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Here is a thought for those of you who love wine and would like to benefit from the expert selections of wine you gain through a monthly wine club membership, but do not want to be locked into a month to month payment.

Instead why not just purchase from a source that hand selects all of their wine guaranteeing that you will always be purchasing excellent vintages?

There motto is “where every wine is a winner” and that statement is not far off the mark. They only carry high quality wines, but do not take that to mean they only carry expensive wine!

There prices are actually very affordable. They have sourced wines for virtually every kind of wine enthusiast from the budget conscious to the serious collector. It may not be quite the same as actually being a member of one of the many California wine clubs that are available, but it comes close.

And frankly using this option as opposed to a wine club membership will actually give you a lot more freedom over the types of wine that you bring into your home.

When people use meat gift baskets to send to family and friends, it can prove to be a very thoughtful gift. For anyone who is a meat love, these types of baskets can make the ideal gift. A basket full of meat may include a family of steaks or a collage of seafood. These scrumptious foods are the perfect excuse for a BBQ or a special evening.

One of the most popular meat baskets to buy, will contain things like burgers, sausages and steaks. These varieties of meat products will be top of the line and feature premium meats. When someone receives a basket like this, they can use it for a BBQ or save the meat for later in a freezer.

There are many ham style baskets available. These hams are well cooked and prepared in a very delicate way. Most ham baskets are well received by the person they are sent to. The rich flavor and unique spices that may come with the ham, can provide a very yummy meal for someone or an entire family.

Crab cakes can be frozen as soon as they are caught. When they are vacuum sealed right away, the flavor and smells are all locked in and fresh. When someone enjoys to eat seafood, purchasing a gift basket full of seafood, can be a great idea.

Some baskets will feature very exquisite seafood. Items such as fillet Mignon, and lobster varieties may be included in the package. When someone sends a gift full of fine foods made from the highest quality available, it can make them feel very appreciated and special.

Using a meat basket to send to a family member or friend is a nice way to say that you care. There are many different occasions where a meat basket can be delivered. Whether its a birthday, an anniversary or a special family function, this type of basket will be well received.

One of the best features of using meat gift baskets, is that the meat may be enjoyed right away or frozen for later. All of the products in this particular basket will be well liked and enjoyed. With the many varieties of baskets that are available, it can truly give someone a custom order. When an order is made, the person can custom order certain themes, food choices or mix and match the ingredients.

How much should you spend on wine? Now that is a question that could have a million different answers depending on who you talk to. People who enjoy drinking wine usually develop pretty specific preferences and they have also built a wine collection based on a budget. But there are some guidelines you can follow when it comes to shopping for wine in terms of how to shop for wine and how to determine what price to pay.

One of the saddest things that can happen to you is preparing a nice meal, opening a bottle of wine, and discovering the wine choice you made is completely wrong. It’s even sadder when you spent a lot of money and now have an opened bottle you don’t really want to finish. What a waste of money that can be!

Of course, if you are like most people, you will just muddle your way through the bottle and drink the wine anyway. From that point forward though it is good to make a decision to follow some guidelines before you ever choose the bottle of wine.

How much you should spend on wine will be influenced by a lot of factors, but there are three primary categories.

Your budget
The meal it will be paired with
The occasion where it will be served

Deciding what you will spend on wine requires evaluating all three factors and then coming up with a reasonable amount to spend.

Budget

You have a budget for your household expenses which includes food and drink, special celebrations, and expenses related to hobbies or special interests. Your wine expense line item will fit snugly in between these three categories.

For example, if you can afford $20 for a bottle of wine then you will want to find the best $20 wine for the money or even consider high quality wines that cost less so you can possibly buy more.

On the other hand, just because you can afford an expensive bottle of wine doesn’t necessarily mean you should buy one. It all depends on why you are buying this bottle and who it will be served to.

The characteristics that most influence the price of a bottle of wine include the following.

Brand
Producer
Vintage
Grape variety
Production method
Quality level

Some countries have a quality classification system. For example, Italian and Spanish wine labels indicate with the quality tier the wine has been assigned. The top tier is the highest quality and will be more expensive than a lower tier.

Some people find a wine they like at a price they can afford and will buy it by the case. Your budget for a bottle of wine should be a guideline and not be a do-or-die figure. You may spend a little more or a little less, but if you find the perfect wine at the right price then it only makes sense to buy several bottles while the price is within your budget.

Meal Pairing

You probably have read plenty of advice about pairing wine with a meal. The kind of meal you are serving impacts the style of wine you will purchase. A red wine for your hearty meal or a white wine for a summer patio meal is the kind of choice you will be making.

Within each wine style is a full range of wine prices. The vintage, types of grapes, and production processes used impact the price of the wine. The better the vintage, the higher the price. The longer it takes the producer to make the wine, the higher the price. The number of bottles produced impacts the price too. Rarer wines will be much more expensive then the wines produced in millions of bottles.

Some people even buy wine before it has been bottled. The industry term for this practice is ‘en primeur’.

The Occasion

Humans being humans, they will spend more on special occasions. This applies to the food, decorations, travel costs and so on. So when it comes to wine, the same rules apply. If you are celebrating a tenth wedding anniversary, you may want to invest in a more expensive champagne to mark the occasion.

On the other hand, if you are having a party where wine will be served, there’s no sense in buying a lot of expensive wine. Instead you will want to purchase a good quality wine that is low to medium priced and in a larger quantity. Most of your guests will not know the difference if you serve them a $10 bottle of wine versus a $30 bottle.

If you are a wine hobbyist and are collecting wine then you will want to buy varying wines of different qualities. One month you may decide to purchase a $20 bottle of a particular wine to increase your personal collection. The next month it might be a $100 bottle of wine because you want a high quality vintage wine you can store.

Thinking Through the Purchase

There are also specialty and collector wines that can run into hundreds and even thousands of dollars. People who purchase these kinds of wines are either making an investment or have plenty of money to indulge their tastes in wine.

There really are no hard and fast guidelines for deciding how much to spend on wine. You need to evaluate the reason why you are buying the wine, your budget, and the current prices. The one thing you will discover though is that there are bottles of wine priced from a low of $5 a bottle to as much as you want to spend on private collection limited edition vintage wines. In general though, it is wise to spend at least $10 on a bottle of wine.

Parties should be fun and free of worries and hassles. The celebrator may be the main star of the party, but the main magnet is the food. A party without food isn’t much fun, unless it’s a reunion party for dieters. So even if you have great entertainment set for the party, the food is always the special number everybody is waiting for. And to ensure that you have the greatest party in town, let the food be taken care of by hiring caterers.

Why prefer catering over your own cooking? Catering doesn’t take much effort beyond picking out the menu from a list that is already prepared for you. Let’s face it, even if you are a great cook, can you cook at least five courses for more than five people?

Say just for the interest of debate you can, won’t you feel stressed taking care of the cooking, planning the whole party, making sure every little critical details are present like napkins and cutleries, and hosting the whole show all at the same time? Keep in mind that a party may have a dozen or more guests, even for a hundred or so guests.

Give yourself a break. It’s your bash so you deserve to have fun. Even Martha Stewart requires people to aid her. You think she sliced and diced every single component in her extensive menu while she cut and glued ornaments concurrently? Everybody needs assistance. Get yours in the cooking section.

One thing to remember, though, catering should not be only about food. It should be about great food and great service. It should be complete with every little thing that you may miss. The food needs to be presented in an appealing table setting and should always be warm (or cold if it’s dessert). There should be buffet table setting and warmers, essential sauces, disposable cutleries, serviettes, and of course, trash bags.

What is another great thing about having catering is that, if you think about it, it is cheaper than making the whole affair yourself. It has everything. Every package has many courses. It doesn’t just have a single starter, main dish and dessert routine. It has a lot of choices so your guests can feast on numerous offerings.

Catering just gets all the cooking job done and right. The greatest thing about hiring catering service is that you, as an emcee, will get to have all the credits as your guests hail you as the party leader.

Are you a fruit salad lover and want to trial with some latest fruit salad recipes each day? Well, in that case, you’re the one at the proper webpage. Here you’ll get a few of the most attractive and artistic ideas to experiment with your usual fruit salad recipe.

People generally consider some very simple and customary recipes while making fruit salad, like fruit cocktail smothered in whipped topping or fruit suspended in brightly colored Jell-O.

You may try preparing some colorful fruit salads by concentrating only on fruits like grapes. Pick grapes of assorted colors and make a nice and multicolored fruit salad. Also, try to use a lightweight dressing because of this grapes fruit salad.

Apart from grapes, you can also utilize several seasonal melons and combine them with other light tropical fruits to prepare a pleasant, refreshing fruit salad. Some of the most appropriate seasonal fruits to combine with grapes and melon are pineapple, mango, star fruit and papayas. These colorful and light fruit salad would be most valued when served with some humble complementary dressing. You possibly can serve these like a side dish or perhaps a dessert.

Further, feel free to make use of a few of the weirdest combos of fruits in the fruit salads as sometime even the weirdest combinations taste great. Try mixing a light dressing with fruits such as peaches, tomatoes and avocados. This will give you a colorful innovative salad which also promotes healthiness. Also, it is not necessary that you have to utilize just sweet fruits to prepare a nice fruit salad. It is easy to even make use of fruits with various tastes for making good fruit salad recipes. Furthermore, you may as well try mixing fruit and veggies to make a fruit salad recipe which has a twist. Among the most generally appreciated combinations of vegetables and fruits is pears and any kind of green vegetables. Also, if you wish to experiment a little too much then you also needs to try making pasta fruit salad with some soft fruits. The best choice of fruit is apples to make a firm textured subtle past fruit salad.

There are absolutely no limits for playing with fruit salad recipes. You possibly can try using any of your favorite flavors to make a nice and modern fruit salad recipe. You will even add up spices like black pepper and curry powder to make the recipe spicier. The top options of fruits for this purpose are blueberries, strawberries and peaches.

Microwave pork rinds are a wonderful tactic to cut down excess weight when you are on a zero carb or low carb diet. The Atkins Diet, Sugar Busters, South Beach, and many other low carbohydrate diet programs suggest pork rinds as one of the well-liked crunchy, salty delights you are permissible to have.

Though carbohydrate contents are very less in pork rinds, but unluckily, the additional dietary values of traditional pork rinds are very grim. They are full with contents of salt, fat and cholesterol. That’s for the reason that usual pork rinds are deep fried. However, there currently exist a far improved version of pork rinds known as ‘Microwave pork rinds’. These rinds are not deep-fried. They are ready to eat in a microwave oven which makes them having 65% less fat, 33% less salt, 32 mg less cholesterol in addition to 40 calories less for every portion than standard deep fried pork rinds. It is stated that pork rinds are the pork fat, but actually they are the dehydrates lengths of skin of the pork. Just after deep-frying they gets so fattening.

These days there is a version of microwave pork rinds that solves the problem. You are able to acquire the microwave pork rinds in bulk. The initial batch you arrange tend to be a sort of testing run. In case the pork rinds do get burnt or not pop up similar to popcorn at that moment you could modify the microwave warmth or cooking time in an effort to save your further batches.

Among the pork lovers, microwave pork rinds are currently hot favorite. There are many people who consider that pork is a high-calorie meat, however for them also Microwave pork rind is a great alternative. It is relatively quick to prepare microwave pork rinds. All you are required to do is to lay the pre-cooked pork rinds into a standard sandwich bag. So far as preparation of microwave pork rind is related, all that you must do is to take a sandwich bag and set the pork rinds into it. While placing the bag in the oven, the unwrap side of the bag should be suitably sealed. Shake the bag so that pork rinds are not piled up on top of one another. Cook it in microwave for around 99 seconds. As told earlier, one can alter the microwave timings in respect to the warmth. The pork dishes with pork rind tastes delightful with salsa, any type of dip or with melted cheese.

It’s amazing that an increasing number of people are purchasing the microwave pork rinds on account of the nutritive element linked with them as opposed to its savor. In all ways, this is a fantastic food for weight watchers!

Champagne or sparkling wine is called the “bubblie” because it has bubbles created during fermentation as a result of the interaction of yeast and sugar and/or the addition of carbon monoxide. Champagnes are normally made from dry white wines, but sparkling wines can use a red or white wine base.

The grapes that make the best champagnes or sparkling wines are the ones with highest acidity. Many champagnes use a blended mixture of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Meunier grapes. But sparkling wines can be made from single grapes also such as the Chardonnay.

A true Champagne is produced in Champagne, France.

There are different methods used to make champagne and sparkling wines. The methods include the traditional style of adding yeast and sugar to base wines; the transfer method which is called that because the wine is transferred from bottles for fermentation to tanks for filtering; the Charmat method where fermentation takes place in stainless steel tanks; and the carbonation method where carbon dioxide is injected into the wine.

Sweet

Sweet wines are exactly what they sound like…sweet! But there are two ways to earn the sweet in the sweet wine. One way is to let the fruit ripen on the vine to the point where it is rotting. Fruit that reaches this point has botrytized and develops an intense sweetness and flavour.

Sweet wine can also be made by adding a lot of sugar. The best sweet wines are considered to be the ones using botrytized fruit and that is how most Australian sweet wines are made.

There are a number of sweet wines including Rieslings, Sauternes, and Chenin Blancs produced around the world.

Fortified

Fortified wine is wine that has had distilled liquor added. Most of the time that distilled liquor is brandy. This type of wine is usually called a sherry, Madeira, Marsala, or Muscat though there are other names.

The fortified wine is intensely flavoured and the wine offerings cover the whole range of flavours including mineral, floral, salty, chocolate, and many others. The flavours are so intense that usually only a very small amount is served at a single time.

The World of Wine

One of the most fascinating aspects of the world of wine is the fact there is something to please every single palate. You may like dry, wet, sweet, floral, earthy, or mineral tastes, and there will be a number of delectable wines that will satisfy. That’s why so many people find wine tasting and collecting so interesting. You can match a style of wine to your own personal style.

So what do you plan to do with all that California wine club (or some other!) that you have been collecting? Some of you may be able to drink it all up pretty fast, but I would guess that most of you will find that the amount of wine coming into your home far exceeds that amount that you can drink. If that’s the case it might just be time to look into a wine preservation and storage system. As well as a few other accessories.

There are a lot of great places you can go to pick up accessories for your wine collection. Amazon.com has a lot of good stuff for instance, but you may want to consider International Wine & Accessories. Whatever your need is they probably have a solution for you. So what do you need?

This site has been around for quite some time now and has built up a pretty good reputation in the industry. When you want high quality service and high quality accessories to go along with your wine IWAWine.com is the place to go. They have partnered with some of the top names in the industry to provide the wine scene with some of the top products in the industry … I am talking about names like Riedel to Le Cache.

High quality products meets high quality innovation. What more could you ask for?

Now here is an organization that knows what wine lovers want. Our site has been serving the wine scene sine 1998. So what have they acoomplished in over a decade of service? They have built one of the largest distribution networks in the industry, they have partnered with some of the top names in the industry and they have developed one of the most efficient shipping and fullfillment platforms in the industry.

What’s that mean for you?

Simply that when you purchase fromour site you can expect your wine to arrive FAST and to arrive SAFE … and that is one of the big reasons why we at California Wine Clubs recommends them to our visitors. They have been in the online wine sales business for so long they pretty much have it down to an art form and are able to provide a level of service that some of the smaller guys just cannot match.

Our site has a substantial selection of wine, wine related gifts and accessories, as well as a fabulous wine club which takes advantage of that state of the art distribution platform I mentioned above … It’s not a California Wine Club, but it is just as good!

These wine clubs are something special. 20 years ago Bruce and Pam became exasperated with the effort of sifting through the shelves at the grocery and wine stores trying to find a decent bottle of wine. They realized that most of the time the wines they truly loved were the ones that were recommended to them by their friends and family.

That is what gave them idea for this wine club.

The California Wine Club is your friend in the sunshine state that always recommends sends you the best wine that California has to offer, but Bruce and Pam go one step further. They do not send out wine that is readily available in the stores, instead that tour California’s wine country and visit all those little vinyards that produce wonderful boutique wines, but are not able to distribute them on a large scale. It is these boutique wines, the gems hidden away amongst California’s abundance of vineyards, that The California Wine Club will bring to you on a monthly basis.

This is one of my favorite wine clubs on the internet. What is especially nice is that they have made this club available to virtually anyone by creating four distinct different club packages in order to meet everyone’s tastes and budgets.

Premier Club –

This their most popular wine club. It is very affordable at only $34.95 per month plus shipping. Members receive to hand selected bottles of wine every month from some of the finest wineries in California. Because it features wines from some of the smaller vineyards in California it is a great club for afciondos that want to expand their tasting experience. At the same time it is a great wine for new comers to the scene because it features wines that are both approachable and affordable.

Signature Series –

If you are a serious wine collector or connoisseurs then this is the club for you … If you can manage to get in it. The wines featured in this club are extremely limited, no more than 800 people are allowed into this club at a time. These are absolutely some of the finest award winning wines available in California.

As a member you can choose whether you want to receive 2 bottles each month or 4 bottles each month. The cost will vary somewhat from month to month because of the exclusive (and limited) nature of wines being offered. The average monthly cost of a 2 bottle membership is about $150, while the average cost of the 4 bottles per membership is approximately $275 per month. That may seem like a lot of money, but the wine you will be receiving will have a retail price tag of up to $100 per bottle. So not only does this club allow you taste some of the best and most rare wine produced in California, it allows you to do so at a significant discount off of retail.

This is an excellent value for those of you out there who are serious about your wine.

International Selections –

As a world traveler this club is probably my personal favorite. Bruce and Pam really out did themselves here. The International Selections club is similar to premier club in that it features hidden gems produced by boutique and “mom and pop” type vineyards. The difference is that these hidden gems cannot be found anywhere else in the United States.

Bruce and Pam find these hidden wine gems in countries like Italy, France, Spain, South Africa and elsewhere, negotiate with the vineyards and import them directly into the US themselves. Most of these wines are exclusive to The California Wine Club … unless of course you are planning a trip to one of the countries mentioned above in which case you could just buy them from the vineyards yourself.

If you have a flare for the international, but are sick of drinking mass produced wine that is typically imported into the US then this is definitely the wine club for you and at a price of $65 – $80 per month this club is surprisingly affordable.

Aged Cabernet Series –

Nothing crafts a great cabernet better than father time … This wine club is made for the true wine affciando. It features some of the finest cabernets available in California. Each cabernet as been aged 10 – 15 and stands at the pinnacle of California viticulture. If you have tried one of these aged cabs you know exactly what I am talking about.

To quote Bruce and Pam themselves “Years in the cellar transform a finely made, boisterous young Cabernet into a magical mix of rich texture, multi-layered flavor and complex nuances of oak and tannin. The fruit-forward aromas soften, a more complex nose develops and stringent tannins are tamed and replaced by a rounder mouthfeel.”

The costs of this club are about what you would expect with the average cost per shipment being between $150 – $235. You can schedule shipments to be monthly, every other month, or quarterly.