Category: We recommend!

The wine for our toast to a new month will be an oldie but a goodie, Dr. Konstantin Frank Vineyard’s 2018 Blanc de Noir. It has been in our wine rack since August of 2022, when we bought a supply of wine from the vineyard.

Our wine consumption has modified as we age, and we are now wine sippers rather than wine drinkers. This is in part due to information from experts in the medical profession about the issues people have assimilating alcohol in their senior years.

What that can look like in public was reinforced at a local restaurant years ago by a prominent and recognizable woman who made a fool of herself after she drank too much. We hope we are never such an embarrassment to everyone around us, and we certainly think of her anytime we consider having one more drink when we are out and about.

If you want to continue enjoying a bit of wine, here are some reasons to consider moderating your drinking, as recommended by the team at Johns Hopkins Medical.

• "As you age, you become more sensitive to alcohol’s effects."

• "Medicines taken by older adults are more likely to have serious interactions with alcohol and drugs."

• "Older adults also are more likely to have hearing and vision problems and slower reaction times. This puts them at higher risk for falls, fractures, and automobile accidents tied to drinking."

• "Alcohol is also linked to mental health problems like depression and suicide in older adults."

If you are someone who has joined our sparkling resolution to toast each new month with bubbles, add to that you can become a sipper instead of a drinker, and that sparkling non-alcoholic bubbles count too.

Trying wines from different places, made with different grapes, and produced by different methods adds spice to our monthly ritual. Since 2007, we have raised a glass of sparkling wine to greet each new month!

We purchased our bottle from the vineyard for $35.99, taking advantage of a case discount.

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Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photos: ©2025 Penny Cherubino 

Louis de Grenelle Saumur Rosé is one of our favorite sparkling wines. This month, our thoughts are also about wine glasses, the people who design them, sell them, and the places that offer a good glass for our wine enjoyment.

Louis de Grenelle Saumur Rosé would look great in any wine glass. It's 100% Cabernet Franc and has a lovely pink color from the skins. It is a great value wine, and we always want to enjoy it in a traditional red wine glass, not a tulip. We appreciate places that ask if we wish to have sparkling wine in a tulip or a regular wine glass. We adore the places and waitstaff who remember that as our preference.

If a bar or restaurant has terrible wine glasses, we probably won't return unless it is a situation like the one we had a few years ago at Meyer+Chang. They had a sparkling wine glass that looked a bit like a small, weighted bottom pilsner glass. We immediately saw that it was the perfect glass for wine on our windy roof deck. We asked our server where they had found them, and he informed us that this glass was purchased for an outdoor party. We asked if we could buy a few. He inquired and added the cost of them to our bill. We use those outdoors all the time.

In our early days of learning about wine, we followed every trend and recommendation. When Riedel wine glasses arrived on the scene, we replaced our more pedestrian glasses with a set for every wine and extras of the glasses they now call Wine/Champagne Glass/Spritz Drinks.

This week we ordered a storage case for our Riedel stemware and will put it away for a very special bottle or to give to someone who is just discovering a love for wine. Our wine rack currently has a few glasses we use day-to-day from MadeIn.

Trying wines from different places, made with different grapes, and produced by different methods adds spice to our monthly ritual. Since 2007, we have raised a glass of sparkling wine to greet each new month!

If you like to try a wine before you buy, we recommend stopping into Cornwall's Tavern in Kenmore Square to order a glass of Louis de Grenelle Saumur Rosé. They have had this selection on their menu for years.

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Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photos: ©2020 Penny & Ed Cherubino 

This month, we salute all the wineries, wine shops, events, and generous people who have introduced us to new wines at wine tastings. We are doing it with a local wine to remind our readers that opportunities to visit winery tasting rooms can be a day trip or weekend away!

If you visit a local winery, like Westport Rivers, you not only have the opportunity to sample their wines but also to meet some of the people who know the most about their story and their bottles. This is one of the vineyards on the Coastal Wine Trail that includes wine tasting opportunity in our south coast and nearby states.

Many wine shops host tastings, and some offer extraordinary opportunities to try a wine you might never experience otherwise. We once tasted Salon Champagne at a Brix Wine Shop Tasting. While we found that this legendary Blanc de Blanc was not to our taste, we discovered other offerings from this vintner to add to our wine collection. Moreover, we've enjoyed meeting some great winemakers over the years.

Restaurants with great wine lists and knowledgeable staff are another way to sample wines. A few wine bars may offer flights of wines matched with their food. We have been known to ask if we may have half-glasses of two different wines so that we can have an old favorite and something new.

Trying wines from different places, made with different grapes and produced by different methods, adds spice to our monthly ritual. Since 2007, we have raised a glass of sparkling wine to greet each new month!

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Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photos: © 2007- 2025 Penny & Ed Cherubino 

This year, we'll share what we have learned about wine from generous wine mentors, like Michael Serpa of Select Oyster Bar and Little Whale restaurants. This is a special year for Michael. It's the tenth anniversary of Select Oyster, and he has been selected as a semi-finalist for the 2025 James Beard Award for Best Chef in the Northeast. Here's to Michael and his outstanding team at both restaurants.

In 2015, we wrote about sharing the taste of Champagne Jacquesson Cuvée 736 with Michael. 

In the process, he changed our choice of glassware for sparkling wines. He said, "Any nicer sparkling wine, I think, just works much better in a standard kind of wine glass rather than a flute, just because you get the aroma…" "When you're drinking great wine," he continued, "I think it should be in a proper glass where you're going to get the full experience of the wine." This tip has added to our enjoyment of our monthly toasts for the past decade.

Trying wines from different places, made with different grapes and produced by different methods, adds spice to our monthly ritual. Since 2007, we have raised a glass of sparkling wine to greet each new month!

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Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photos: ©2015 Penny & Ed Cherubino 

We will ring in 2025 with a bottle of Deutz Brut Champagne and a year of sharing a toast to each new month with you. This year, our theme will be wine tips we have learned from our wonderful wine mentors and our own experience.

Our tip for New Year's Eve and January is that you don't have to have an expensive bottle of wine to enjoy a toast. Our two favorite ways to achieve this are to find an inexpensive wine you like or buy a half-bottle of slightly more expensive but great-value wine. With our Deutz Champagne, we opted for the half-bottle.

Like many of you, we are drinking less alcohol these days. We love half bottles of great wine. We recently matched a wonderful half-bottle of Amarone with a braised short rib meal. 

We recently enjoyed Deutz at Select Oyster Bar, but our fondest memories of this champagne are from Brasserie Jo, located in the Collonade Hotel. While we enjoyed many items on that menu, the highlight was having champagne and profiteroles. The waiter would come to the table with a plate containing naked profiteroles and a pitcher of fudge sauce. He would begin to pour and then ask us to say when we were happy to have him stop. Finally, he would refill our champagne glasses to enjoy with dessert.

Trying wines from different places, made with different grapes and produced by various methods, adds spice to our monthly ritual. Since 2007, we have raised a glass of sparkling wine to greet each new month!

We purchase our half bottle at The Urban Grape for $38,00

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Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photos: ©2024 Penny Cherubino 

This month, we'll raise a glass of sparkling Sake to another wine hero, Richard Auffrey, from The Passionate Foodie blog. Richard has been writing about food and wine for as long as we have. We've followed him for nearly two decades and find him a reliable food and wine scout. 

We love his rants about the world of food and wine! His recent article, "Rant: Boston+ Area Restaurants, Want To Be Cutting Edge? Embrace Sake," inspired us to try sparkling Sake.

If you want to try Sake or learn more about it, click on the post above and the link to the food pairings he suggests. Then, stroll around the site for more on that topic or other food and wine recommendations. 

We even had a bottle of sparkling Sake in our wine rack. While this particular one may not have been Richard-approved, it did come from a trustworthy wine shop owned by people who care about wines of all kinds. We suggest you go to The Passionate Foodie and let Richard recommend your choice of Sake. 

Trying wines from different places, made with different grapes (OR RICE) and produced by different methods, adds spice to our monthly ritual. Since 2007, we have raised a glass of sparkling wine to greet each new month!

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Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photos: Unsplash

We always have a few bottles of Dibon Cava in our wine rack. Today, we will pop a cork and raise a glass of this great-value wine to the Oz Wine Company and its founder, Andrew Bishop.

We have toasted this Massachusett business before but recently discovered new reasons to salute their work. We have been on the hunt for non-alcoholic (NOLO) sparkling wines. Most of what we've tried disappointed. In one of our recent visits to the Oz website to see what new producers they have added to their list, we discovered that they have selected Muri Drinks from Denmark as a NOLO addition to their line. 

We found that we can buy these NOLO sparklers locally at Formaggio Kitchen, which doubles as a double endorsement of their quality. The combination of a trusted wine merchant and a trusted distributor means we look forward to adding a house NOLO sparkler to our wine rack.

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Our Sparkling Resolution is covered in this post : Join Us as We Toast…

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Here are all the wines we've covered. Since this is a category, this post may appear at the top. Just scroll down for more.

What's on your food lover's shopping list?

Details:

Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photos: ©2020 Penny & Ed Cherubino