White Wine

This stylish, substantial dry white wine - made from a once-obscure but increasingly popular Rhone Valley grape - delivers ample flavor at a reasonable price. There are nuances of peach, melon, herbs and lychee in a wine that faithfully imitates the style of the great wines of Condrieu. This is one of the better California viogniers I've tasted in recent years. grilled salmon or swordfish

Gruner Veltliner, a little-known variety outside Austria, is one of the world's top-ranked grapes for white wine. This sleeper from north of Vienna is a big bottle of fine wine for a most affordable price. Dry but not severe, it offers hints of sweet pea, minerals and pear - with admirable intensity and no signs of decline at 3 years of age. SERVE WITH // white-fleshed fish, seafood, spicy Asian fare

This easy main-dish salad starts with a bag of frozen scallops, which we're seeing more of in supermarket freezer cases. This recipe also takes advantage of in-season produce to enjoy in the waning days of the farmers' market but, obviously, vegetables from your grocer's produce section can be substituted. The salad also calls for a bit of white wine. If you don't typically have open bottles of wine around, and/or don't want to uncork a new bottle for such a small amount, consider stocking your pantry with one or two mini bottles, or boxed wines, which have a shelf life of five weeks to six weeks after opening.

2004 Veramonte Sauvignon Blanc, Casablanca Valley ($10). This highly regarded Chilean winery wasted no time getting this white wine to market - a move that pays off in freshness and liveliness. The wine offers vibrant pear, citrus, herb and mineral flavors that would be well-matched with spicy seafood dishes. There's no need to worry about cork taint because it comes with a screw top.

Opa! When the spirit hits you as you watch the Summer Games, which spirits are you going to reach for? Too much ouzo over the 16 days of competition will make you woozy. So how about toasting the ancient gods of Olympus with the nectar from Greek vineyards? Greek wines are hard to find outside Greek restaurants. And many have labels written in the Greek alphabet, which can make it tough to negotiate let alone pronounce. Although the word oenophile, a lover of wine, comes from the Greek language, Greece's reds and whites haven't been embraced here the way Australian and New Zealand wines have been.

Pierre Franey and his series of 60-Minute Gourmet cookbooks taught a generation of Americans the versatility and speed of the classic French saute. Franey would cook whatever was for dinner - chicken or beef or veal or fish - deglaze the cooking pan with red or white wine, tomato sauce or whatever, and then enrich the sauce with stock or cream or both. The technique would always be the same, but the results were markedly, deliciously, different. This dish of boneless chicken breasts paired with roasted red peppers in a mustard- and cream-laced sauce is an adaptation of one of Franey's recipes.

Would you buy a bland, underripe melon if some marketer promised it was low in nicotine? If your answer is yes, you might be ready for low-carb wine. Thanks to the nation's current Atkins-inspired frenzy over the dreaded carbohydrate, selling wine by its dietary numbers is an idea whose time has come. One can only hope it will quickly go. Leading the way into this new wine fad are two concoctions called One.6 Chardonnay and One.9 Merlot. The names of these California wines, concocted by the wine division of Kentucky booze-monger Brown Forman, refer to the number of grams of carbohydrate in a 5-ounce glass of the stuff.

A few years ago if you had told me Cambridge would be a vacation destination for Baltimoreans, I would have laughed. It was just a town to drive through on the way to Ocean City. With the opening of the Hyatt Chesapeake Bay resort 18 months ago, all that changed. Tourists arrived in droves who were willing to spend -- even used to spending -- $50 a person for dinner. One of the beneficiaries was the Canvasback, Cambridge's fine dining restaurant. (It's also a sometimes raucous pub with live blues performances, which makes for an interesting combination.