Love Sterling cabernet! Gotta have it with a seared steak. :drool:

Coolest label I've seen lately--Papio wines. Has a funky illustration of monkeys playing latin jazz. I bought a bottle, but I can't tell you how it was because my fiance guzzled it, dammit.

I'm back.

One of the best buys in wine right now is Georges DuBoeuf Beaujolais Villages 2003. 2003 was a fabulous year for Beaujolais; in fact, DuBoeuf calls it the Vintage of the Sun and has attached a special extra label saying so on the bottle near the neck. Remember that hot Summer when people died from the heat in France? It concentrated the flavors in the grapes so that the wine has wonderful fruit. I have paid as little as $7.99 for it on sale in Pennsylvania where it is normailly $9.99. I saw it in Tennessee last week for $12.49 which was still a bargain.

I'll have to look for that stuff, Kat, I'm very fond of Beaujolais. Something I haven't seen here yet is a Central Coastal Californian: Mirassou. They make a lively, lovely, quite sweet white. I suppose it would be lovely for marinating dessert ingredients in but so far I just couldn't bear doing anything with it but drinking it.

Currently, we're cooking with Two-Buck Chuck, white or red -- Charles Shaw, available at Trader Joe's all over the country, gets its name from its rock-bottom price of $2 per 750ml. Vin très ordinaire, but pleasant, and superb value for money.

* Except in Pennsylavnia.

Anything that unites French and Germans should be viewed with suspicion. :-)

I'll take CA reds (Bordeaux primarily with Berringer vinyards being at or near the top) and German whites (dry is my favorite). CA has figured out how to engineer what the French leave up to mother nature. And the Germans, like the Californians, leave nothing to chance.

The Aussie have also shown that they know how to produce a good red but there are some imposters piggybacking on that success.

Where you have to go to the ABC store instead. I get a mite spoiled in California with its one-stop shopping for groceries and beer and wine and liquor, in the grocery stores.

MO and IL are the same as CA when it comes to beer and liquor. But for whatever reasons, Walgreens no longer carries beer and liquor here in MO. And they used to have the best selection and prices.

ABC is Virginia...and one or two other states, IIRC. In PA, they're officially called Wine & Spirits Shoppes...most folks generally refer to them as "state liquor stores."

Missouri boy, they are called "State Stores".

This "Wine & Spirits Shoppe" is a new innovation where they're trying to pretend that they aren't state-owned businesses and also trying to make us forget that the booze is twice as expensive as that across our southern borders.

Oh, and beer, incidentally, isn't sold in a State Store. Beer is sold by a "distributor."

On the upside, for the first time ever, you can buy beer by the case in a distributor on Sundays. It's quite exciting. (before last month you had to go to a restaurant bar that had sunday sales and you couldn't buy more than two six packs per visit. The turnaround from taking two six packs out to your car trunk counts as a new visit).

We can tell. I just wouldn't use the word "spoiled", exactly.

Yeah...my bad.

hell Syc the CRAP wine you drink can be found at 7 11 , or Mapco Express !!!!

Or my local Mobil. :D

Okay, with all this superb local knowledge, here's a question for the ages that may braid this thread together with the one about what foods you're addicted to:

Philly Cheese Steak: best wine to accompany? And best beer?

Wine: a hearty but cheap red, probably a Zinfandel or the afore-mentioned "three-buck Chuck".

Beer: a deep, dark stout or porter with some tang to it.

Beer-wise, I would recommend something light such as Yuengling, because you don't want to add anything too heavy to the ton of grease that you've just consumed.

Wine...Boones Farm, of course! :)