Thanksgiving is a holiday almost designed to fail. Thankfully, choosing the wine is the easiest part. In fact, do it right and wine can come to the rescue.

Raise your hand if you’re one of the many wine drinkers who say they don’t like Chardonnay. Or maybe you’re like Paul Giamatti in Sideways and you’re “not drinking any @#$% Merlot!” Well then Uncorked Kitchen & Wine Bar’s “Old World vs New World” wine tasting class has a message for you — “Never write off a varietal.” The class focuses on sampling two versions of the same grape varietal—one from an Old World country (essentially Europe and the Middle East), and another from the New Wor

Most wines are pretty straightforward. But others are… different. They’re different because although they’re made with largely the same ingredients and with the same fundamental process, a slight tweak to either can generate a much different result. And that result can challenge our concepts of what we consider as wine. Sparkling wines. Fortified wines like Sherry and Port. Dessert wines. All are technically wines, but each feature either a different production process or ingredient that sets them apart from your everyday “table” wine.

“The varietal is not the star here.” That’s the biggest lesson coming out of the Uncorked Kitchen & Wine Bar’s wine tasting class “Wines of Spain & Portugal.” For many wine drinkers, particularly beginners just learning their way around, recognizing the kind of grape used in making wine tends to be the first focus

Wine appreciation is one of those skills that seems almost out of reach to the uninitiated or uneducated. Watching a master sommelier take a sip of wine and immediately ID the exact type, region, and year seems like magic to those of us who take a sip and think it just “tastes like wine.” But after many years of enjoying wine without much thought into what I liked or why, I decided to make an effort to learn about wine properly. Not to nail a blind tasting, but to just gain a better understandi