Even if you have nothing planned and no time, you can still do something special for St. Patrick’s Day:

Drink Green

Make green beer, sparkling wine, ginger ale, lemon-lime soda (7-Up, Sprite) or club soda.

ANOTHER TIP: Pour any effervescent beverage down the side of the glass, rather than into the center. It preserves more bubbles.

It’s easy being green on St. Patrick’s Day. Photo by MBPhoto | IST.

Eat Green

Color dips, condiments and other creamy foods green. Use 10-12 drops green food color per 1/2 cup of:

 
On St. Patrick’s Day, it’s easy being green.

Uh oh, no wine? Pick a substitute. Le Creuset French oven available at SurLaTable.com.

Sometimes when you’re preparing a recipe, you discover that you you don’t have wine, or find out that a guest does not consume any kind of alcohol.

There are a number of substitutes for both red and white wine; although, advises chef Louis Eguaras, you need to be sure that the sweetness level of the substitute is appropriate to the dish (i.e., grape juice may not work in every dish).

Red Wine Substitutes

White Wine Substitutes

Keep A Supply Of “Cooking Wine”

To be sure we always have wine, we take the last few ounces from a bottle of wine and fill up small repurposed bottles with tight caps—eight or sixteen ounces, one for red wine, one white. The limited amount of air keeps the wine usable for months and the small bottles tuck into the back of the fridge. You can keep topping off the “cooking wine” bottle: It’s O.K. to mix different wines.

Never buy anything called “cooking wine”: It’s the dregs!

Oysters and bubbly are not just for New Year’s Eve. Oysters on the half shell are a favorite in Ireland. While they’re popular bar food with a beer, you can create a real celebration with sparkling wine.

Whether with Champagne or the lighter and more affordable Cava and Prosecco sparklers, invite friends over to toast to St. Patrick’s Day.

Alexandra Shapiro, owner of the Flex Mussels restaurants in New York City, offers these tips:

Champagne and oysters. Photo courtesy
Champagne Bureau.

The best oysters we know are from Willapa Oysters, which are harvested to order and overnighted to you.

With an abundance of protein and minimal calories, the bubbly-bivalve combination is much healthier cocktail party option than, say, sugar-laden Margaritas and fat-laden nachos.

Forget the old wives’ tale that oysters are best when there’s an “r” in the month. This advice came from the days before refrigeration—much less overnight shipping—when oysters spoiled more quickly in the warmer months.

Everything you need to know about oysters.

Top off your knowledge of sparkling wines.

Sparkling rosé wine—be it Champagne or from another part of the world*—isn’t a great idea for Valentine’s Day just because it’s pink. The color is an added bonus for Valentine festivities.

What makes sparkling rosé special is the deeper fruit flavor, fuller body and roundness that comes from pinot noir grapes.† Never confuse rosé Champagne or other fine sparkler with “pink Champagne,” a lesser-quality product that is colored pink, rather than allowing a natural color extraction from the pinot noir grape skins.

*Only sparkling wines made in the Champagne region of France can be called “Champagne.” Wines made anywhere else—including other regions of France—are called sparkling wine.
†Some sparkling rosé wines are 100% pinot noir, others are blended with chardonnay grapes. Sparklers that have no pink color can still contain pinot noir, but have not had skin contact with the pinot noir grapes, which impart the color.

Rosé sparklers tend to be more expensive than their conventional counterparts. But for about $22.00 a bottle, a bottle of Domaine Chandon Brut Rosé is delicious; for $50.00, the Domaine Chandon Etoile Rosé has wonderful complexity and is well worth the money if your budget allows.

Pretty in pink: as a cocktail or a dessert. Photo courtesy Domaine Chandon

The two sparkling wines are made by Domaine Chandon, the Napa Valley winery founded in 1973 by Moët-Hennessy, producers of Moët et Chandon and Dom Pérignon champagnes.
 
Serve these delicious bubblies:

 
Should you serve sparkling wine with chocolates or chocolate cake?

Only if it’s a demi sec or sec (sweet) style.‡ There’s too much acidity in a brut Champagne or sparkling wine, which fights the sugar in the dessert. Here are our suggestions for:

 
‡While sec is French for “dry,” it’s idiosyncratic that, as regards Champagne and other sparkling wines, sec refers to a sweet style.

As much as we’re fans of casual entertaining—stop by after work for some wine, or at 4:30 p.m. for tea time—we love to plan special entertainments.

If the planning is effortless, so much the better.

That’s why we were so pleased to discover Cookies & Corks—a young business founded by two young moms who met via their kids’ activities.

Cookies & Corks is a new twist on wine pairing: dry wines with sweet foods. The company sells cookies and recommends which types of wines to pair with them.

Then, instead of popping the cork and serving a plate of cheese, you serve a plate of cookies.

These are not just any cookies, but sweet-and-savory cookies crafted specifically to pair with the wines. Your own recipe for chocolate peanut butter cookies, for example, would need to be tweaked a bit to work as well as the Cookies & Corks version does.

Open the box, pop the cork and enjoy.
Photo courtesy Cookies & Corks.

Here’s what’s in store for your get-together:

 
Each box contains 15 all-natural cookies—five each of three flavors. Wine pairing suggestions are included, and the wines are easy to find.
 
If the concept of cookies and wine sounds quirky to you, there’s only one thing to do: Get a box of Cookies & Corks and see for yourself. Sophisticated and novice wine drinkers alike will have a fun time, enjoying the tasty cookies and marveling about how well the pairings work.

You don’t need to throw a party: Cookies & Corks for a quiet movie evening is also a special event.

And the next time you give a bottle of wine, including the matching box of Cookies & Corks will make it memorable.

Learn more at CookiesAndCorks.com.

Thanksgiving is the biggest travel holiday of the year. If you’re planning on traveling with a fine bottle of wine in your suitcase, consider getting a VinniBag.

We’ve tried a lot of wine travel bags. We like VinniBag the best for car and bus trunks, airline travel and anytime a good bottle of wine can be jolted. It’s not just leakproof: It’s so robustly padded that nothing should break in the first place.

Like an inflatable bath pillow, VinniBag has inflatable air chambers that protect and insulate wine bottles and other liquids (olive oil, for example). The air pockets provide superior protection against impact and leakage.

Easy to inflate, VinniBag deflates and stores flat when not in use.

One VinniBag is $28.00; two or more are $25.00 each. It’s a welcome gift for friends who buy good wine and like to travel with it.

Get yours at VinniBag.com.

Our favorite wine travel bag: Vinnibag.
Photo by Jaclyn Nussbaum | THE NIBBLE.

If you’re planning a party, how much wine do you need? Wine quantities will vary depending on the type of party you’re having.

Gary Sitton, winemaker at California’s Clos du Bois winery, offers these general rules of thumb:

A standard bottle of wine (750ml, or 25.3 ounces) provides five five-ounce glasses of wine.

A wine pourer helps to pour without dripping. Photo courtesy Rosendahl.

 
Now that you’ve got a handle on the wine, here’s how to calculate the amount of hors d’oeuvre.*

*In French, the singular and plural word forms are the same: hors d’oeuvre.

For dessert: a glass of Moscato wine.
Photo courtesy Gallo Family Vineyards.

America doesn’t enjoy enough dessert wines. From late harvest Rieslings to sparkling red Italian Brachettos, hearty Ports and unctuous Sauternes, a plethora of dessert wines is waiting to be discovered.

A sweet wine can be enjoyed with more than just dessert. Think of the sweet carbonated beverages that are enjoyed at lunch, dinner and in-between. It’s easy (and much more delicious and food-friendly) to substitute a light, sweet wine like Muscat (Moscato in Italian).

The Muscat grape is not well known in the U.S. But it’s so prevalent the world over that wine historians believe it may be the oldest domesticated grape variety—the one from which all other grape varieties are descended.

While it is possibly to vinify the grape into a dry wine, Muscat/Moscato is more popular as a sweet dessert wine.

Not only is Muscat very flavorful, but it can also be very inexpensive. The low cost of growing the grapes in other countries translates into bargain Muscats. This summer, we’ve been enjoying Gallo Family Moscato from the famed California vintners, made from Argentina Moscato grapes. The cost: just $5.99 per 750 ml bottle.

Sweet yet elegant and sophisticated, the lush, fruity aroma beckons from the glass. The flavors—notes of peaches and honey—are satisfying enough to be the dessert, for fewer than 130 calories per glass.

A glass of sweet wine, with or without a piece of fresh fruit, is often served as dessert in Europe. You can also serve it with cookies: Follow the Italian tradition of serving Vin Santo, a dessert wine from the Tuscany region of Italy, with biscotti and other cookies (shortbread works nicely).

A great treat: oysters with a variety of
white wines. Photo by Nathan Maxfield | IST.

We love oysters, so we hosted an extensive wine-and-oyster celebration last Friday, National Oyster Day (August 5th).

When we began eating oysters (way back in our college years), the de rigeur wine was a crisp Chablis from northern France—or Champagne, if you were a bon vivant.

But if you know what to look for, you can buy an oyster-friendly white wine for $10—and have more money to spend on oysters. We’ve asterisked * the more affordable wines we tried (of course, some wines in these categories are more than $10—ask your wine store clerk for help).

And here’s another budget-wise tip: Each participant was assigned one of these wines to bring to the party.

STILL WHITE WINES

 
SPARKLING WINES

BEER WITH OYSTERS
While we were comparing all of the wines, someone asked for a beer.

We pulled out several different styles: an amber ale, IPA, Pilsner and stout. All were delicious, but the stout, a roasty style of beer (the term comes from the dark-roasted malts used to brew it) was deemed a perfect beer pairing.

If you’re looking for a gourmet Labor Day activity, here’s your blueprint!

See our Oyster Glossary for everything you wanted to know about oysters.

Check out the different types of beer in our Beer Glossary.

There are more than 40 The Capital Grill restaurants in the U.S. We’ve only been to one, and it’s a class act. It has become our restaurant of choice when we’re going to dinner with people who want a steak-and-seafood evening with good wine.

If this is up your alley, The Capital Grille is offering the best wine tasting deal we know of:

Now through September 4th, for just $25 with dinner, you can have as much as you want of nine sparkling, white and red wines, including a Port-style dessert wine from Australia (charmingly called The Portly Gentleman). Known as the Generous Pour, if purchased by the bottle, the wine tab would be almost $800.

At a recent dinner, we opted in and tried all nine Generous Pour wines. We declare it the best $25 restaurant wine experience—as well as an enlightening, fun and delicious evening.

You can have your wines any way you want them, including pours of any and all nine wines and refills of your favorites.

Days later, we’re still enjoying the Generous
Pour experience at Capital Grille. Photo
courtesy Capital Grille.

We started the evening with a Marquis de la Tour Crémant de Loire, a lovely French sparkler that was the apéritif. We asked for more to go with the yummy pan-fried calamari with hot cherry peppers. The buttery St. Jean Belle Terre chardonnay went better with the lush lobster mac and cheese.

The ability to try so many wines with dinner—to compare and contrast—is a wonderful experience. Do you prefer the La Cana albariño or the St. Jean chardonnay with oysters on the half shell? Try it and decide (we preferred the albariño).

We had both whites, the Crémant and a Byron Bay pinot noir with our salmon—and confirmed that we continue to prefer pinot noir to white wine for pairing with salmon.

Those who ordered steak had five different reds to compare, both international and from California. We accepted “donations” of meat from their generous portions to try with the reds.

At this point we should have called it quits and let The Portly Gentleman suffice as dessert.

But no: We allowed ourselves to be seduced by the rich dessert menu (cheesecake, coconut cream pie, crème brûlée, flourless chocolate espresso cake and some lighter temptations).

A wine pairing dinner is a wonderful way to spend an evening with friends or colleagues, sharing good food and wine adventures. The wine selection was specially chosen by Master Sommelier George Miliotes to complement both the menu and the season.

You can send someone a gift card to the Capital Grille. What a great gift (hint, hint)!