2008 Bucci Verdicchio Classico Castelli di Jesi DOC

Castelli di Jesi, Italy – $20

First things first, this wine rocks!

It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting down to a nice Italian meal or just kicking it on your stoop all night, this wine will impress the pants off anyone (which might be your intention). It’s clean and refreshing with beautiful lemon/citrus flavors. Just drink it! We promise you’ll be happy.

Now let’s break down the name of this wine because it’s crazy confusing. Here’s what everything means:

Bucci is the producer, meaning the company/ family that actually turns the grapes into wine. In this case, it’s shortened from Villa Bucci. Don’t ask why they shortened it. They just did. They’re Italian.

Verdicchio is the name of the grape. It’s a white grape native to Italy that is known to be crisp, refreshing and generally awesome.

Classico is a designation of quality. The DOC (see below) dishes out titles based on the quality of the grapes and winemaking. In this part of Italy, the grapes for a wine marked ‘Classico’ need to come from the oldest part of the region.

Castelli di Jesi is where the region where the grapes were grown. Italy breaks down regions based on how the wines taste. If the wines from the other side of town tasted significantly different, chances are it’s another wine region.

DOC is short for “denominazione di origine controllata.” This is the government agency in charge of setting the rules for the region (can they irrigate, which grapes can be grown, how long the wines have to be aged, etc). Putting this on the label means the winery followed all of the rules.

Drink liberally with all things seafood, grilled chicken and your English-Italian dictionary.

2009 E. Guigal Cotes du Rhone Blanc

Cotes du Rhone, France – $13

One of the best ways to find an awesome yet affordable wine is to look at the heavy hitting producers. While $300 bottles of rock-star wine are a great way to prove you’re a kickass winemaker, they’re expensive to produce, take years of aging before they can be sold and are an all around tough way to pay the bills. So, to supplement revenue many of these wine-producing legends often make a boatload of inexpensive vino to sell right away.

When this happens, we win! These guys are using highly refined techniques and top quality grapes to make wine we can all afford to drink.

E. Guigal is one of the most respected producers in France’s Rhone valley. Their high end labels sell for hundreds a bottle and are highly sought-after by collectors world wide. Only, you don’t need to drop a few hundos to get your hands on some quality wine. Their entry-level bottles are damn good and go for less than $15.

The 2009 E. Guigal Cotes du Rhone Blanc is a blend of typical Rhone grapes, Viognier, Roussane and Marsanne. It’s a rich wine with a medium body that is straw yellow in color. It rocks a very floral aroma with peach and apricot flavors but figures out a way to stay crisp and refreshing.

Drink liberally with Chinese takeout, toothpick skewered cheese or grilled fish.

2009 Dry Creek Vineyards Chenin Blanc
Dry Creek Valley, California – $15

Summer is all about lazy afternoons spent chomping fresh seafood while perched by a body of water. Since this could be anywhere from a friend of a friend’s absurdly extravagant house on The Cape to a kiddy pool you setup on the sidewalk in front of your tiny Back Bay pad, it’s important to have a beverage that can roll with any summer situation.

Luckily, we found the 2009 Dry Creek Vineyards Dry Chenin Blanc. They’ve been making Chenin Blanc in Sonoma County for more than 30 years. Originally from France’s Loire Valley, Chenin Blanc is a versatile grape that can range from sweet dessert wine to awesome bubbly to a dry and flavorful vino, like this one.

This wine smells wonderful with aromas of tropical fruit. When sipped, there are flavors of green apple and citrus fruit. It’s a dry wine with a crispness that can cut through the heat of a hot summer afternoon.

Drink liberally (and we mean LIBERALLY) with oysters, crab and/or lobster while kicking it with your swimsuit clad friends.

NV Emeri Sparkling Sauvignon Blanc

Australia – $13

Bubbly is confusing. Here is a quick cheat sheet:

You can’t call all bubbly Champagne because in order to don the prestigious (and more pricey) name the grapes have to come from the Champagne region of France.

Prosecco is a bubbly that comes from Northern Italy. Cava is the Spanish version and is made with indigenous grapes from Catalonia (near Barcelona). Bubbly from France, that isn’t from Champagne, is called Cremant and all major wine regions make some form of it. Portugal even gets into the mix, look for wines labeled Espumante.

Here in the good ol’ USA we make a ton of bubbly. From California, to New Mexico to Virginia to Massachusetts, there are American Sparkling Wines from sea to shining sea.

So what do you call a sparkling wine from Australia? Delicious, that’s what!

While not exactly known for making bubbly (or even Sauvignon Blanc for that matter), the Aussie’s are the new kids at the party but they’re doing a bang up job. The NV Emeri Sparkling Sauvignon Blanc from De Bortoli Wines in New South Wales is bottled refreshment. This is wine for sipping on the hottest of summer days. It’s super light-weight so you can knock back a couple glasses of crisp sparkling that has slight grassy and herbal flavors. The bubbles make it fun and will class up your afternoon of stoop sitting, lazy river inner-tubing, or hot, muggy day picnic-ing.

Drink liberally with a cheese plate, fresh strawberries and a big hunk of fresh bread.

2007 Château de la Fessardiere Muscadet de Sèvre-et-Maine Climat

Loire Valley, France – $15

Confused by the name? It breaks down to one easy to remember formula: this wine + shellfish = awesome. It’s that simple.

The white wine Muscadet exists for the sole purpose of washing down sea creatures. In France it’s drank by the gallon with oysters, mussels, crabs, langoustines, clams and all the other little critters found roaming the ocean floor.

Muscadet is a wine that all shellfish lovers should know about and purchase in great quantity. Which works out quite well for us New Englanders, as we have no shortage of kickass seafood.

Muscadet is wine region on France’s Atlantic coast and the western most part of the Loire Valley. It’s made from only one grape, Melon de Bourgogne, which has a crisp acidity and with a citrus-like zing to it. This is not an expensive, fancy wine meant for savoring and bragging to your friends about. It’s a Tuesday night sipper or a thirsty Thursday guzzler. It’s simple, it’s pleasant and it’s pretty damn cheap considering the high quality.

The 2007 Château de la Fessardiere Muscadet de Sèvre-et-Maine Climat is made from 100% organic grapes and the vineyard follows Biodynamic processes. This wine has a bit more weight than typical super light and refreshing Muscadets, but still lands all those delicious flavors that make sweet love to shellfish. Best of all, it’s cheap enough that after blowing your budget on the fish, you can still buy a few bottles.

Drink liberally with shellfish (as if we didn’t say so enough times), light pasta dishes and as many oysters as you can shuck because it’s National Oyster Day (which, apparently, is a real thing!).

2009 S.A. Prum Essence Riesling

Mosel-Saar-Ruwer, Germany – $15

Summertime = funtime and we fully support busting out a bottle or two for a late lunch on a gorgeous, lazy weekend afternoon. While the whole “liquid lunch” thing is totally awesome in theory, let’s face it: nothing good happens when you get schwasted by 3pm. Luckily, there’s a way to have your cake and eat it too!

Enter German Riesling. The country cranks out tons of delicious yet classy wines with less alcohol than other whites. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Hey, Second Glass, why the hell would I buy a wine with LESS alcohol?” Here are a few reasons:

1) It goes REALLY well with food. Like, a nice salad, maybe seafood, or even just some bread and cheese will dance their asses off with the wine, in your mouth. Trust us, it’ll be awesome!

2) It’s nice and crisp with a bit of refreshment and a kiss of sweetness. It’s soooo easy to drink on its own.

3) Two people can easily split a bottle over lunch not end up drunken rampaging down the middle of the street harassing tourists and losing flip-flops.

Convinced? Good! Go get yourself a bottle of the 2009 S.A. Prum Essence Riesling. This one is a Qualitatswein (or QbA) wine, which means it meets certain standards set by the government and ranges from dry to semi-sweet. This guy drinks closer to the dry side with a cool, crisp minerality. At only 10.5% alcohol you can chug a few glasses and still make it back from the beach with both flip flops!

Drink liberally with Thai takeout, a fruit and cheese plate, or while laying on a blanket under the shade of a big tree!

2009 Twin Vines Vinho Verde

Vinho Verde, Portugal – $10

You’re staring at a wine that is absolutely perfect for summer. It’s light, super crisp and ultra refreshing. Not only that, it’s also light on the alcohol (around 10%) so you can sip on this wine all day while bathing in the sun but not be a mess when it comes time to go out later that evening. Some people drink lemonade on a hot day, we drink Vinho Verde.

Vinho Verde is a wine region in northwest Portugal that literally means “green wine.” Referring to the extremely fresh and youthful flavors, these wines are meant to cool you off on a hot day. Because these wines are made from local grapes no one has heard of, like Loureiro, Arinto, Trajadura, and are often produced in mass quantity, these wines are unbelievably inexpensive. But don’t let the sub-ten-dollar price tag fool you. This region produces some bitchin’ wines that are great for lazy afternoon sipping.

The 2009 Twin Vines Vinho Verde, like most wines from the region, rocks a light spritz. It’s no where near a full on bubbly but it adds to the overall this-is-going-to-cool-you-off-ness of the wine.

In Portugal, they drink this stuff by the pitcher with grilled sardines, whole fish and octopus. Here in the US, we suggest rocking a few bottles of this at the beach while nomming on fried clams.

Drink liberally from a plastic cup while nibbling on grilled seafood and salad with goat cheese while digging your toes into the sand on the beach.

2007 Rock Wall Wine Company Zinfandel

Sonoma County, California – $20

Zinfandel is California’s hometown hero. It’s the closest thing they have to “local, indigenous” grape and they’re running with it! (Technically, it has it’s roots in Primitivo from Italy, but hey, who’s counting?)

Big, bold and loaded with sun-ripened fruit, this is a grape that has a “live fast and die young” attitude. It’s a wine that karate-chops steak, grilled veggies and huge burgers right in the face! This is the grape the innovators of the California wine industry choose to work with more than any other.

So why did we pick the 2007 Rock Wall Wine Company Zinfandel? First, it’s a SLAMMIN’ wine loaded with dark berry fruit flavors and a solid, firm structure. Basically, its damn good Zin and you’ll only wish you had another bottle when finish the first.

But here’s the really fun part. The winery isn’t located on a scenic hillside in the Cali countryside. No, it’s in a 40,000 sq ft hanger on decommissioned Air Force base overlooking San Francisco.

And the winemaker isn’t your stereotypical grey-haired, old dude. She’s a boisterous, high-energy, 20-something badass!

Attn: grey-haired, old dude winemakers. We still love you! We’re just sayin’ she ain’t that ;-)

But just because she’s young doesn’t mean she’s short on experience. Shauna’s father, founder of the winery, is Kent Rosenblum, veteran wine rockstar. This means the girl literally grew up in a winery.

Now she’s in charge and she’s decided to experiment with everything from Riesling, to Tannat to bubbly. In one of the coolest spaces we’ve seen Shauna and her Mohawk-sporting staff are making truly innovative, unique yet absolutely delicious wines.

Drink liberally with all things grilled, slow cooked BBQ pork, and your friends that refuse to do things “by the book.”

2009 Lieu-dit Cocagne Côteaux du Vendômois Rosé

Loire Valley, France – $11

Last summer we tasted this wine and instantly fell in love. It had brilliant crispness, great minerality, and, with just a touch of fruit, could cool us down on even the hottest summer nights. But like most flings, it was gone and out of stock before we knew it.

Well, we waited an entire year and like that cutie you met as a kid at camp, it’s time to rekindle the old flame, if only for another hot summer.

So yes, this rose is a mouthful to pronounce but you’ll forget all about that after you pop the cork and start sipping away. It’s made from Pineau d’Aunis, an obscure grape you probably haven’t heard of, but rocks some really interesting flavors. This isn’t a smack you-in-the-face-with-fruit wine, it’s more of a “Did we spill the bottle? Where did it go? Oh well, let’s open another one” kind of wine.

Basically, it’s damn good wine made for chillin on the porch, watching the sunset, and feeling those happy summer vibes. Grab it while you can because once it’s gone, you’ll have to wait until next summer. Just like when you were in camp.

Drink liberally with picnic basket snacks, like soft cheeses, fresh berries, cured meats and a hottie sunbathing on a blanket.

Gruet Brut NV

New Mexico, USA – $15

This wine embodies the true spirit of American Pioneering. In the 1950s, a French architect who also owned a winery in Champagne decided he wanted to make wine in the US. After a long search for property all over the West, he settled on, of all places, New Mexico.

Fast forward to present day: the winery is now helmed by his son and daughter and Gruet is blowing up! What’s most amazing is they’re making highly authentic, yet insanely affordable Champenoise style bubbly in… well… Albuquerque.

We’re going with their flagship wine, the NV Brut, but you can also find the Blanc de Noir (made mostly from Pinot Noir grapes) and Rose (dry pink wine) for the same price.

The Gruet Brut NV is everything you want in a bottle of bubbly: it’s rich, complex and toasty with a crisp and clean zing that dances in your mouth. This wine is made from both Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. At around $15 this is a shockingly good bottle and when you browse the top restaurant wine lists in the city, you’ll see they agree. Grab a few bottles for the weekend because being patriotic never tasted so good!

Drink liberally with good food, friends and family and FIREWORKS!