Live Life...Drink Wine ~
Certified Sommelier Stanley Browne and the Staff at Robust
comment on the pleasures and plights of wine, food, travel and entertaining.
A. Bommarito Wines Chaumette Winery Classique Wines Major Brands
It was an amazing event and we are proud to support, through a portion of the proceeds, College Bound a nationally acclaimed organizations that helps at risk youth in St. Louis prepare and succeed in 4-year colleges.
And an extra special thanks to Jennifer Johnson, Marketing Director at Chaumette for partnering with us on making this event such a success. We can't wait for next year!
Welcomes to the world of bubbles. In this New Year of 2012 I invite you to celebrate every day! Here is a little sip for thought in one of my recent articles in Ladue News:
Dark and delectable; velvety, rich, smooth and creamy. Its powerful, yet tender sweetness lingers long after it slowly melts away.
Chocolate. The word itself conjures dizzying thoughts of delight and decadence. It's easy to lose yourself in its luxury, and paired with some lush and robust wines, the result can be euphoric, a playground for the senses.
When my trusted friend and brilliant colleague, Jennifer Johnson, Marketing Director at Chaumette Winery, approached me with the idea of gathering the finest local chocolate producers for a chocolate and wine event, I was eager to help. Jennifer's wealth of wine knowledge, as well as, strong marketing and PR experience has made planning for this event seamless, and every bit more worthy.
Stanley and I are proud to live and own a business in St. Louis. We are equally passionate about supporting local businesses and our community. Some of the finest chocolate producers and wines are right here in our region and we believe we should foster, support and celebrate what we are all about.
We are also passionate about the people of our community, and felt it was important that we include a philanthropic component to our efforts. For us, education is the key to economic freedom, so in this inaugural year of The Art of Chocolate and Wine, we chose to honor College Bound. With a portion of the proceeds going to support, low-income College Bound students, we can celebrate all that our community has to offer.
On Sunday, January 22, we hope you will join us for The Art of Chocolate and Wine: Inspire Your Desires!Celebrate and taste the finest local, artisan, hand-crafted chocolates we have to offer and sip on wines that will ignite your senses.
After all, isn't everyone looking for a little inspiration these days?
Special thanks to our fabulous chocolatiers and wine sponsors:
“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”-Benjamin Franklin
So I have been asked to start writing this blog on beer. Even though I have a love for wine and opening a jammy blend from Rhone with friends, drinking the rosés of Provence and swimming in the Mediterranean Sea.
90% of the time when I’m ending a phone or text conversation with a friend the words, “Oh and grab a case on the way,” is the way our talk ends. The more I thought about it, you can say I’ve come to think of the relationship of wine and beer like this: Where wine is the expression of the grape, beer is an expression of the artist. Unencumbered by the traditions and rules that the wine industry has to deal with, a beer makers creation is limited only by his or hers imagination.
With beer if you taste chocolate, coffee, or even pumpkin spice, odds are you taste it because that is an ingredient itself, with the quantity of those ingredients specifically chosen to give the drinker a prefect mouthful of beer every time.
I’ve worked at Robust for almost three years and the one thing that makes me chuckle is that we have a beer list with almost thirty beers broken down in the similar to our wine, easy-to-use Robust Factors. There are some people that still don’t know we even sell beer. The beer categories are a little different than the wine: Fresh, Lively, Hearty, Robust, and Fruity. The beer list changes about twice a year, and since its spring, that means its time to switch it up. There are a couple of heavy hitters that have a good chance of making the cut due to their style and expression. From Goose Island Brewery in Chicago there is the India Pale Ale, and from Brazil the Xingu Black Beer.
The India Pale Ale when poured into a glass has a great burnt orange color and a nice head that hangs on the glass like lace with every drink (lace, actually being the technical name for it). Time to drink, it starts with just a tingle from the hops on the tongue followed by fruit and malt coating the tongue then finishing with a long hoppy finish which lasts at least 7 seconds.
Xingu black beer is a very unique beer when poured into a glass. Carbonated with nitrogen instead of CO2 the bubbles in the beer are light, the beer is smooth as it rolls over the tongue tasting chocolate, malt and just a hint of red fruit. This is a beer that is a great segway beer for a person looking to break into the world of dark beers, and a beer for dark beer lovers to drink sitting on a patio on a hot summer day.
So next time you go to Robust look your server in the eyes and ask them for a “twelve-ounce three-ounce,” and I promise you will get a laugh out of them and a great drink in your hand, ENJOY!
With Easter Sunday quickly approaching and spring in full force, it's time to start entertaining. The new season calls for a diversity of foods from fresh vegetables and fruits to salmon and lamb.
Here are my picks for this season's dining table:
08 Parducci Sustainable White, Mendocino County $11 09 Chaumette Chardonel Reserve, Ste. Genevieve, Missouri $17 09 Hahn Pinot Noir, Monterey, California $14 06 Algodon (Syrah, Cabernet, Malbec), Mendoza, Argentina $16
Art and Wine. Wine and Art. Each inspires the other in everyday life.
We believe our proprietary wine, Cellar Arts "The Robust Blend" Napa Valley is an art form in itself—the delicate blending of grape varietals; the subtle nuances in taste, smell and structure; and the art of the winemaker's (Julien Fayard) craftmanship to produce an outcome that one will sip, savor and appreciate.
But now it's time to we have some fun with it.
This bottle of wine is looking for some new inspiration—a new way of talking, a new way of walking—a new label.
Calling all creatives—photographers, painters, illustrators, printmakers, mixed-media, et al. Here's your chance to inspire the world to drink "The Robust Blend". Enter the Robust "Design Our Wine" Label Competition.
What inspires you to drink a wine? Or does wine inspire you? Whatever the case may be, we're giving away more than $500 worth of cash and prizes to the artist who can best dress our wine bottle. Plus, we're inviting your friends, family and the rest of the wine-loving community to vote and help you land a spot as a Top 10 Finalist.
The Final Four (three runners-up and the Winner) will be chosen by a hand-selected jury of art and wine savvy professionals including Kelly Pollock, Executive Director, Center Of Creative Arts (COCA);Tom Lang, Department of Art Chair, Webster University; Catherine Neville, Publisher of FEAST Magazine; and Wine Producer Cal Nicholson, Nicholson Jones Selections.
Last week I talked a little bit about Syrah and Shiraz, and the wonderful spice notes that come along with wines of their nature. But, even though people love to drink Syrah and Shiraz, and while the presence of spice is second nature to us within gastronomic realms, I consistently watch drinkers have an acute aversion to the idea of herbs and spices in wine.
They love how the wine tastes—but the mere suggestion that those wonderful aromas are spice-oriented feels perverse.
But why? The coupling of food and spice should come as no great surprise. In fact, we seem to expect that flavorful food must involve some generous dash of spice. Proof? Pepper pervades everything: eggs, goat cheese salads, curries, or even grilled sockeye salmon see us all mindlessly (yet intuitively) spiking our food with the treasured spice. Pepper has earned a permanent spot on our table.
So, why do we flinch at the suggestion of pepper and spice nuances in wine? I suspect that the answer is two-fold:
1.) Wine is made from grapes, and grapes are a fruit. A mention of black cherries, plums or lemon pulp in a wine description and we don’t flinch—fruit aromas and flavors, borne from a fruity source, make a lot of sense. Aromas or flavors outside of the fruity realm feel innately out of sync.
2.) Wine aromas and flavors can be classified as primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary aromas are usually tied to the overwhelmingly fruity components, while secondary aromas are those often related to the way that the wine was made (type of oak, yeast strains, etc). Tertiary aromas are related to terroir (the essence of the place that the grapes were grown) and to complexities that arise as the wine ages in the bottle. These potential tertiary aromas are numerous, ranging from mold to gasoline to wet stones, to wet dog to ‘barnyard’ to, you guessed it—spices. Spice nuances in wine develop via similar processes to rotting mushrooms or burning rubber nuances. Within this collective tertiary aroma/flavor group, it’s no wonder that spices often get confined to a genre that seems off-putting.
