Local Flavor -- Dominick's Merlot

This week's wine is local - sort of. I bought this big bottle of Dominick's Merlot from Mt. Carmel Wines (...as always). As the name and label suggests this is Dominick's DOC house wine. House wines with a DOC designation are rather low on the an Italian wine scale but that's not to say that house wine is bad. House wines are produced from the variety of grape local to the "house." This could be a restaurant's "house" or an actual family home. So depending on where the "house" is located, the wine can actually be very good. It's like the difference between BBQ in Texas and BBQ in Minnesota; it just depends on where you are.

Massive bottle of Dominick's wine

The result is usually a young (new) wine that is very drinkable and served in copious amounts. Hence this big (and cheap) bottle from Dominick's. The variety of grape used here is "Piave Merlot" and probably one of the more confusing wine names. "Piave" is a DOC wine of the Veneto Region, located in Northeast Italy. To give you an idea, Venice is in the Veneto region.

My Grade: 8/10

Price: $10

After reading Steph's blog I figured that it would be appropriate for me to mention that I intern at AOL video, a floor up from Steph and the Brand Marketing Team. It's funny -- my internship consists of advising websites and blogs on how to integrate video onto their site to enhance user engagement and monetize video/page views -- but I haven't embedded any video on my own blog yet!

So, here is a video from the AOL library with instructions on how to open a bottle of wine. The guy in the video is pretty lame, I know. Maybe I'll pull intern rank and talk to someone about getting better wine videos. If anyone wants to pull video from the AOL library it's incredibly easy -- just ask me! And hey, if your blog somehow records a few million page views a month, maybe I'll be talking to you from my desk in the office about monetizing your blog.

*Disclaimer: my boss would fire me on the spot if he saw how low below the fold this video is. Ideally, videos should be placed above the fold to increase engagement. But I'm pulling editorial rank here.