Wine and Spirits Travel

It's hard to keep up with all the wine regions out there all over the world.  One site on the web  is making it a little easier to navigate your way around European wine. Wine Travel Guides has over 50 guides with 2,500 pages worth of information -- for free! I don't usually write about websites, but I was quite impressed with Wine Travel Guides .  It provides detailed guides for trip planning or interesting reads for the armchair traveler.  The guides are divided into France, Italy and Spain and then broken down into very specific regions. Within Burgundy , for example, there are guides for Chablis , Côte de Nuits , Côte de Beaune , Côte Chalonnaise , Mâconnais and northern Beaujolais and Heart of Beaujolais .  The pages on each region on Wine Travel Guides offer in-depth information on the area's wines, places to stay, food of the region, visiting wineries and additional detail. All of the guide writers are well-published and experienced in the regions they write ab

Washington, DC is so full of attractions we often forget its namesake’s home, but a trip to Mount Vernon is well worth it.  It’s not surprising that this estate is a landmark full of history, but not many realize that some of that history is the spirited kind. My trip to Mount Vernon actually began at a restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia called The Majestic .  It’s a small place that you can easily miss on this busy street, but it’s worth checking out the extensive cocktail list (loved the Mint Julep) and Nana’s Sunday Dinner (incredible Tiramisu, something I’m not usually wild about).  After dinner I was lucky enough to be able to stay at the Mount Vernon Guest Quarters, owned and maintained by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.  This group is actually the oldest national historic preservation organization in the U.S. – and quite hospitable. The next day it was off from the quaint house to the big house, Mount Vernon.  Though the property now has a modern museum and classroom