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
There’s this thing that happens when a winemaker decides that their vines, or they, haven’t suffered enough for their art. Some specific and slightly punishing logic takes over, and the next thing you know, someone is planting grapes 1650 meters (5413 feet) above sea level in higher Andean reaches of Mendoza, which is itself already…
McCollum was designed in partnership with Oregon’s Adelsheim Vineyard when it launched in 2018. Four years later the project is still going strong, though this craft pinot noir now also incorporates fruit from the McCollum family’s own 318-acre estate in the Yamhill-Carlton AVA. As this wine evolves, let’s see how things are progressing. Give this…
We’re longtime fans of California’s Larkmead and are pleased to revisit the blue chip operation’s three latest releases, arriving in time for 2026’s summer festivities. All are bold reds so if you don’t get to them this year, a few years of cellar slumber will likely do them all some good. 2023 Larkmead Cabernet Sauvignon…
Truth and Valor is a Paso Robles-based producer of particularly patriotic wines, all reds. We last encountered the operation with its 2021 vintage and now we’re back with four offerings from 2023. Let’s salute the winemakers and dig in. Note: The fourth of these wines was inadvertently omitted from our original review. We’ve updated! 2023…
Sagrantino is a grape that genuinely humbles. Not in a pretentious, wine-clown kind of way, but more like the way a long hike in midday July heat humbles: you think you’re prepared, and then somewhere around mile three, there’s an epiphany that in no way do you have business being out there. That’s Sagrantino: dense,…
There is a version of celebrity wine, and celebrity anything really, existing purely as a licensing deal: a label slapped onto something bulk-produced and mildly unremarkable. It is the vineyard equivalent of a perfume “partnership”, with the celebrity’s name performing the heavy marketing lift while the liquid inside does as little as possible. You, savvy…
Scharffenberger is a Mendocino-based winery that specializes exclusively in sparkling wines (all ideal for pairing with sister operation Scharffen Berger chocolates). We’ve covered these wines periodically through the years. Today we take a fresh look at the two flagship nonvintage bottlings as well as a vintage blanc de noirs picked in 2019. NV Scharffenberger Brut…
Rodney Strong is one of the old guard reliable producers of Sonoma, California, with a winery that dates back to 1959. Today it continues to crank out wines across a range of prices and styles, and today we take a look at a recent release (though not the most recent release, which is vintage 2021)…
La Biblioteca is an Oregon winery but its winemaker hails from Burgundy. Francois Millet, the legendary winemaker who ran Domaine Comte Georges de Vogue in Chambolle-Musigny for decades, took the winemaking reins here in 2022 as a consultant. The new 2023 vintage is the first with his imprint. Over Zoom from his offices in France,…
Papapietro Perry isn’t just a winery whose name is really fun to say out loud. It also makes some stellar wines from its home base in Sonoma County, California. We recently received two pinot noirs from its 2022 vintage. Let’s taste. Updated 5/2026 with coverage of the Peters Vineyard selection. 2022 Papapietro Perry Pinot Noir…