Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve been recommended by the CDC to stay home. St. James Winery has brought people together and allowed them to share experiences over their favorite glass of wine for 50 years, and we want to continue to do this even during these trying times. With that, here’s a list of four ways to inspire you to connect with the ones you love while staying in.

1. Try our new Sparkling Fruit Wines. We recently released four new wines that are fun and sparkling variations of our popular fruit wines and now come in 375ml cans. These lighter, lower ABV versions have a sparkling effect and come in four flavors – Blackberry, Peach, Strawberry and Mango. For a night in idea, try the canned sparkling version and the traditional 750ml bottled wine to compare the differences. You could also do a blind taste test to see if your partner can guess the flavor! To purchase, you can find them online here in a special sampler combo pack.

2. Get outside. Staying home and social distancing doesn’t mean staying inside. As the spring weather warms up, go outside and enjoy the season. Sit around a fire with a glass of red wine, have a midday picnic with our limited release Strawberry Moscato, or sit on the porch or patio and watch the sunset with your special someone and favorite wine. Sunshine and warmer weather are sure to lighten everyone’s moods after a long winter.

3. Fruit wine mixology fun. Our popular fruit wines are made with 100% real fruit and are perfect to use as a base for mixology for some fun wine cocktails. Browse our website for different recipes such as Blackberry Mojito, Strawberry Lemonade, or Blueberry Gin Fitz. You can also have fun at home mixing up your own recipe. It’s simple –

• • Start with one of our eight fruit wines.
  • Add a spirit of your choice such as tequila, vodka, gin, or rum. Flavored spirits can add in another layer of flavors like vanilla or citrus!
  • Add some optional club soda or lemon-lime soda to give it some fizz.
  • Give it a splash of citrus such as lemon or lime.

The possibilities are endless and you can create some fun recipe inventions! Snap a picture of your recipe and share it with friends and family on social media. Maybe, take a moment to tag @stjameswinery while you’re at it.

4. Host a virtual comparative tasting. Make sure you and your friends have the same wines on hand and meet online!
For example, you and your friends could compare a Chardonnay to our Chardonel.

Or you could do a vertical tasting of the same wine but from different years. Currently, we have the following Norton wines available for purchase online:
Norton 2004, 2006, 2009, 2011, 2014, 2011
Try the different wines, take notes, then compare and contrast to discuss them.

As a reminder, you can purchase our wine at stjameswinery.com, with curbside pick-up, and we just launched local delivery within the radius found on the map below. Read more about how our local delivery works here.

We hope these ideas will help you to sip back and relax in the weeks ahead! Cheers!