wine shops that feel the love!

K&L Wines
638 4th Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 (415) 896-1734



For this, the Eighteenth Edition of Wine Blogging Wednesday, Dr Vino challenged us, not to feature wine, but to feature a seller of wine instead. Our favourite wine shop perhaps?

I have two favourite places to buy wine in San Francisco. The first is the Ferry Plaza Wine Merchants who I have written about before. When I visit the Ferry Building, I am usually on foot, with not much more than a shopping basket to carry all of my market wares, so at the most, I only ever buy two bottles of wine from FPWM at a time.

When I need larger quantities of wine I drive to K&L, just over a mile from my house. They have plenty of parking and they also stock some neat spirits as well as a wide selection of wines from all over the world. What I particularly like about them, is that whatever strange question I throw at them (and believe me, I have asked some unusual ones), they are completely unfazed and they do their utmost to help me come up with a solution.

K&L helped us find Alsace wines to go with choucroute.

K&L helped me find three different sparklers to pitch against the English Nyetimber in a blind tasting.

K&L staff have an assuring way with words.

K&L staff helped me find an "off dry" red, and patiently tried to help me understand what "off dry" meant.

K&L helped me put together wine pairings for my 2004 Christmas dinner menu.




Last Sunday I took K&L a new challenge. Tomorrow it's my turn to take wine to my Slow Mediterranean Cooking class at Tante Marie. I asked for help choosing a sparkling wine and a red wine from Meditteranean countries at around the ten buck level per bottle. My preferred choice, the Proseccos, were a little bit pricey, so I ended up with three bottles of Segura Viudas Brut Cava which I was assured was much better than Frexinet (it better be). My helpful assistant had such great things to say about the 2003 D'Angelo Aglianico "Sacravite" described as a value-packed red with layers of exotic spice and rich, dark fruit notes, I can't wait to try it. Apparently, the Aglianico grape which I had not heard of before, came from Greece with the Romans way back when. Roll on cooking class...



PS - Even if you don't live near K&L, do check out their website - it's a great read and full of well-written descriptions of the wines that they stock. It's clearly set out and informational as well. Don't despair if you are not in the vicinity, you can buy from them online too!

Daily weight loss, Weightwatchers and diet notes:
Tuesday nights are my favourite night of the week, Weightwatcher-wise. It's the end of my WW week and I have to eat any spare weekly points before they reset again on Wednesday. This means it's time to feast. Last night I had toast and foie gras and rillettes and grilled gruyere and a couple of squares of Scharffenburger chocolate. And after all that I weighed myself and I had still lost two pounds. Whoever said dieting can't be fun?

23 19.5 17.5

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