To coincide with opening of  the Winter Wine Festival, on Monday, Jan. 31, a team of chefs from the Wentworth by the Sea Hotel, the Samoset Resort in Camden, Maine, the Bar Harbor Club in Bar Harbor, Maine, and the Portland Marriott at Sable Oaks, will begin carving 50 blocks of ice, weighing 300 pounds each, into a finely detailed sculpture of a life-sized horse drawn sleigh carrying wine barrels. The finished sculpture will be lit at night for dramatic viewing on Friday, Feb. 3.

Wine columns postulate that a great Chinese meal need not be a wine-free experience; open a bottle of Riesling or Gewurztraminer and voila, delicious food that goes in 10 different flavor directions with wine that matches. The advice is correct, but too limiting. There’s something else out there… think bubbles.
 

The University of New Hampshire now serves eggs from chickens that have been raised in a cage-free, certified humane way. The school will now be buying all of their shell-eggs—about 250,000 per year—from Pete and Gerry’s Organic Eggs in Monroe, N.H.

Please don’t be put off by the following statement: this is a red wine, not a pink one. Many of you already know that, but I want to be careful not to embarrass the reader who doesn’t realize that Zinfandel is red and that White Zinfandel is only the ghostlike representation (albeit a happy ghost) of what Zinfandel is really is meant to be.