We consider our wine room to be the most fun and exciting part of the off sale business. We have a great variety of wines that we have chosen to represent our store. We are continually researching, listening to customers, and sampling(our favorite part) new wines to bring to you. We look forward to visiting with our customers about new wines for our store. Your suggestions are very important to the continued improvement and ultimate success of our wine room!

      Deb Sovde, our in house wine connoisseur, is really fun to kibitz with about wines. She is truly knowledgeable about wines and is an expert when it comes to matching wines with food. Be watching for Debs column on many wine related topics on our web site.

      There are many good wine-and-food pairings for meals. The first basic rule of thumb: Serve what you like.

      But what we always hope to find is the match where food and wine really play off each other for a delightful and memorable meal.

      Red wine with meat and white with fish and poultry is not the rule any more. The way to select the best wine coice is to consider the seasonings and sauce or flavors that will cook with the meat. For example: Meats that you might serve with a fruit condiment- cranberries, pineapple, applesauce or chutney, for example, can often be paired with a slightly fruity wine. Remember that fruity is not necessarily sweet.

      Spicy seasonings really need a lighter, fruity wine to enhance their complexity because a heavy dry wine makes spicy foods simply taste hot or bitter.

      Meats with a higher fat content, such as steak or prime rib and some lamb, go well with heavier, richly flavored red wines that will cut through the fat between bites to keep the palate from growing tired of the meat. Cabernet, merlot, syrah or red zinfandel work great.

      Many of us like to say we only like dry wines, but truthfully, Americans like lots of "fruit" in our wines. French, Italian and Spanish wines are typically more "restrained" -have less noticeable fruit -because in those countries, people tend to drink wines with food as part of a meal, not as a cocktail beverage. American and Australian styles have richer fruit because that's what we seem to like. Wine is frequently consumed before or after a meal, so we want stuff that tastes good by itself.