Drink local!

The week of October 11th marks the second annual Regional Wine Week. What is Regional Wine Week? I’m glad you asked.

Regional Wine Week is the brainchild of Jeff Siegel (Fort Worth Star Telegram and WineCurmudgeon.com) and Dave McIntyre (Washington Post and WineLine). They organized a handful of wine writers who blogged about regional wine (i.e. North American wine that isn’t from California, Washington, and Oregon) during the same week. By all accounts it was rousing success with roughly 40 writers and bloggers professing the virtues of local wines.

As a result, DrinkLocalWine.com was created as a portal Web site giving readers access to the various writers participating in the blogging effort during Regional Wine Week. This also spawned the first of annual DrinkLocalWine.com conference which I blogged about earlier.

So what’s it all about? The idea here is that we now have a greater selection than ever of wines from all over the country. Unfortunately, much of the wine produced outside the big three (four if you include New York) never get their due. With few exceptions, restaurants hesitate to list them and retailers are afraid the carry any significant amount of inventory. The tragedy is that there are some really damn good wines that are overshadowed by their bigger brethren in Europe and California.

So, Regional Wine Week is all about giving these wines the respect they deserve. Not all of it is good, but by supporting your regional wineries, it only encourages them to get better.

Okay, you may say, you’re from California. True. So, my regional wine happens to be from Sonoma. The rules of Regional Wine Week state that we have to write about “wine from around here” – wherever “here” might be for me. Well, I’m going to break the rules in this case, and follow the spirit of the idea. Since California gets enough attention, I’m going to write about Michigan (where I’m originally from) wines. I think there are some fantastic wines being made in the old MI and I think they deserve attention. Now, I just need to find a Michigan wine around here. Um, right. Think I’ll try online.

Watch this space for more the week of October 11th.

Tags: drink local, drinklocalwine.com, regional wine week