“It’s my favourite beer,” says my pal Ede, who is something of a beer connoisseur. So I tried it and, just like Mikey, I like it. A lot. I still puzzle over the name, though: why is a Dutch brew called Bavaria? Self-described as “a family-brewed premium beer”, it clocks in at five percent alcohol and is available in a half-litre can; a six-pack runs $11.99 plus deposit. While the price is similar, it’s better value than most import beers, because many come in 330-millilitre containers.

There’s something about the spicy, floral grape that really hits the spot with this slow-cooked garnished sauerkraut dish. Here's a shopping list of eight recent tastes to get you started.

This week Jurgen Gothe samples vodkas straight, peared, mangoed, mapled, açai’d, citroned, and moonlit from Greenland, Sweden, the U.S., the Netherlands, Canada, and Vietnam.

Red wines blended with white Viognier now number 10 in the B.C. catalogue and have become a summertime favourite this season. Jurgen Gothe samples six bottles and rates them by flavour and value.

The problem with no-alcohol beer is that it isn’t: most of what passes for it actually has a half-point or so of alcohol. Not this one.

Dozens of new Chardonnays arrive in stores each year and our thirst for the tasty white grape knows no limits. Jurgen Gothe rates a batch of newcomers from Australia, B.C., California, and Chile.

If you buy one of each from this Chilean producer's portfolio of seven wines available in B.C, you will have barely spent $85 and will have a terrific wine-tasting, food-matching adventure ahead of you.

Jurgen Gothe took price as the prime consideration and tasted both the cheapest and most expensive wines. His conclusion: go for the $8.49 bottle.

What more fitting way to celebrate B.C. Day than with a thimbleful of one of our province’s proudest wine exports, icewine—specifically Peller Estates Private Reserve Trinity Icewine 2005 ($52.99 for the 375-millilitre bottle). Based on the hybrid variety Vidal Blanc (54 percent), along with Riesling and Ehrenfelser, it’s already pleased so many palates—critical and just for sheer enjoyment—that the 711-case supply seems to have sold out, at least from the winery.

It's love at first taste for two specialty white spirits now found in B.C. liquor stores. Enjoy these simple recipes for sugar-cane juiced caipirinhas and mojitos that will quickly become your favourite summer sippers.

Here's one more recipe. This Elephant Island Rosemary Swizzle brings together Elephant Island’s unique crab-apple wine with a splash of gin and flavours of lime and fresh rosemary.

Ed and Nick aren’t typical Argentine names, yet that’s who signs the back labels of two same-varietal, different-designated-vineyard Malbecs from Argentina’s prime grape region, Mendoza. Read on and you learn that they are the importers of two delicious big reds: La Posta Angel Paulucci Vineyard Malbec and La Posta Pizzella Family Vineyard, both 2006 vintage, both $19.99.

Here's a few Extreme Chardonnays: the cheapest, the costliest, the sticky sweet, and the ultra-dry. Take your pick, says Jurgen Gothe, there’s something for every taste and every wallet of the world's preferred white wine.

Summer seems to be the season for vodka, with more than 100 types flowing through government stores. Jurgen Gothe sips through some of the latest, including “the world’s first eco-friendly luxury vodka”.

Quite a few of the world’s best substances are the result of good blending: tea, perfume, and wine. Here are a few from the wine valley in our own provincial back yard for you to sip and savour.

This is fun, and besides, you need something with bubbles after all those barbecue reds in last week’s column: an Australian sparkling Sémillon from the Bimbadgen Ridge line. This is bright and easy bubbles in a nicely weighted wine, thanks to the substance Sémillon delivers; unobtrusive natural sweetness; and a lengthy finish. The cry for more goes up as soon as the glass is drained.

Syrah gets Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma”, Cabernet Sauvignon sits well with the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women”, and Merlot goes with everything from Lionel Richie to Otis Redding, according to a new study.

Last week’s lot was cheap and cheerful; this week’s raises the bar a bit. There’s nothing here under $20, for all those capitalized Barbecue Situations. As always, prices—and vintages—were correct at the time of acquisition. The government adjusts these monthly.

The mercury is rising at last so it's time to fire up those barbecues. Jurgen Gothe sifts through the new reds and finds wines for burgers, short ribs, applewood-smoked Cheddar, or perfect Portuguese grilled sardines.

Fruit wines often don’t get the respect they should, but when you add a skilled winemaker to the equation, there are endless palate delights you can savour from stuff that isn’t Vitis vinifera.

Someone must be drinking this besides me—the price of Dalton Canaan Red 2006 has gone up by a dollar since it arrived here at the beginning of the year. But even at $17.99, it continues to be good value and a good introduction to the new style of Israeli wines beginning to come our way. The blend is Cab-Merlot-Shiraz; cherries are the first sniff and taste you get, with some easy sweetness and a fresh, bright, light finish. Good prime-rib wine, but it will dress up a basic barbecue just as well.

Jurgen Gothe's sifts through some heady and fruity Sauvignon Blancs, a delicately balanced Riesling, and an unusual Gewürztraminer that had a hint of salwater taffy in his quest for the best new whites.

All right, let’s blow the budget in a single bound: one more from the legendary Black Hills Estate Winery, the Carménère 2006 ($31.90 and a dime for the blue box). Everybody say “Ow!” Then sip it slowly and add one W to the exclamation. This is some wine—but what is it? A once-flourishing Bordeaux variety that’s making something of a comeback, not only in Bordeaux but in California, Italy, and Argentina—why not British Columbia?

The first in a two-part toast to late spring with recently arrived white wines from around the globe gets your tastebuds ready with Chardonnay, the world’s favourite white wine.

Get your green brew without having to wait till the next St. Patrick’s Day. It’s St. Peter’s Organic English Ale, 4.5 percent alcohol ($4.89 for a half-litre bottle)—good and bright, crisp and lemon-hoppy. Plus, the bubbles aren’t the industrial kind that induce indelicate eructation; there’s just a light carbonation.

Six cheers for our own Wild Geese!

Following in the lees of a column a couple of weeks back, here are more newcomers that can be found on local shelves.

This weekend’s wine fest is a must-attend event that will put many old stereotypes to rest with head-turning new offerings

First, the kvetch. I don’t think 24 percent alcohol really constitutes a liqueur, but they’re calling it that—SOHO Lychee Flavoured Liqueur ($25.45). This is tasty, though, and better iced than off the bar shelf: there’s an intriguing aroma and definitely a litchi taste. It could be a little less sweet for my palate, but I say that about practically everything. Pernod makes it, in France, and it’s very good in a long drink with orange and lemon juice and a splash of soda.

Not a week goes by without a clutch of new wines appearing, especially at this time of year. Sometimes they’re new vintages of old favourites. Sometimes they’re brand-new names and labels—fledgling wineries that are sending their first offerings out into a crowded and discerning market. Sometimes they’re wines that have been renamed, repackaged, rebranded.

Step in the front door at 1944 West 4th Avenue and you enter the Riesling shrine. All right, that doesn’t do justice to the work of one of the city’s great chefs, but we’ll get to that later.

With four annual wine festivals and nearly 200 wineries in the region, the first thing you need for a tour is a big car to cart home boxes full of wine.

Here’s a mouthful to be reckoned with: Hacker-Pschorr Edelhell Münchner Exportbier ($2.62 for 500 millilitres). One of Munich’s proud old names does it according to the old Bavarian purity law. Edelhell means “noble light” but that refers strictly to the colour, not the alcohol level, which is a sensible 5.5 percent. Fresh, bracing, and decidedly Bavarian-style flavours hit the palate.

Australians know a thing or two about Shiraz. The five available in B.C. from the Lehmann portfolio are all excellent, and come decorated with big awards and accolades.

You should have been there.

However you say it, new Pinot Gris and Pinot Grigio wines make grey grand, so now’s the time to pour your way through a PG tour

There are plenty of big guns on the B.C. wine scene, and one of the biggest is Harry McWatters. For over four decades, he has filled—defined is better—the role of mover and shaker in our still-fledgling wine industry. (It’s a lot less fledgling now than it was in the ’60s, and we have McWatters to thank for a lot of that defledglingization!)

Real apple cider, done the French way, and biologique, too: set up a bottle of Val de Rance Cidre Bouché and enjoy an exquisite drink. This is fresh, apple-y, naturally sweet (none of that fake, sugary quality so many of our domestic models display) good bubbles.

Viognier continues its dominance as the white wine lover’s darling. Chardonnay is so last season, isn’t it? And Pinot Blanc? For people frying fish, darling. Sauvignon Blanc is all about oysters, what do you say? But Viognier, now there’s one to be seen sipping.

It’s the glitch that won’t go away. First there was the January 24 column that got Ikon Vodka inadvertently delisted when it wasn’t listed in the first place. Then there was the attempted glitch-fix (in the Valentine’s pink-bubble column of February 7), which got its own glitch when the last line was lost.

Put me down in the “yea” column on Tetra Paks. They’re handy, unsmashable, easy to cool and to pour, and on the boat about the best way to carry wine. Here’s a spring-through-early-autumn table wine that brings together Chardonnay and Verdelho in a litre of gulpable pleasure. Australia’s Heath Wines Lizard Flat 2005 is 89 percent Chard and 11 percent Verdelho, but from the taste you’d think it was the other way round, with plenty of biteful, almost spritzy acidity.

Consider the numbers: 1,600 different wines by 176 wineries from 16 countries. They’ll be appearing in some 60 separate events, way more than half of which have long since sold out. Years ago, someone figured out how many glasses that would entail dishwashingwise, and it came to some googly number like 30,000.

Jaded wine palates—and questing ones—take note: there’s exciting stuff going on at your nearby government liquor store, and it’s centred on the Med. Israeli wines have arrived on these shores, with attitude, and about time too. Travelling recently through the vineyards of Israel, I kept hearing, “Why do people keep referring to us as ‘Middle Eastern’ wines? We make Mediterranean wines.”

This one’s so good you could pour it for your Valentine: “Edition Two” of the KB Signature Series, KB Double Chocolate Ale (650 millilitres, in a handsome box, $7.88). It was developed in collaboration with Purdy’s, a local name synonymous with superb chocolate. Purdy’s extra-dark goes into the recipe’s preparation and another shot just prior to final fermentation. Fabulous flavours run rampant: there’s bittersweetness, but it’s light and elegant too, and it doesn’t hit you over the head.

Pink champagne—rosé being the more elegant term—differs from the regular “white” variety only by the skin of its grapes. Those would be the same three, at least in the Champagne region: pinot noir and pinot meunier, and chardonnay. The first two are red-skinned grapes; by leaving the wine on those skins a little longer than usual, presto! pinko!

The life span of a restaurant in this town—all right, in any town—can generally be measured in terms of months, not years, and rarely decades. But this one can—2008 marks the 30th anniversary of the fine and famous Le Gavroche (1616 Alberni Street), as good and French as it gets.

Let’s taste one of those lavish elixirs (see the icewine-harvest reference above): Tinhorn Creek Kerner Icewine 2006, made from a successful German hybrid first produced in the ’60s, its two grapes being a red (trollinger) and a white (riesling). Good acidity and surprising longevity are its hallmarks. Take a sip: there’s gorgeous freshness and lovely harmony, then roasted apple/caramel and maple-syrup nuances. It’s a well-balanced wine with backbone and perfect acidity.

Glenora is the Nova Scotia distillery that produced Canada’s first malt whisky, Glen Breton. Now here comes Glen Breton Ice, a little bottle of originality proudly labelled “the world’s first single malt whisky aged in icewine barrels”. Ten years in the barrel, out it comes at cask-strength (57.2 percent alcohol). The 250-millilitre bottle costs $50, which about puts it in the collectors’ or connoisseurs’ league.

Quick question: is the quality of homegrown wines getting that much better, or is the thirst just getting bigger? Both, in the case of this questing palate.

Another visit with the BOYs—Best of the Year wines that made the jaded palate sparkle and buzz. The semifinal list ended up at 29 wines, which is more than twice the number I like to present. But it’s early enough in the new year to throw caution into the blue box, so I’ll cram as many into this corner as I can.