Nightly Activities
Every evening, we offer unique wine flights, over fifty wines by the glass, "The Nosh Menu”, as well as made to order sushi from our very own Umi Sushi Bar. In the Lava Room, we have XBOX 360 and Wii games and numerous HDTVs for the gamer in you! We also have large screen HDTVs to view nightly sporting events.
Nightly Wine Bar Specials- 5-7pm
Monday- $2 Draft Shock Top Belgian-style beer and $3 draft Stella Artois
Tuesday-2-4-1 Nosh menu appetizers & $10 U-pick-it wine flights from our extensive wines by the glass menu
Wednesday- Half price all wines! Bottles and by the glass + freebie food 5-7pm
Thursday- Half price sushi maki rolls- in the Wine Bar or Umi Sushi bar only
Friday- Rum Fun! U call it rum drinks $4.00
Free validated parking while dining at The Oz
While dining in The Oz Restaurant for either lunch or dinner, we now offer free validated parking for up to 2 hours.
Signature Cocktails
We have just added many new signature cocktails, made with fresh squeezed fruit juices, premium liquors, and each one unique and all hand-shaken. Come in and try our "Ten Thyme Smash Martini" made with Tanqueray 10, fresh thyme, cucumbers, and white cranberry juice!
Wine Flights
`Bubbles-Bubbles', `I'm Blushing', `California Cool Chardonnay', `Mysterious Merlots'... what's in a name??
These are the names of some of our new wine flights in The Wine Bar. Our wine flights have three specially selected wines that share a common trait. But what are they, and what's in a name? Now that's the fun of flights, come in and have fun tasting and sampling our interesting flights, each flight has three wines, each with a two ounce taste, and all wines are available by the glass as we continue to pour over 50 wines by the glass every night.
Sauv Me
Douglas Green, Capetown, South Africa
Villa Maria, New Zealand
Hanna, Sonoma Ca
$10
Southern Hemisphere- Red
Wolf Blass Cabernet/Shiraz ‘Red Label’, South
Australia
Bodega Tamari Reserva Malbec, Mendoza, Argentina
Cono Sur, Pinot Noir, Colchuga Valley, Chile
$9
Southern Hemisphere –White
Villa Maria, Sauvingon Blanc, New Zealand
Douglas Green, Sauvignon Blanc, Capetown, South Africa
Lapostolle, “Casa” Chardonnay
$10
Thunder Down Under
Hardys Nottage Hill, Shiraz
Penfolds ‘Thomas Highland’ Shiraz
Wolf Blass ‘Red Label’ Cabernet-Shiraz Blend
$9
Our new Director of Food and Beverage is also the Hotel Certified Sommelier and he will be introducing even more wine flights in The Wine Bar. In addition to our new wine flights, our unique signature cocktails and our nine-dollar nosh menu, The Wine Bar has it all.
The Juice
Put a cork in it!
The debate over natural cork wine closures has never been more intense! On the one side, wine oenophiles praise the natural cork for its ability to breath and expand and growers of cork trees are hurting as the need for natural cork is waning. This debate is basically due to Cork Taint. It is the tragic point at which a cork becomes contaminated with 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, or TCA. Discovered by a Swiss researcher in 1981 who detected TCA in a $400 bottle of wine, it's described as smelling like a cross between moldy newspapers and old socks. Most of us can't detect it until it goes above 6ppt (parts per trillion), but expert noses are thought to sense it below 2ppt.
This lead to new wine closure materials; polyethylene, screw top and plastic, that have taken off and in many markets represents over 70% of all wines sold. Natural cork is harvested from cork trees where the bark is harmlessly removed by hand with axes, and takes 9 years for the tree to fully regain its full bark back on its trunk. The proliferation of cheaper synthetic wine closures “corks” has farmers of these forests reconsidering and changing what they plant there.
As wines in the new world are crafted to ‘purchase and drink’, as opposed to old world varietals, ‘purchase and cellar’, more non-cork wine closures will begin to appear. Where this all goes and how far reaching this debate is? Only time will tell. As a certified sommelier, the sound a real cork makes is very different than any synthetic wine closure out there today. But who knows with today’s technology, what tomorrow may bring!
To cap it all: the options
Natural cork: Cork has more than 400 years' experience in stopping wine bottles but it is also charged with spoiling 3-5% of global wine. Spanish law now dictates that wineries in 11 regions must use natural cork to receive a DO (Denominacion de Origen) quality status. This won't do much to counter charges of a southern European monopoly.
Screw cap: Once the surest way to get yourself barred from the dinner-party circuit, screw-caps are now billed as the solution to both cork taint and the less-technical issue of "where's the bloody corkscrew?". Guala Closures, one of the world's biggest manufacturers, claims sales are growing at half a billion a year, and screw-caps are getting clever with plastic filters and layers to deliver oxygen to maturing wines.
The plastic stopper: Entrepreneur Dennis Burns, a producer of pro-tech hockey helmets in the US, decided to use a similar polyethylene composite to make a synthetic wine "cork" with no chance of taint. Burns's Supreme Corq is one of the biggest of the 30 synthetic cork producers worldwide. Its rival, Nomacorc, produced 1.4m plastic corks last year – enough to circle the earth 1.33 times. The synthetic boys don't buy cork's ecological superiority: "Many are just cork granules and dust bonded with solvents," says Simon Waller of Supreme Corq. "They are no more biodegradable than our product."
The zork: It's new(ish) and loud and hails from New Zealand. The Zork (a hybrid of "zero" and "cork") is a low-density plastic closure that boasts sophisticated tamper-evident design and inner foil oxygen barriers. The innovation will need to be more sophisticated than the colour – bright pink or red, which may put off serious wine drinkers. It's gaining popularity in US wine bars for by-the-glass fizz.
Treetop Tropical Thursdays- Rooftop Happy Hour Pool Party
The season is now over for our Thursday night summer rooftop pool party! Rated “The Top 3 Happy Hour in the DC Area” by WTOP radio, and featured in numerous articles in the Washington Post, and frequented by local TV personalities, politicos and up and comers, this event will be the hottest place to be in Bethesda in the Summer of 2011, beginning June 2nd! Each week we will feature free specialty appetizers from area celebrity chefs and local Bethesda eateries, and other special and unique business in the area displaying their goods. Look for news and announcements in the spring with new line ups and great activities that will sizzle all summer!
Reply to our Facebook Event page for photos from this past summer and for notifications!
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