With the hot season already under way I figured that you would enjoy some light drinking and selected 3 refreshing white wines and one easy going red. To help you celebrate in style without breaking the bank I made the offers very simple: buy 6 bottles of the same wine and get FREE SHIPPING! Naturally you are welcome to combine these offers together or with any other wine of our current catalog.

Our Pinot Grigio Riva Moretta from Italy seemed like a perfect candidate for an afternoon chiller! High temperatures will tend to increase your consumption therefore pay attention to the alcoholic content of your drinks to avoid heavy or spinning heads! Like most of OWC wines this one is relatively low in alcohol (12.5%) and will go down pleasantly after a slice of pizza without ringing a bell in your head!

For the Chardonnay lovers who enjoy a full body wine with an almost silky texture please grab our famous Limoux Domaine Delmas. Elaborated and aged in oak barrels by my friend Bernard Delmas, this wine has reached its full maturity and should be enjoyed now. A delight in your glass coming directly from the foothills of the Pyrenees, this 100% Chardonnay is complex, elegant and sophisticated enough for a party by the poolside!

I presented the Muscadet, Château de la Fessardière last month with a certain pride since this is the first NO SULFITES ADDED white wine that I have found worthy of my glass! Here is your chance to get some bottles and appreciate the softness and charm of this wine.
Note that it contains a relatively high amount of CO2 (carbon dioxide). This gas, a by-product of any fermentation, is kept high on purpose since it protects (as SO2 does) against oxydation. If you found it to be in excess simply shake the bottle and release the gas with your thumb (beware your neighbors though!). I know it sounds a bit heretical but believe me, it works well!

Finally I selected the simple yet highly enjoyable Cabernet Sauvignon Domaine de Bajac which aptly demonstrates that you don't have to spend a fortune for your healthful dose of daily red! A 2002 Cab at this price is a happy surprise but taste this one and you will understand why our reputation of providing great wines at any price is well deserved!

Enjoy your Summer!

Be it the 4th (in the US) or the 14th (in France), it seems that July is dedicated to acknowledging the roots of our modern world history. Armed with a number of worthwhile intentions our forefathers have set up the foundational rules that govern our democratic world today. They certainly did the best job they could at the time and I am not sure we would do any better today! Now, whatever we managed to accomplish from that point on is definitely worth reflecting upon!

If you have an inclination toward understanding modern global history and politics and/or if you simply love to witness a brilliant mind at work do yourself the favor to listen to Thomas Hartmann on his radio show on Air America. Not only has this man fathered several high caliber works on subjects ranging from Spirituality and Energy Politics to Health (his books on ADD are superb) [not to mention his books on recent political events and trends], but he is also hosting a 3 hour radio show every day of the week! The breadth and depth of his analysis as well as the respect he shows for all viewpoints and the intelligence of his proposals are a rare example of balance in this field prone to extremist or or otherwise fixed thinking.

If you 've ever been in presence of a great intelligence you've probably noticed a strange phenomenon: you become suddenly more intelligent yourself! Complex subjects appear much simpler, unrelated matters seem to combine effortlessly, boring topics reveal a fascinating side to them! And it's not long before you comment to yourself a well made point by: "Sure, I knew that all along!" I've had the good fortune to meet a few of these minds bordering to the genius (And boy! What a treat!), ones that make life all of a sudden more juicy, intriguing and interesting. Spending time with Thom is this kind of opportunity. I simply deplore working too much to have time to listen to his radio show!

But if you can, please do! It won't be any waste of time and believe me, any of his books is a source of inspiration and awe for such a brilliant thinker and consciousness raiser!

Our shopping cart is constantly improving. A convenient feature of our Wine Store is the ability to edit your own account. Simply log in with your email and password and enter into My Account where you can modify any of your personal information. You can look up your previous activity, reorder an entire order with a simple click, add an address or verify the status of your current one by clicking on the Tracking button.

USEFUL TIP: When you're lost on a page and can't seem to find your way out, most of the times the name of the website or the logo of the company itself is a link back to the home page! Since it is not highligthed or underlined it is easy to ignore it, as I did for many years myself until I found out about this little trick.

It is our intention to make your online experience as easy and enjoyable as possible.
If you encounter any problem navigating our websites, please don't hesitate to call us at 1-888-326-9463 so we can fix it asap. We will be happy to guide you, help you make your choice or even place the order for you.
You may use ecowine.com or theorganicwinecompany.com, 2 different presentations of the same store or french- wine-online.com which has a new interface.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR FEEDBACK!
When we announced our intention to create a video on winetasting basics we were overwhelmed by the number of responses (and questions!) that we received from you! This was proof enough of your interest in the matter and a clear indication of your desire to learn how to enjoy to the fullest your favorite drink! What I want to do now is to answer these questions in different formats so you can easily retrieve them through the written word (blog or FAQ page), the spoken word (in little audio files) and finally through a video course. We even thought of a teleseminar now that the technology makes it so easy!

Anyway all of these projects have us buzzing around! We taped a couple of video introductions to winetasting but as you can imagine this is a whole new world for us and it may take a bit more time than anticipated to produce a good quality video! In the meantime here are the first answers to some of the 200 questions you sent us!

From Charlene: "Why aren't there more wines without sulfites?"
Dr Mic: I have addressed this question in the January newsletter. In a nutshell, there is no known subsitute for the convenience and efficiency of sulfites to keep a wine fresh, avoid its oxydation and turning to vinegar. Various conditions influence the success of such endeavor: type of grape, soil and climate, harvest conditions and grape quality, winemaking equipment and other physical constraints. All things considered it is a very risky and therefore financially dangerous proposition for the winemaker therefore he will only set aside a small portion of his harvest for this purpose. Finally the distance/time traveled from the cellar being another factor, most NSA (no sulfites added) wines on the market at this time are domestic.

From Bob: "What taste might alert me that a wine is substandard or, for some reason, has gone bad ? (Needless to say, such a wine could never have come from the Organic Wine Co!)"
Dr Mic: Thanks for the clin d'oeil (wink), Bob, but we've had our share of those too (albeit rarely)! The number one reason for a wine to be bad is a defective cork. The cork is a whole story unto itself and being an organic product, is subject to alterations impossible to predict or avoid entirely. The classic "cork smell" (and taste) reminding one of cardboard, dust or mold is definitely unpleasant but is perceived quite differently by various people since we do not all possess the same sensory equipment and training. It is due to a chemical compound (trichloroanisole) created by fungi present in the bark or sometimes in the wooden environment of a cellar! Affecting a large number of bottles (up to 10% according to certain estimates) it is the #1 headache of the profession and generates lots of inventive solutions to get rid of it! The most obvious future is the screwcap which combines ease of use to open and close the bottle and quasi perfect preservation of the wine. The drawback: we lose the "pop" sound!

The second most important factor (somewhat linked to the first too) is the age of the wine. Every wine has a life of its own with a birth, a growth period, a maturity and a decay. Therefore a major element in wine appreciation is the knowledge of when to keep a wine to let it improve and when to drink it before it turns south! But this is not an exact science which makes it all the more fun! And it certainly takes some experience!

But to answer your question you will need to have some idea of the type of wine you are tasting to compare it with what you already know about it since it is all about your EXPECTATION! Millions of tastes and flavors show up in wines and you're bound to like and dislike quite a few. An obvious taint by an outside pollutant or a wine gone over the top (vinegary or dead flat by oxydation) seem like an easy judgment to pass, but I have been amazed to find people enjoying wines extremely oxidized or concentrated like a syrup. In fact I have such 80 year old wine made by my great-great-grandfather which is a pure delight on a vanilla ice cream!

We have been asking you to subscribe to a different database recently because it will give us more flexibility than our current ConstantContact system. We will keep both running for a while but we'd appreciate if you take the time to enter your name and email on this new system. We can't do it for you even if you are subsribed to our newsletter because of the Anti-Spam laws. Unfortunately some of you have not received the confirmation email or have failed to complete the registration and we are not authorized to contact you since this would be considered to be spam in itself! Crazy technology!

All you have to do is visit our primal site www.ecowine.com and fill in the required boxes. Then don't forget to click on the confirmation email to complete the process or let us know if it has not worked correctly.
Thank you for your cooperation. to help us serve you better.

Let me wish you a pleasant Holiday with a beautiful and reflective poem written by a young african who received the Best Poem Award of 2005:

When I born, I Black,
When I grow up, I Black,
When I go in Sun, I Black,
When I scared, I Black,
When I sick, I Black,
And when I die, I still black..

And you White fella,
When you born, you Pink,
When you grow up, you White,
When you go in Sun, you Red,
When you cold, you Blue,
When you scared, you Yellow,
When you sick, you Green,
And when you die, you Gray..
And you calling me Colored ??

We love to help you make your choice. Call us with your special needs, we will do the best to satisfy them.
Real people are just a phone call away at
1-888-326-9463! (888-ECO-WINE)

Dr Mic
Wine Selection

Veronique Raskin
President

Organic Wine Company
415-256-8888