Holiday Gifts for Wine Lovers

As Thanksgiving's roast turkeys become the weekend's turkey sandwiches, it's time to start thinking about the next holiday on the calendar . . .

Do you have a wine lover on your shopping list? A wine class or one of our packaged wine boxes make perfect gifts.

We offer flexible gift certificates available for specific classes, specific wine boxes, or pick any amount of your choice and allow your friend or loved one decide how they want to spend it.

Certificates are available by mail or by email.

Contact us to discuss the details or place your order online!

Happy Holidays!

WSA Brings the Wine Class to You!

The WSA is headed out of the classroom and into your home with our new "Wine Class in a Box" Program! Join us each month as we hand select our favorite wines to create a collection of portable "classes" that are delivered right to your door. Each six-bottle "class" is delivered in a carrying tote, complete with producer / wine style / regional information, maps, serving suggestions and WSA tasting notes. We also offer a monthly value case with 12 Bottles Under $12. It's like having your very own personal wine educator or sommelier in your kitchen or dining room!

September's "classes" include The "Heart of France:" Loire Valley Wines and Dr. Strangewine: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Unusual Grape Varieties.

Through September and October, we're offering free home delivery for all boxes, so now's the time to check it out!

Find out more or place your order here: http://www.wineandspiritarchive.com/classes/shop

WSA Tastes Gamay and Decides Oregon Does it Better!

Of all the Mix Magazine tastings we participated in, the Beaujolais tasting was probably the most disappointing. These light-bodied, summer-appropriate reds have crept up in price, but not in complexity. Much of what we tried was dull, uninteresting and not worth the price.

Enter Oregon gamay-based wines! Katherine Cole snuck a few of these into the tasting and they immediately stood out, offering multi-dimensional flavors of red fruit, baking spices and earthy notes, all backed by a fuller, richer body than what we find in Beaujolais. Hopefully, this a grape Willamette Valley winemakers will continue to experiment with!

You can read more about our Beaujolais tasting here.

Payment Plans Available for WSET Courses

Interested in taking a WSET Wine Certification Course this fall, but struggling to get the financing together? Payment plans continue to be available for these courses at no additional cost to students. Here's how they work: 1) we break the tuition costs into 2 to 4 monthly installments, 2) you make a monthly payment on either the 1st or 15th of the month, and 3) as soon as your first payment is received your course materials will be shipped out to you. The only requirement is that your final payment be received at least 2 weeks before the course's end date.

And for those of you who work in the wine industry, don't forget to ask your employers if they will help cover the cost of your training. Many are willing to cover or share tuition expenses!

Upcoming WSET Wine Courses

WSET Advanced Course, Portland, OR, Sept. 14 - Nov. 30

WSET Intermediate Course, Portland, OR, Oct. 14 - Dec. 9

WSET Intermediate Course, Seattle, WA, Nov. 7 - Nov. 8

WSA Students and Alums Visit Trisaetum and Anne Amie

As part of our most recent WSET Advanced Course, we took our students - as well as a few alums - down to the Willamette Valley to tour the vineyards and wineries of Trisaetum and Anne Amie Vineyards.

At Trisaetum - a new winery located in the Ribbon Ridge AVA - we toured the winery's newly constructed, state of the art facility. The winery's top flight technologies included an air filtration system developed by Nasa and what - by the end of our visit - we came to know as the "bug-sucking-machine": a grape processor that uses a vacuum to remove all leaves, dirt, bugs, water, and other debris from the grapes. This "cleaning" process, followed by a double hand-sorting of the fruit is thought to be an important contributor to the ultimate quality of Trisaetum wines. We were all certainly sold on the 2007 off-dry Riesling we were served upon arriving at the winery . . . A huge thank you to Greg, Alice and Courtney for the tour and tasting they arranged for us!

With a little time to kill, WSA student Jeremy Saxton arranged a quick stop for us at one of his favorite wineries - Lenné Estate, where we sampled some beautiful Pinot Noirs. Thank you to Lenné for accommodating us on such short notice!

Next, we headed to Anne Amie Vineyards where WSA Alum Ksandek Podbielski showed us the vineyards, pointing out several AVAs visible from Anne Amie's beautiful back patio as well as the winery's new vegetable garden. Thomas, Anne Amie's winemaker, then took us into the cellar where he explained the flow of fruit through the facility and his own philosophy on winemaking. The visit ended with several comparative tastings. In the first, we tasted the difference between two bottlings of the same wine - one under screw cap and another under cork. Both were beautiful, but we all agreed that the wine under cork was showing it's age much more quickly, while the screw capped wine tasted much younger. Next - as part of Thomas' discussion on how he creates his bottlings - we compared two different blends. Each blend was made from the same three barrels, but with a different ratio of wine taken from each cask. Given that the two blends contained the same three wines, the differences between the two were quite distinct and offered great insight into the blending process. Thank you to Thomas, Ksandek and Katie for making this such a wonderful stop!