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
From the inimitable Kingsley Amis, in the tome Everyday Drinking: Faced with a choice between bad or untrustworthy red wine on the one hand, and ditto white on the other, pick the red. That was true back when Amis wrote those words in the early ’70s (when cheap white wine meant one thing: crudely made…
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It’s been a year since we updated the “cheat sheet” vintage chart, designed to let you know what years are the best for certain wine grapes and regions, and which you can avoid. As with last year’s edition, here’s how to use the cheat sheet: Only the last two digits of a year are included…
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Smith Woodhouse isn’t the biggest name in Port, but the company’s Lodge Reserve Port is a winner in the nonvintage world. This is a rich and vibrant ruby Port, full of fruit and jam flavors. The finish is impressively long. It stays with you in the back of your mouth for minutes, fading from sugary…
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This is the cocktail that launched quite a memorable evening. This one’s fun to watch, as the fig seeds float up and down with the Prosecco when you first serve it. The name is apropos of nothing, as I couldn’t come up with anything in the “fig” genre. Tuesday Afternoon 1 fresh fig, stem removed…
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Interesting tasting last night for Bonhams and Butterfield’s pre-auction tasting. But more than the wines was the curious issue of attendance: Considerably lower than even six months ago and perhaps an ominous sign of what may happen to the market for high-end wines in hard economic times. Still, there was wine to be tasted (in…
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The Wall Street Journal reminds me how easy I have it here in California: I can order wine or spirits from just about anywhere and have no trouble receiving them here without fear of UPS dumping $100 Cab down the drain. (Believe me, it happens!) I’ve been under the impression that things have been improving…
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I thought sales of Palin Syrah would’ve gone up for the humor value alone. Nothing’s funny any more, I guess. The sales of Palin Syrah, a 100 percent organic wine from Chile, have dramatically plummeted in a San Francisco wine bar ever since Republican presidential hopeful John McCain named Sarah Palin to be his running…
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With Shafer’s 2003 Cab, on first blush, there’s heat and considerable tannin on the palate. That tannin doesn’t fade, even after four hours of sipping, I’m still getting a lot of heavy tannic notes, indicating this wine’s got years ahead of it before it peaks. The fruit beneath is enticing, even though it’s tight as…
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The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry weighs in on the biggest fad in winemaking going today: Biodynamic farming. One assumes by the name that biodynamics must be a good thing… but what does it really mean? The CSI folks dig deeper, outlining something that even includes astrological analysis that is “set against a complex background cosmogony…
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Courtney Cochran is one of these hipster gals trying to change the wine world and refocus it on a younger crowd, away from the Robert Parkers of the industry. Great, I’m all for it. Now she’s got a book out, Hip Tastes – The Fresh Guide to Wine, which is sort of an introductory text…
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