeuf’s marketing promotion in the 1970s, Beaujolais Nouveau, a particular style of Beaujolais, is celebrated every third Thursday in November with cries of “Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé!” and a lot of wine. Not all of it good. In fact, most of it not.

But there’s so much more to Beaujolais than Nouveau. I won’t say that Beaujolais Nouveau is horrible, since there are some that are decent, but in this tasting, we’re going to focus on Beaujolais that’s not Nouveau. The good stuff. Specifically, the crus.

Body is such a weird word to describe liquids, isn’t it? I can’t help wishing there was a better word to describe the fullness, weight and texture of wine. Body, to me, just feels so fleshy. As in, in the flesh. Not at all how I think of wine.

But it’s the word that’s widely used, so I’ve accepted it too. This tasting groups styles of red wines together by a body-related characteristic. All of these red wines have light bodies, which in wine’s case, means that their weight is more akin skim than whole milk. Hopefully, I haven’t deterred you with mentions of flesh and milk, because these are some of my go-to styles of red wine.

Austria always makes me think of Alpine skiers and hearty dishes like Wiener Schnitzel, knödels, and apfelstrudel. And if you just thought, wait, aren’t those foods German? Think again. Austria and Germany share a language and many cultural traditions, but Austria has a history just as long, complex and fascinating as its northern neighbor. And it has a wine culture all its own.

Austria’s capital city, Vienna, consistently tops lists of “most liveable cities in the world,” and I like to think that might be at least a teensy bit to do with the fact that Vienna is also the world’s only metropolis still growing vines and making wine within city limits. This is a country where wine has been made since the Bronze Age, and if the preservation of the vines within its capital is any indication, wine culture here is still going strong. This is your sign to get to know Austrian wines, starting with some of its best-known styles: the whites.

Pinot Noir is the Goldilocks of grapes. It needs conditions that are just right to make great wine. And it’s also somehow the fifth most planted red grape variety in the world. You’d think that fewer producers would want to mess with such a cruel mistress of a grape, but Pinot Noir wines, when they’re good, are just really, really good. Mesmerizingly good. This tasting focuses on some of the world’s best regions for still red Pinot Noir wines.

No one is surprised that the first Italian tasting here is focused on the reds. Italy is famous for its red wines, but please don’t count out the whites! We’ll get to those another time, don’t worry. This tasting covers the “biggies.” The must-know Italian red wine styles, the ones that are widely exported and have come to represent Italy’s modern wine culture, even though it’s far more diverse than we could ever cover in a single tasting.

I love Champagne. Love the wine, love the place, love the people, love the stories. I am completely biased when it comes to Champagne, but I still hope this tasting helps you sort through what is marketing fluff and what is actually true about these wines. And as always, I hope it helps you discover your own preferences and favorite styles of Champagne.

There’s a reason I called this “Wine for Dessert” and not “Dessert Wines.” For whatever reason, dessert wines have gotten a bad rap. There’s a tendency to think of sweet wines as the bottom shelf, gas station-style swill that tastes sweet like soda, but also not quite like soda, and that just screams future headache. These wines are not that.

And if you do serve wine for dessert, know that it is one of the easiest (read: laziest) desserts you can offer…and yet it’s somehow one of the classiest choices you can make.

Grenache. Garnacha. Granaccia. Cannonau. Many names, one grape. It just depends on where it grows. Grenache is probably best-known as the “G” in GSM wines, southern France’s Grenache-Syrah-Mourvèdre blends. An unsurprising claim to fame, since Grenache is often blended with other grape varieties. Grenache has a reputation for being a bit “blah” by itself, since the grapes can accumulate lots of sugar, resulting in high alcohol wines that lack sufficient acidity to taste balanced.

But. (There’s always a “but” when it comes to wine.) More and more producers are finding ways to bring out the best in Grenache. And the vine’s ability to thrive in dry soils is coming in handy in these times of climate change, as droughts have become commonplace in some wine regions. This tasting will take you through Grenache’s greatest hits, both in blends and monovarietal wines, so that you can decide whether it’s blah or brilliant.

The Rhône might as well be two separate regions. The defining feature that connects them both is the namesake river, cutting through France from the Swiss Alps all the way south to the Mediterranean. But the Northern and Southern Rhône are very different places viticulturally. This tasting covers the top red wine appellations: 3 from the north and 3 from the south, so that you can form your own opinions about Rhône Reds.

Chardonnay is the most-grown white grape variety globally, so pretty much everyone has heard of it. That ubiquity hasn’t always helped Chardonnay though, especially California Chardonnay. After a huge wave of popularity in the 90s, the “ABC” movement (Anything But Chardonnay) gained traction in an effort to shift away from buttery, overripe, oaky wines that were starting to all taste the same. Trends always change though, and so do winemaking styles. Recent endorsements from celebs like Lizzo have certainly given Chardonnay a boost in perception.

California Chardonnay is often discussed like it’s a single style of wine, rather than a wide range of styles depending on where the grapes are grown and how the winemaker decided to treat the wine. This tasting is intended to give a sense of the range of styles produced in that massive and sunny state, so that you can figure out what you prefer.

Bubbles! Effervescence captured in a bottle. Just the sound of a cork popping is enough to inspire a cheer…even though ok, fine, these days I carefully & quietly pop those bottles. And not just because of proper etiquette, but because emergency room visits from poorly popped bottles are a real thing. Safety first, folks. Keeping a grip on the cork once the wire cage and foil are off and carefully twisting the bottle (not the cork) while holding it at a 30-45° angle pointed away from faces and breakable things is not just fancy, it’s smart.

Champagne usually comes to mind first when we start talking about sparkling wines, but this tasting will include 5 other classic styles so that you can get into what makes each style distinct and decide which you prefer.