Helping you select great wine.In a bottle shop. Top Drops  •  April 2017 Bob's Top Drops are updated frequently, as new wines are tasted. Wineries, for a chance to appear here, please send us tasting samples. Read more articles at The Real Review Cellar Talk is updated weekly and can also be found at The Real Review Our most popular wine plan, the Winemaster’s Selection brings together a premium range of wines at fantastic prices. Our most popular plan, with exceptional value for money Crowd-pleasing wines that suit all tastes three months (March, June, September, December) Available as a red, white or mixed Typical drinking window: 1-10 If you've been to a fancy restaurant, you've probably seen a sommelier — those wine experts who make sure you get the best possible match for your meal. But what if you don't want a chardonnay or pinot? What if you want a nice cold beer? A new program is working to bring this same level of knowledge to the world of malt and hops by turning out batches of certified beer experts known as Cicerones.

Ray Daniels, a Chicago brewer, started the Cicerone Certification Program five years ago. And he jokes that he did so for a fairly simple reason: bad beer. "You'd go into a place that had a lot of taps, that you'd think might know their beer. And they really didn't," Daniels sighed. So Daniels came up with the Cicerone exam to standardize a canon of beery knowledge. There are three levels of of Cicerones, starting out with Certified Beer Servers (an online exam), Certified Cicerones (an in-person test, complete with a tasting component), and the top level of Master Cicerone (an in-person exam lasting two days). wine in a box commercialThe exams focus on five basic components: keeping and serving beer; best white wine italian foodbrewing process and ingredients; new zealand best wine in the world

and beer and food pairing. This may sound a bit complex. And it is: Only about a third of test takers pass (and the numbers are even lower for the Master Cicerone certification). But Daniels stresses that he's not trying to set up some elitist system. Enjoying a beer is a simple pleasure. It's just that beer itself isn't so simple. "Beer is a fragile product," Daniels notes. "It can be ruined instantly by certain types of handling. So the people in the beer business — from the brewery all the way to the waiter or waitress — need to understand the complexity of beer." best wine to drink in usaSo far, only seven people have achieved the top level of Master Cicerone. buy german wine ukBut about 900 have passed the regular exam, and an additional 27,000 have become Certified Beer Servers. great red wines under 20 dollars

And the beer world is taking notice. Many breweries encourage employees — from brewers to servers to distributors — to study for the Cicerone exam. Portland-based craft brewer Widmer Brothers has gone a step further: It pays for exams and sets up study programs, and it will even require the basic level for certain employees by the end of the year. Widmer's brewing manager, John Eaton, says it makes a lot of sense. "The last thing a brewer wants," he says, "is for a consumer's first interaction with your beer to be not the beer that you wanted them to interact with." best year for italian red wineAnd that bad interaction can happen when there's something wrong with the beer — from dirty keg lines to brewing mishaps — which the Cicerone training will help employees identify. best wine tour vacationsBut Eaton says a bad interaction could also happen when someone just doesn't know how to give you the right beer. best wine list dc

While wine has its own language, beer servers are often at a loss as to how best to match a drinker to the right beer. "That's actually one of my biggest pet peeves," Eaton notes, "is people will say something like a dark beer is automatically heavy or bitter — neither of which is necessarily the case. All different colors of beer can be all different ranges of bitterness and can be all different ranges of density." And when Cicerones study up so that they understand — and can communicate — these differences, there's a better chance that they can help get the right beer into customers' hands. And that's something that any beer lover can drink to. Emily Wines' sommelier career might have seemed predestined on account of her last name, but the 39-year-old Washington native originally set out to be an artist. Moonlighting as a sommelier during graduate studies in San Francisco, however, altered her course. She trained as an assistant sommelier under Rajat Parr at the Fifth Floor, which holds a Wine Spectator Best of Award of Excellence, and eventually took over the list.

In 2008, she became a Master Sommelier, one of only 129 in the world, and was made wine director at the Fifth Floor's parent company, Kimpton Hotels, where she currently oversees the beverage selections at 50 locations. Wines spoke with contributing editor Jennifer Fiedler about developing food-friendly cocktail menus, why she loves keg wines and how "sommelier slams" helped her get familiar with other beverages. Wine Spectator: How does your background in wine influence how you approach other beverages, such as cocktails, in your new position? Emily Wines: I oversee the spirits program, though we have a corporate mixologist who does the cocktails. I felt like a lot of cocktail programs are stand-alone, as in the bartender doesn't talk to the chef the way that sommeliers do. It's just as critical that the cocktails reflect the sensibility of the cuisine and that they work with the food. WS: What makes a cocktail food-friendly? EW: One of the big things is alcohol levels—sometimes they're too alcoholic.

Sometimes it's about temperature. Really hot food and cold cocktails aren't the best combination. Wine-based cocktails and more culinary cocktails tend to work better with food. WS: You have an extensive keg wine program at your restaurants. How did that come about? EW: It's something that we believe in on a couple of levels. One, for the environment: I can't count how many times I've watched a waiter open a case of wine for a banquet, empty the bottles, then throw the whole thing away—so wasteful—whereas kegs can be used over and over. The other side of it is the freshness factor. The glass of wine is as fresh from the bottom of the keg as it is from the top of the keg. WS: What are a few keg wine producers you like? EW: Lioco is fantastic. Au Bon Climat has been doing great stuff in keg. In Arizona we have a few small producers that are doing keg wine as well. There's a couple big people that do custom kegging that we like to work with: Gotham in New York and, in California, Free Flow Wines or Silvertap.

WS: You created a happy-hour program that features sustainable wines. EW: We wanted it to align with our values, so we insist that all of the wines have a story that they can tell about how they give back to the community or to the earth. For example, we work with a wine called Flipflop, and they donate shoes to kids in third-world countries. We have worked with another winery that does beach cleanups. We've worked with Wente that has their Farming for the Future program. WS: What are the "sommelier slams" you have at Kimpton? EW: Five years ago, I started doing these battles, sommelier dinners. I see a lot of variations all over the country now. The whole point for me was to learn more about other beverages, so for these dinners I would pull in a sake expert, a mixologist or another sommelier. We would do a three- to five-course dinner and pair each course with two beverages, and we would make it like a battle and argue about who had the better pairing without saying anything negative about the beverage or food.