Wine
While wine can be made from many types of fruits and flowers, it is iconically produced from fermented grapes. Wine production dates back at least 8000 years, and today it is produced in quantity in more than 70 countries, with Italy, Spain, France, and the United States the largest producers of wine today. The world of wine is vast and complex, with more than 10,000 grape varietals in existence. This is largely due to experimental cross-breeding and grafting that has taken place for millennia, and such experiments have led to some of today’s most popular grape varieties, including Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay. The primary styles of wine today include red, white, and rose. While almost all grape juice itself is white, red wine is made by allowing the juice from black (aka red) grapes to ferment in contact with its skins, while white wine is usually (but not always) made from white grapes. Rose wine is made from black grapes with limited skin contact, which provides the pinkish color.
Top Wine Posts:
Understanding the Wines of France
Wine and Beer Touring in California’s Paso Robles, 2017
Touring and Wine Tasting in California’s Anderson Valley
Harvest in Chile’s Casablanca Valley – A Dusty Paradise
Chateau Montelena’s Dream Tasting: A Retrospective of Five Decades of Wine
Exploring Port Wine: Touring Porto and the Douro Valley
Visiting Tuscany’s Tenuta dell’Ornellaia
The first two rounds of Domaine Bousquet’s Alavida were met with praise for presenting a high-quality Malbec at a smart price point while also displaying an impressive list of credentials in the “clean living” column. It’s a USDA-certified organic, vegan, gluten-free, and kosher wine enduring an incredibly disciplined and rigorous process that requires an immense…
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Christened in tribute to the patriarch of Baldacci Family Vineyards and father to winemaker Michael Baldacci, this Cabernet Sauvignon is the beneficiary of grapes harvested from Baldacci’s top two vineyards, located in the Stags Leap and Diamond Mountain districts and carefully selected to showcase the diversity of regional terroir. It is matured for 22 months…
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We often cover the higher-end wines of Beaulieu Vineyard — aka BV — but the more affordable bottlings are far more common in the market — not to mention accessible. This Napa Valley expression is a decidedly soft and juicy incarnation of cabernet sauvignon, so bursting with plums and cherries that it doesn’t immediately evoke…
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We’ve covered Symington’s Quinta da Fonte Souto white blend on several occasions, but never its red: this alicante bouschet is a signature variety of southern Portugal’s Alentejo region. These grapes are grown at Symington’s 511-acre Quinta da Fonte Souto estate in Portalegre. The resulting wine is dark purple, completely opaque — perhaps best thought of…
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I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for some festivities in the form of holiday revelry. Naturally, the holidays mean gift-giving time is nigh, and you’re going to want recommendations for what to wrap up and stash under the tree. As always, this year we want your gift-giving to make a statement, but we…
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We reviewed the 2017 vintage of San Felice’s Campogiovanni Brunello di Montalcino twice, and now we’re back with our first (and probably only) look at the 2018 vintage. Both are expected to be very good to excellent vintages for the classic Tuscan region, so let’s dive in and see if the equation has changed at…
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We last saw San Felice’s Bolgheri bottling in the 2017 edition. Like that vintage, this 2020 is a blend of 95% merlot and 5% cabernet sauvignon. But unlike the 2017, this offering is a much softer and more approachable wine, ready to drink today. Exuberantly fruity but far from sweet, you’d never notice this was…
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Non-alcoholic wine is a tricky beast, but we’ve been watching the category evolve and improve in recent years. Oceano’s latest holds a lot of promise: Not only is it vintage-dated, it’s a vineyard designate from the Spanish Springs Vineyard in central California near San Luis Obispo. Process-wise things are similar to other NA wines: It’s…
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Aging wine and spirits on and around the water has become something of a Thing lately, with operations like Jefferson’s sending whiskey around the world on ocean voyages and Maison Ferrand aging Cognac on a barge in the Seine. Wine of the Sea is something very different. A Wisconsin wine importing company called the BZ…
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2021 is shaping up as an exceptional vintage for California pinot noir, and Merry Edwards recently dropped its wines from this year — all showing beautifully. Today we dig into six of them and a sauvignon blanc — five from the Russian River Valley and one from the colder Anderson Valley to the north. Thoughts follow.…
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