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
Josh Cellars Seaswept Sparkling is tailored for the intersection of brunch, summer, and a playlist starting with anonymous, synthetic downtempo beats and somehow ends up with a sea shanty singalong before the table is cleared and the Uber home arrives. A blend of 50/50 Chenin Blanc and Colombard, it opens with an easygoing brightness of…
No less than six months from our overview of Mi Sueño’s 2025 offerings, we return to one of our favorite Napa Valley vineyards to taste a quartet of vintages released this year. If you’re new to the site (or the wine), Mi Sueño (“my dream”) was founded by Rolando Herrera, a Mexican-born winemaker who rose…
While a sizeable sum of U.S. wineries find themselves retreating, shuttering tasting rooms, trimming ambitions, or informing shareholders that caution was always in the cards, the Heath Family portfolio carries on adding labels, acreage, and reasons to remain relevant in the ongoing campaign to make Texas a formidable wine destination. K-Estate (Kuhlman Estate) sits within…
Created by Sabrina Weiss and sommelier Julie Dupouy, SemiPlume is a new entrant into the NA wine space, with a singular focus on its sparkling product. Available both in standard 750ml bottles and 250ml cans, the affordable offering isn’t de-alcoholized wine but rather sparkling water flavored with grape juice concentrate and a variety of botanicals,…
Riunite is one of those names that has existed long enough to become cultural furniture: familiar, faintly nostalgic, and impossible to dismiss, even if it has spent years making the case that “approachable” can also mean “just pour another glass and stop talking.” Building its international ascendancy largely around Lambrusco, it helped turn a once-regional…
By the time Brunello di Montalcino was taking shape in the 1800s, Tenuta CastelGiocondo was already on the ground as one of the first estates involved, so the Frescobaldi-owned estate has been there from the beginning in a way that counts. The label, lifted from a Simone Martini fresco, only sharpens the point: this is…
No less than ten months after our last round, we return to Mezzacorona’s Ventessa line with an introduction as minimal as the wines themselves: low-calorie, low abv wines that are vegan, gluten-free, clocking in at 90 calories, and shockingly still affordable while everything else seems to be skyrocketing in price. 2025 Mezzacorona Ventessa Vigneti delle…
Largely known for its easy-going line of Prosecco, Cantine Maschio enters the non-alcoholic arena with this dealcoholized white sparkling variation on a classic spring/summer sipper. There’s an opening lemon note giving the wine immediate lift, but it threatens to present as “cleaning supplies” or “lemonhead soda”, especially when pouring multiple servings in the same proximity.…
Campo Viejo is an iconic part of Rioja, a place where wine has allowed ample time to permeate the landscape, economy and local culture. It’s been quite a few years since we’ve had anything from the winery, so it’s time to revisit and check out its flagship offering. The nose on this Tempranillo does everything in…
New Zealand’s sustainable wine story is easy to tell because the numbers do most of the talking. Launched way back in the mid-90s, Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand (SWNZ) has grown into an internationally-recognized, industry-wide certification program covering all aspects of vineyard operations. The headline figures are hard to ignore: 98% of the country’s vineyard-producing area…