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
Wine.com put out a curious press release, saying that at its website Syrah is now outselling Chardonnay, for the first time ever. Syrah sales grew 47% during the first half of the year, earning it the #2 varietal spot behind Cabernet Sauvignon (so Syrah is now outselling just about everything, really). Nationally, though, those numbers…
Look at all that juice!
Last night I splurged on this bottle of Williams-Selyem Pinot Noir. It may be the most I’ve ever spent on a 750ml bottle of wine in a restaurant, and it is arguably one of the best bottles I’ve ever drank, too. (The price below is the retail cost.) Williams-Selyem’s Westside Road Neighbors Pinot Noir comes,…
The winemaking process continues over at Wired…
In the world of wine gadgets, there are fancy thermometers, cool glasses, and high-end corkscrews. And then there is WinePod, which lets you make your own wine, 48 bottles at a time, from frozen grapes, year-round. I installed a WinePod in my house last week, and my first 150 pounds of grapes go into it…
Some families go on vacation to Disneyland. My family goes to the wine country. (Hey, don’t feel bad for the kids. There is a TON of stuff to do up there, from swimming to amusement parks to visiting the Jelly Belly factory… all of which we did this time up.) Spending five days tasting wine,…
I always seem to have a bottle of Port open and at the ready… but never get around to drinking it. Memo to self: Drink more Porto. Sandeman’s 20 Year Tawny is a nicely mellowed tawny, not too rich or sweet (which I know turns many Port drinkers off), but still bearing some nice complexity.…
The charms of Lillet Blanc have been adequately covered in this blog. But there’s another Lillet — Lillet Rouge — which is considerably harder to find even though it’s been on the market since 1962. There’s not a lot of mystery to what Lillet Rouge is: As the name implies, it’s pretty much the same…
Brancaia (sometimes indexed as “La Brancaia”) is regularly touted as one of the great Super-Tuscan wineries, yet the wines, while expensive, are generally in reach of the average wine buyer. Though in production for only a few years, the $70 Ilatraia is already one of Brancaia’s signature bottlings, a 60-30-10 blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Sangiovese,…
Robert Craig has been making wine on Mount Veeder for 30 years. Exactly. This year, Craig celebrates its 30th anniversary as a creator of “mountain Cabernets.” In honor, here comes his 2005 Affinity, a Bordeaux-style blend from Howell Mountain, on the other side of the valley. Affinity is 85% Cabernet Sauvignon, 13% Merlot, and 1%…