I love watching people read wine labels at dinners or a wine tasting. They look at it as though it is a great lost work of Shakespeare, but the truth is they have no idea what they are looking at. It is kind of like when I try to fake that I am listening to my wife! Regardless, the wine label is full of all kinds of information, so let’s take a look at what you can glean from it.

The wine label is organized based one where it comes from. The newer producing regions have made it easy. They put the producer, vintage year, varietal, region of the vineyard and alcohol level smack dab on the front. Older vineyards in France and Italy stick to a tradition, which makes it more difficult. Italian ones are particularly brutal because, well, they are solely in Italian. The key is to look for identifiers for years, vineyard and even bottle shape to figure it out.

When you are first beginning to think of purchasing luxury gift baskets you have a few basic choices to make. Outside of price, which is truly the most basic choice-what type of products do you want to find included in a luxury gift bsaket?

While many companies focus on alcohol others tend to focus on finished products.

Personally speaking, unless I am buying a gift basket for a chile, I’d rather receive a truly top flight alcohol than something whcih was likely manufactured in China and doesn’t stand a good chance of holding up over the long term.

Alcohol can offer a ton of interesting choices from wine to rum to scotch. Wine especially can add a lot of interest to your luxury gift basket because it is made in such limited quantities by some wineries. Many of these smaller, family owned and operated wineries are open to the public which can help you in your attempts to plan your next vacation to wine country as well.