Not sure about everyone else, but Dry-January didn’t last too long in our household this year. What’s usually a pretty easy endeavour following a glutenous December had a pretty bleak start this year. When everything is locked down, it’s cold, dark, and we literally can’t go anywhere at all, nice meals at home are all we have to look forward to at my house. Whether it’s take-out from some favourite restaurants that need our support, or a cozy home-cooked meal, denying that nice glass of wine turned out to be a bridge too far this year. So cheers to the best of intentions under pandemic conditions!

What pairs best with seasonal depression, lock downs, and cold dark weather? For me, a nice big red is what I’m reaching for these days. And probably the most popular big red on the market today is Cabernet Sauvignon. I’m sure everyone is familiar with this grape, but maybe not all it’s various styles. It can be a bit of a chameleon. It can go from dark fruit, earthy, graphite notes to dusty, herbaceous menthol flavours, to big jammy, stewed fruit compote depending where and how it was made. Always full bodied, but can be bone dry, earthy and tannic, right up to sweet, jammy and oaky. So here’s an excellent selection that runs the gamut.

This is a topic that almost always comes up in all my other Zoom tastings and in any wine education seminars, or restaurant staff trainings back when those still happened in the before times. It is one of the most important topics in wine today because organic and natural wine is becoming increasingly popular and biodynamics have become a cornerstone of that movement. But it’s a complicated system with a lot of myths, so earlier this year I did a blog post with a bit of a primer on all things “natural wine”. That’s become quite a buzz word with lots of hype and some misunderstandings, so I tried to break things down a bit in my Natural Wine 101.

So this week we’ll taste and discuss some great Biodynamic wines, and here’s a list of some suggested bottles from both Lifford by the case and from the Byward Wine Market by the bottle. If you’re in Ottawa, you can stop by the shop and pick up some bottles yourself (we’re essential, so we’re still open for pickup/takeout) or it can be delivered within Ottawa.

Time to pop some corks and say goodbye to the worst year ever. Even if we have been fortunate to find some silver linings in all the 2020 chaos, I think overall everyone can agree that we’re ready for 2021 and the hopeful return of some normalcy to life. So let’s raise a glass from our at-home lockdown New Year’s Eve celebrations and bid good riddance to 2020 and cheers to a more social 2021!

Since we have no shipments coming from Toronto this week, this week’s feature is all about Sparkling Wines from the Byward Wine Market since we have a great selection of various sparkling in various sized bottles at the shop! And as an added feature, if you’re staying in for New Year’s and you’re interested, we’ll send you the credentials to hop on a Zoom to kick off NYE with a Sparkling Wine tasting for anyone who bought a bottle of bubbles from us to celebrate with. More details on this below, but it’s free, you just need to have picked up one of our bottles of Sparkling and send me a note that you want to join!

Well, obviously it has been an incredibly weird and difficult year. I just wanted to take a moment to thank you all so much for all the support through all this. When restaurants all closed, direct to customer sales was the only real option for wine agents. It was really nice getting to know so many of you since March and I’m glad I could help with quarantine and getting some great wines delivered right to your homes. And for all the bad of the pandemic, there was a silver lining that allowed me to partner with Lollo and open the Byward Wine Market. If you haven’t been in yet, we have a great retail space downtown and began to try build the private wine shop of our dreams. So thanks to everyone for all your support of Capital Wine and Byward Wine Market this year and I’m looking foward to sharing more great wine in 2021!

Because next Friday is Christmas, and the Friday after is New Years and we can’t deliver on those days, this coming Friday December 18th will be our final delivery of 2020. So if you’re still looking for some great gifts for friends, family, employees, and clients, or just drinks for the holidays and toasts for the New Year, you might want to stock up this week!

So for this week I’m featuring just a few things ahead of our last delivery to Ottawa for the holiday season:

Now that the weather has decisively shifted gears and we’re also heading into holiday shopping season, it’s time for us to hit refresh with some newly themed mixed packs! Whether you’re looking for cozy fall/winter drinking at home or getting a head start on holiday shopping, we’ve got you covered.

At the Byward Wine Market our motto has been DRINK GOOD WINE and we’re evolving that motto for the holiday season to GIFT GOOD WINE. We have a whole bunch of new mixed cases both from Lifford directly and also at the Byward Wine Market for pickup or shipping within Ottawa. Follow the links below to each of the collections from both Lifford and Byward Wine Market.

This time of year we’re often shifting gears to the cozier heartier things. Boots, vests, big sweaters, soup, and red wine. Don’t get me wrong, rich whites are really great this time of year too, but there’s something about the chill of the fall air that goes so nicely with some rich red wine. So this week I’m featuring one of my favourite California wineries, Marietta Cellars.

Well, it’s not the best Sauvignon Blanc weather out there, but let’s be honest, Sauvignon Blanc fans drink Sauvignon Blanc all year through rain and sleet and snow. AND we just got some great new bottles in. So let’s talk Sauv Blanc this week.

Thanks to a few really really big brands from New Zealand like Kim Crawford, Sauvignon Blanc’s popularity skyrocketed since the 90’s through the 2000’s. But since Kim Crawford sold out to Constellation they’ve scaled it to industrial levels and it’s become a caricature of itself, similar to what Yellowtail and Wolfblass did to Australian Shiraz years earlier. So the mainstream profile of New Zealand Sauv Blanc developed into this exaggeration, purposely done with selected yeast strains to emphasize the over the big gooseberry, fresh cut grass, grapefruit notes, along with a pile of extra tartaric acid to balance out the extra sweetness of the style. And many people dig this kind of Sauv Blanc, and that’s cool, but the downside is that it’s become so popular in the mainstream that many people don’t know what Sauv Blanc actually is…or at least what it was before the big New Zealand bomb dropped. So this week is an exploration of great Sauv Blanc, for Sauv Blanc lovers, by a Sauv Blanc lover (aka me).

The De Martino family has been making wine in Chile since the 1930’s, and they have long been at the fore of Chilean viticulture. From having worked in almost all of Chile's viticultural D.O.’s, they were also the first to label and export a 100% varietal labelled Carmenere wine from Chile, and they were the first Wine Spectator 100 point wine from Chile as well. As such they were a very big deal through the 90’s and 2000’s with their robust style that helped define top Chilean wine to the rest of the world.

But when the next generation of De Martinos began taking over, they started looking more to the past as their future. While they’ve always been organic, the focus shifted from powerful American style big wines with new oak to raw natural wines of the past…

Whether you’re still having a big Thanksgiving gathering with all the family in your bubble, or even if celebrations are a little scaled back this year, here’s some great ideas for wine so you can avoid the LCBO and have some great bottles delivered right to your door.

With Thanksgiving happening the weekend after next, it’s time to start thinking about what wines you want to celebrate with. So this week is all about Thanksgiving and featuring a few cases of the best Thanksgiving dinner pairings. A variety of rich whites, lighter reds, and even some curve balls with Pet Nat, Godello, Orange Wine, and old vine Chenin Blanc to maybe challenge the supremacy of Chardonnay as the perfect Turkey pairing!

As the wildfires in Oregon seem to be subsiding, it feels like we need to give a bit of love to one of my favourite wine regions in the world. I absolutely LOVE Oregon wines. And one of my favourite producers is the (relatively) young winery owned by Kate Norris and Thom Monroe called Division Wine Co. They have an urban winery in downtown Portland where they source grapes only from organic and biodynamic vineyards and make some of the most exciting wines in the Willamette. And at the moment we have 3 wines from them:

This week’s exciting Capital Wine news is that we’ve launched our Shopify website for the Byward Wine Market and we’re going to begin doing custom mixed cases for pickup or delivery within Ottawa!

We’d love to have you into the shop for a personalized wine shopping experience, but if you’re too busy to make it down to the market or you’re continuing self isolation, we’ve got your back and will begin delivering your own custom mixed cases around Ottawa! Because loading all the 160+ wines that we currently carry in the shop onto the website along with tasting notes is going to be a bit of a job, we’re hoping you’ll be patient with us as we upload them in the coming week or two. But we’re starting with a few thoughtfully selected mixed cases to get things rolling. These are all in limited quantities, so first come first served!

We’ve had a fun first week with the opening of the Byward Wine Market, and it was so nice to see a bunch of you stop by the shop and grab some wine! For this week’s features we’re going to look at some amazing wines that we currently have available in the shop by the bottle and delivery by the case as well. Because it’s a retail there is a slight markup on the individual bottles to help cover overhead on the space, so it will always be a better deal to buy them by the case, but amazing convenience to be able to grab individual bottles to try out as well. We’re still working on the website which should be ready soon, but for now you can follow us on Instagram for wine updates and features @bywardwinemarket!

And because great Pinot and Chardonnay are some of our favourite grapes, we decided to start there with features this week. 3 great bottles of each, from 3 different places, all currently available by the case or by the bottle at the Byward Wine Market.

We’ve been working our way through some great themes like Cottage Wines, BBQ Wines, Summer Sparking, Mixed Cases, etc. But one question I constantly get asked is: what’s your best value wine? This question keeps coming from the perspective of folks who are used to grabbing $12-$15 “everyday” kind of wines from the LCBO, wondering if there’s a better alternative within the same price range. The answer is absolutely, yes, 100%. We have lots of great wines in this range, several of which have been part of past weekly features. And it’s hard to pick just one from so many, but if push came to shove, the wines of Laurent Miquel are really hard to beat in quality for price

So it seems everyone was really into the idea of Cottage Wines over the last two weeks! There has been demand for more of those recommendations and I was even on CBC Radio’s ‘All In A Day’ chatting about this with Alan Neal this past Wednesday. So, I decided to strike while the iron’s hot and everyone is still in peak cottage season with another round of top recommendations for the lake, camping, or just hot patio times in the back yard or garden! A few of these I discussed on the radio and if your cottage isn’t TOO far out, we may even be able to deliver there!

Drinking in the peak summer heat is all about keeping things crisp and fresh. It’s when light beer eclipses IPA’s and stouts, when whites and rosés out-perform reds, and when the effervescence of sparkling really shines. There are so many great styles of sparkling for all different tastes and budgets, and here’s a few favourite recommendations in each style:

It’s that peak-summer time of year where so many people flock out of the city. Whether it’s to a cottage or campsite, the summer exodus has been even sweeter this year following all the lockdown and quarantine. But even moving into Stage 3 of re-opening still hasn’t made it fun going to LCBO to stock up for your weekend or week(s) away at the cottage. So here’s some excellent cottage or camp friendly bottles (and cans!) that will hit the spot while you’re off-grid relaxing and grilling in the great outdoors. AND unless you’re way out off the beaten path, we can deliver to your cottage as well!

New Zealand Sauv Blanc is one of the hottest regional wines to hit the mainstream wine market since California Cabernet or Australian Shiraz. Sauvignon Blanc’s home is in France, it’s grown all over the country but namely the Loire Valley in areas like Sancerre or Pouilly-Fumé, as well as Bordeaux. But in recent years Sauvignon Blanc become synonymous with New Zealand, the Marlborough region in particular. The big flavours of grapefruit, gooseberries, fresh cut grass, and even some funkier cat pee notes stood out as big new flavours unique to New Zealand and its popularity took off from there. Even though it’s one of the newest wine growing regions for Sauvignon Blanc, to many it’s become the reference point. Marlborough must easily be the most famous Sauvignon Blanc region in the world, even though its one of the newest.

Now that mixed cases are finally legal, we’re building our offering of curated mixed cases for home delivery. Here's a list of all the mixed cases we currently have available. If interested please order before Tuesday at noon for Friday delivery in Ottawa, or Monday at noon for Tuesday delivery in Kington and Prince Edward County.

Over the last several years “orange wine” has become increasingly popular, particularly within the natural wine scene. There are exceptions, but for the most part orange wine is made by the smaller natural/organic/biodynamic wineries that focus on edgier raw styles of wine. These types of wineries don’t produce huge volumes overall, so their orange wine production is fairly allocated. The orange genre overall gets a lot of hype on instagram and in mainstream foodie publications like Bon Appetit or The New York Times, but there isn’t all that much volume produced, and most of it gets bought by restaurants. All this draws people’s curiosity and I get countless customers asking me for orange wine to try out, but unfortunately we often don’t have much in stock. But today is different! We have 2 really great orange wines available in this week’s feature! But because I always get so many questions about all aspects of orange wine, first, a couple things about orange wine if you’re newer to this: