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
Summer is here — officially, now — and that means the white wines will be flowing. Why not take the opportunity to look at five different varietals all primed for warm weather? All of the ...
Two Argentine Malbecs go head to head today, showing just how variable this grape and this region can be. 2008 Bodega Tamari Mendoza Malbec Reserva is a burly, smoky beast, a brute that’s a real ...
I can’t speak to the wisdom of naming your wine after Alexander Hamilton — and putting a picture of him on the label — but this Dry Creek Valley Zin is certainly worth a try. ...
+Get rid of glass and you can jam much more wine into the same amount of space. CalNaturale uses Tetra Pak cartons to put one liter of wine into a compact and sturdy package — ...
You may not realize it, but you’ve probably had wine made from Melon de Bourgogne grapes, and probably more than you realize. That’s because all wines from the Muscadet region of France’s Loire Valley are ...
Not knowing exactly what this Loire Valley red was made of, Jean-Maurice Raffault’s Chinon, from the Savigny-en-Véron village, “Clos de Capucins” label, generated quite the argument here at Drinkhacker HQ. Guesses ranged from Syrah to ...
A perennial favorite “splurge” wine, BV’s epically-named Georges de Latour Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley Private Reserve remains a winner in its 2006 vintage. Amazingly soft for a Napa Cabernet this young, it’s a wine inflected ...
Crisp and alive, this Spanish white (from the north of Spain on the Atlantic coast, directly above Portugal) offers a nice balance of fruit and minerals — not as light as Sauvignon Blanc but not ...
By my math, winemakers like to declare a “vintage of a lifetime” once every five or six years, but with Duboeuf’s 2009 Beaujolais-Villages bottling, this might actually be legit. For the Beaujolais newbie, Beaujolais-Villages is ...
During my visit to Ornellaia, I also had the chance to sample three other wines from the neighborhood, comparing them in the relatively controlled environment of a local wine and salumi joint. Some thoughts follow: ...
