Grape of the Day

I periodically, as in almost daily now, am asked by someone to recommend wines. Now, that could be a wine, a wine pairing, a particular bottle, a grape, a style of grapes, or practically anything else. That's okay; I enjoy doing it. I think most of us enjoy sharing a passion of ours with others no matter what that passion might be. From what I hear, most of the wines that I do recommend are successful recommendations. That is, the people that I make the recommendations to are pleased. Sometimes, they make it easy. Other times, well, they don't make it even remotely easy.  As I said, I am more than happy to work with you. But, if you want me help make you happy in this fashion, help me to help you. What do I mean by that? Give me information. The more information, the better.   Here's an example of a challenging request that came up during my essentially weekly visit to Costco last weekend. A nice enough lady (NEL) saw me looking at the assortment of wines they carry and b...

The world is opening back up, so it's time to take a trip today. We're heading to the Western Cape, as it's known region of South Africa. The trip in is long. We took a flight to Johannesburg, non-stop, but really long being masked, and planned to head to the Cape Town area by car. But, after a 17 hour flight, 14 more hours in the car was not what we wanted, so we grabbed another flight to Cape Town and headed just slightly northwest. People who grew up in the US in my generation will remember all the time we spent learning about explorers in our history and geography classes. In particular, here, we might recall that a Portuguese explorer by the name of Vasco da Gama became the first to round the Cape of Good Hope (technically, it was one of his captains named Bartolomeu Dias, but history, at least when I learned it in school, doesn't tell us that) at the southern tip of Africa thereby 'connecting' the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, at least for European explorers...

Look at the labels on a bottle of wine. Usually, but not always, there is a front label and a back label. Usually, those labels are pieces of paper or some paper substitute affixed to the bottle with some sort of glue. Occasionally, on really fancy bottles (fancy in this case is almost always equal to expensive), the label information is etched.  Etched labels are pretty cool. I have some. I think that there was one time that I bought a bottle at least partially for the label. And, for those that don't find themselves offended by absolutely everything, the story makes for a laugh, or at the very least a smile.  We were visiting a favorite winery in the Rutherford area on Highway 29 in Napa Valley. Deciding that we needed one more stop on our way back to our bed and breakfast on Mdrone Avenue in St Helena, we asked the proprietors for a suggestion for a winery that was on the way and open that late. They sent us to a place called Fleury near the end of a road (Galleron) we had ...

At least in the US, we have a holiday weekend coming up as we celebrate those who gave their lives in military service. In a decent part of the country, that means it's barbecue or BBQ time. And as afficionados know, and I am frankly not one of them (BBQ and my digestive system no longer get along all that well), BBQ styles vary in different parts of the country. Let's start out with Carolina style BBQ which interestingly is really North Carolina style as South Carolina has a slightly different style. And, consider that North Carolina is a pretty big state east to west and that the eastern part of the state has a different style than the western part of the state. The difference as far as I know is that in the eastern part of the state, they use the whole hog while in the western part, they stick to the shoulders. And, while both sauces use lots of vinegar, salt and pepper, and sugar, in the west, they add even more sugar and throw in some ketchup. Vinegar is acidic -- very aci...

We hear that a fine wine improves with age. Is that true and, if so, what does it really mean? How does it improve? Are there limits? Let's begin with the last question. Yes, there are limits. If we leave out foritifed wines and Sauternes (and a very few limited others) both of which seemingly age forever or close enough to it that it might as well be forever, there is a point where wines go over the hill. All of them.  We don't know when that is going to be. Even the experts, self-proclaimed or otherwise, don't know, but the fact is that they have a bigger dataset than you or me and therefore are able to predict better than we are. When they are wrong, though, they are really wrong. They were so far off, generally speaking on the 1997 and 1998 vintages of Napa Cabernets that it was laughable. However, their advice has a strong tendency to be good. What is usually going on, and this happens more with red wines than white is an evolution of flavors. Recall that among the ind...

We've written a lot in here over time about pairing although it's not necessarily been a primary focus. There are some foods, however, that we don't mention very often. It's not because we hate those foods, but because those foods are just top on the person doing the pairing. Number one on my list is ginger. And, it's not because ginger is inherently difficult to pair with, but because ginger is a very distinctive flavor requiring particular types of wine, but it's also pretty unusual to eat ginger alone and the types of dishes that ginger goes in often don't pair with the same wines as the strong ginger flavor does. Got that? Ginger is spicy and it carries with it a mild amount of heat. When I see the word or taste heat, my mind goes to aromatic white wines often with some residual sugar. Alternatively, I go to a very full-bodied white wine that lingers on the palate for long enough to absorb the spice and heat. So, with ginger, I look to an off-dry Alsatia...

If you read technical specifications about wine or listen to people who speak, often loudly, about wine, you might notice that the oak in which the wine was aged is being trumpeted. In fact, you likely hear terms such as new (never used previously); once-used, previously used, or used; or neutral (used twice or more previously at which point it is more of a storage vessel for fermentation than anything else). Should you care? Why? The short answer is yes. The reasons are extremely technical, but we can take those technical reasons and largely ignore them to explain the wine reasons behind it. Likely more than any other type, we hear about a wine having been aged in French oak. In France, one cannot imagine, and it might even be against the law, but I don't know that, that a French wine would be aged in other than French oak if it is aged in any oak. And, while not all French oak is the same, oak that is referred to as French oak is technically quercus robur (yes, I knew that withou...

I've been ranting quite a bit lately on the price of wines and the quality of wines. There is certainly a school of thought and I have heard if frequently that a typical wine drinker cannot tell the difference between a [insert small number] dollar bottle of wine and an [insert much larger number] bottle of wine. In fact, just the other night, I saw a patron at a restaurant order the least expensive wine on the wine list at $6 per glass (for those not familiar with pricing, that is inexpensive enough that the restaurant is likely only paying about $5 or $6 for the whole bottle. The same patron then told the person sitting next to him that "wine pricing is stupid because nobody can tell the difference between a $100 bottle and a $500 bottle." To some extent, he is correct. Price, in and of itself, is not necessarily an indicator of quality. But, more expensive wines are higher priced for some reason and it is often a history of quality. If Charles Shaw, for example, were s...

In much of Europe, people learn about wine at relatively young ages. Now, we're not talking the absolute trash that many American high schoolers have experimented with and gotten sick from, we're talking local table wine. So, they learned about wine often as whatever was local. But, in the US, wine -- real wine, that is -- was for most of us an entirely different story. For young adults in the US who first experiment legally with wine, typically they start with something inexpensive. They'll go to a store and look at the wines (often in the less than $10 grouping) and look for an attractive bottle or a catchy name. And, what will likely attract them to the wine itself, as compared to the name or the bottling, is something that drinks easy and perhaps exciting.  So, wehre do they start? For at least a generation, the normal starting point, at least among traditional wine grapes -- vitis vinifera  -- was Chardonnay. In recent years, while Chardonnay is still a popular startin...

This is really a US-based problem. Most of the rest of the world seems to have avoided this somehow. But, Americans, particularly American casual wine drinkers, either hate what has become the traditional American Chardonnay or they gravitate toward. it. At least partially as a result, the prices of these wines have skyrocketed. If you want that is consistent and not an oak [chip] bomb, the prices are just higher than they have any need to be due to this amazing concept called supply and demand. But, and again, this is US-centric because I just don't hang out living in other countries and needing to buy wines, your best values here in white wines are not in Chardonnay. In fact, they are anything but Chardonnay.  Well, almost anything but Chardonnay. The other two white grapes that have gotten particularly popular in the US are Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Grigio/Pinot Gris. In particular, pruchases of California-produced as well as Marlborough (New Zealand) Sauvignon Blanc and of Ital...

Yesterday, after reading that red wine can be an important key to cognitive acuity late in life, a regular reader asked me if I could recommend a red wine for under $20. The fact is that there are lots of good ones. And, if you are willing to go into the $20 to $30 range, the number grows significantly. But, in order to find them, you need to largely get out of the mold you are stuck in. Note that in my title, I said finding good wines at great prices; I did not say finding great wines at great or even at good prices. On rare occasion, we might get lucky and find a great wine at a great or even good price, but for the most part, proprietors of great wine learn pretty quickly that it is great and with that greatness comes rapid increases in price. So, what is the secret? First, stay away from everything you know. That's right, fuhgeddaboutit!! In the US, when casual, or even somewhat knowledgeable wine drinkers talk about red wine, inevitably, they are talking about Cabernet or red ...

As I age, and yes, it's better than the alternative, I realize that my body doesn't work as well as it used to. Put me on the tennis court and I'm a step or two or ten slower than I used to be and I was never fast to begin with. My idea of jumping is getting at least one heel off the ground at a time. But, my mind still works pretty well. And, my memory, both short-term and long-term really has not faded. Perhaps that my memory has thus far withstood the test of aging has something to do with drinking red wine. What's that, you ask? Yes, scientific studies have posited that this is for real. In fact, one that was fairly recently punlished in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease  found that consuming red wine and cheese on a fairly regular basis, but not to extreme, had a significantly positive correlation with cognitive acuity in later years. That's cool. I like good red wine and I tend to like cheeses that pair well with red wine, so perhaps I can keep my memory ...

This comes from a scenario that people who travel on business will recognize. Whether you've had the specifics or not you might not even know, but it would not surprise me if you have. Let's set the stage. You've finished a long day that might have included travel, meetings, sales, or just meeting with people you've never met before to build relationships. Perhaps you've helped some customers or clients to solve some nagging problems. Maybe you got chewed out by a long-term or newer customer or client. Surely, one of these resonates with you if you travel for business. It's dinner time. You don't want to leave the hotel, so you find a restaurant in the hotel. Some of us when we are alone sit down at the bar and eat there, but some of us prefer a table. In this case, let's grab a table for one. So, we order some food and a glass of wine. Are you with me? Does this resonate at all? The wine comes out and you know upon looking at it that it's not the wi...

It's a hot trend in 2021, but much like other trends, nobody seems to know why. More than ever before, at least in my memory, people are drinking unfiltered wine. In fact, based on my observations strolling near the wine area at my favorite big box store that happens to sell wine, people are seeking out unfiltered wine. I probably should have grabbed my handy dandy portable microphone that I always carry with me in case I need to interview someone (if you believe that, there is a bridge in Brooklyn I will sell you) and asked these people why they were looking for wine, but I just didn't have the foresight. So, just as you do, I have to guess. What is unfiltered wine, anyway? I know, it's wine that's not filtered. So, I guess we need to know what filtered wine is. We're probably all familiar, at least conceptually with the fermentation process. That's the one in which the grape juice turns into an alcoholic beverage. To look at such a wine, it looks quite cloudy;...

I had an interesting conversation the other day. It happened to be with a bartender who knows wine pretty well and was behind the bar at a restaurant with a not insignificant wine list. He remarked that I was one of his few customers who had ordered a particular wine and he thought it was one of the very best wines and especially one of the very best values on his list. When I responded that it was a great wine that is not easy to find and is very food-friendly, he replied that he agreed. But, he followed that most of his customers who come in make themselves out to be wine experts and that a fair number proclaim themselves to be. He also said that those same people never veer off the popular few grapes. As we continued the discussion, he pours lots of Cabernet, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and Merlot. But, while they have some on their list that nobody has ever heard of, those are the wines that people know.  So, I thought about it. What exactly is a wine expert? That's a tough qu...

This was inspired by a white wine I had the pleasure of enjoying yesterday from a grape that is not well known for producing long lived white wines. While this Pinot Gris from Alsace had only six years on it, it was coming into its prime and it was clear that it could last much longer. And, those that do age well tend to bring with that age tremendous complexity. This wine had that and was extremely food friendly as well. So, what do we look for in a white wine to see if it might age well. Growing region! To a very large extent, those white wines produced in extremely warm growing regions do not age well. The grapes are typically extremely ripe when picked giving them high natural sugar that converts to alcohol content, but lower acidity. Instead, go for the cooler growing areas or at worst, those that have very cool evenings and nights. Another thing to look for, but that will be extremely difficult to learn unless you are into reading tech sheets is how the wine was fermented. Those ...

I saw an article recently that inspired this post. Of course, I can't find the article, so I can't link to it. But, that does allow me to write off the top my head rather than cheating and perhaps even violating copyright laws. Last I checked, we are allowed to remember things we read and even comment on them. In any event, the article talked about how what is not in the bottle affects your perception of a wine nearly as much as what is in it. And, they had data to back it up. What do I mean? And, how does it apply? In the simplest case, find a bottle of wine and a friend or significant other. Get each of you two wine glasses and pour from the same bottle into each of them. If you don't want much wine which might be a travesty in and of itself, make the pours really small. Place two glasses -- one for each of you -- in a sunny or well-lit part of the home or other environment. And, place the other two in a dimly lit part of the environment. In the bright environment, turn o...

Why do we celebrate with Champagne? When did this happen and who decided it was the proper way to celebrate? It turns out that the French probably didn't invent the process of making sparkling wine, but in the opinion of most connoisseurs, they perfected it. However, well before the French developed the methode traditionelle , the English had discovered how to make sparkling wine. And, in the 17th century, an English physician named Christopher Merret informed the Royal Society of London that adding sugar during the process of making sparkling wine gave it a far more effervescent appearance and taste. According to legend and documented history, royal courts grew to love Champagne. It was an extravagance that the proletariat could not access, but royalty could bathe in it if they so chose. But, the phenomenon that made Champagne the drink of celebration was ... and who would ever believe this ... that royalty found that women were more beautiful after the men had consumed plentiful ...

Imagine this and some of you can. You go to [insert name of favorite US wine region] on vacation. You visit wineries. You love some of the wine. You order some to be shipped to your home.  Enser%&^$*$*!!!!  That's the buzzer saying no you can't. So, you go online to buy the wine and have it shipped to you from some online retailes. No you can't. In some states, you can order wine through wine clubs. But, in those states, even then, you can't have wine sent directly to you. First, it has to pass through a state-run store. In other states, however, you can ship directly from wherever you want outside the state, so long as that state will ship to you to wherever you want inside the state. Why does this make sense? Hint, it doesn't. Why should this be allowed? I'm not sure. Way back when, I learned that buried within Article 1, Section 8, of the United States Constitution was the statement that Congress is authorized to regulate commerce "... among the seve...

I bet it's happened to you. It's certainly happened to me. You look at a wine list and pick out a bottle for whatever reason and your server (or sommelier if it's a hoity toity place) brings it to the table. There is nothing wrong with the bottle; you just don't particularly like it. It doesn't coincide with your taste preferences. What do you do? A bit depends on where you are. If your server/sommelier asks you how it is, you might choose to say something like it not being your favorite. They'll get the picture. But, if all they do is offer apologies, that is really their only obligation. In this case, there was nothing inherently wrong with the bottle. You just didn't like it.  This is not at all dissimilar from when you order a dish that is properly prepared, but it's just not your favorite. You find out that you don't, after all is said and done, love spam a la mode. Similarly, you don't like Domaine de Lots of Oak Chardonnay. Generally speak...

Ever since Robert Parker, famed founder of Wine Advocate , started his 100-point scale for grading wines (he doesn't use anywhere near 100 points in his ratings as he rarely publishes a review for a wine rated as low as 85), wine drinkers around the world turned to critics and the grades or scores they give wines. Much as with other grades (see schools in the US), wine grades started to inflate. In Parker's publication, where he describes 100 as a perfect wine, he sure does give a lot of 100-point grades. Wine Spectator , on the other hand, gives fewer 100-point grades (they are exceptionally rare), but almost all the wines that they grade are in a less than 15-point span. Other publications are even worse in my experience using similar grading scales, but inflating them from those first two publications. The message must be then that all wines are worth at least 90 points from some publication with wine or a wine-related term in the title. 90 points should be an excellent prod...

A few weeks ago, we learned about research that was being done in South America on what we described as wine fingerprints.  Attentive readers might recall that part of the fingerprint of a wine or a vineyard was the winemaker themselves. And, of course, even if there is just one person labeled the winemaker, there are usually many who are part of the process that begins with planting the grapes and ends with the wine being bottled. All contribute to the uniqueness of the wine. This morning, I was saddened by a series of articles that I saw all telling the same story. Wine giant, E&J Gallo, very shortly after purchasing Sonoma-based winery Clos du Bois, laid off 32 of the 37 employees including all the winemakers.  Legitimately, they said that sales were down. But, it didn't seem to matter to them why sales were down. The first step was to reduce costs and then later, they plan to figure out what went wrong. The winery workers said that previous owner, Constellation Brands,...

Yesterday, I wrote about ruining wine service.  And, while wine service is certainly not my area of expertise and, in fact, wine generally is not exactly that either (you can find my real expertise in a different blog, but if you're reading this one, I expect that one will bore you to tears), one of our readers asked me to comment on what makes for good wine service. In my opinion, what is good wine service at a family-oriented chain restaurant is quite different from what might be good wine service at a fine dining restaurant and even that is quite different from good wine service at a restaurant that truly prides itself on its wine. We'll try to start with the basics and work our way up. While there is much here that doesn't apply to the other than wine paradise establishments, you can figure out which ones are which. The higher end the restaurant and the more hifalutin the wine list, the more of these niceties you should expect.. The first thing that should be done is to...

Imagine this. You go to restaurant that you really like. You pick out a wine that will go particularly well with the food and you order it. And, what do you know? The message that comes back is that they haven't had that wine for several months. Not a few days, but several months. And, their wine list is disposable paper. So, it's not as if they have to reprint a fancy list on fancy paper and bind it or laminate it; it's just on plain paper. After that, you find another bottle that you think you'll like with the food and the server tells you that that was an interesting switch. Interesting in a you must be freaking idiot way. His point was that it was not a particularly similar wine. And, while in a sense he was right, in a sense he was very wrong as well. You see, while the new wine was of a different grape and from a very different part of the same country, the two wines did share some characteristics that were very important to me   with this dinner. Both were red. B...

Last night, I had the opportunity to present ten wines, all of Italian origin, for whatever that's worth, to a group of people who are, in total, not sophisticated wine drinkers by any measure. Some in the group were pretty savvy, but some were not. It turned out that we served five wines. Of the five that were opened, one was sparkling, one was white, and three were red. My impression of the five was that four of them were pretty good, one far less so. But, the most popular wine was undoubtedly the one that I termed far less so, likely followed by the sparkling wine (it was a very appealing pink in a pretty appealing bottle). Let me show you one of the bottles, empty now, of course.  No, the picture is not great, but despite what you are thinking, it is an empty wine bottle. And, once people started drinking it, they wanted more and more until it reached its current state of empty. Purported to be Sangiovese, a great grape that pairs so well with the acidity in tomatoes, the sligh...

Okay, I know you didn't drink wine yesterday. It was Cinco de Mayo and you drank tequila. That's okay. And, it's funny how Cinco de Mayo celebrates a battle from the US Civil War era that took place in Puebla, Mexico. I was in Puebla a few years ago, not once, but twice for the same professional meeting, the first one getting cancelled after we got there due to a major earthquake with its epicenter barely outside of Puebla.  While that makes for an interesting story, it's not why I bring it up. While in Puebla, we spoke to the locals. Even in the city where the battle occurred, they don't have particularly large celebrations for Cinco de Mayo. Rather, they just go about their lives and drink some tequila like they might on any other day. So, what does all this have to do with wine? Not much. But, in honor of the drunken fiasco that occurs in the US every year on May 5, I thought I would talk about Mexican wine. That leaves me a but stuck, though, despite the climate...

Somepeople just don't like red wine. That's a character defect, but we all have them. People think I have one in that I find peanut butter to be the single most disgusting item ever created. It tastes bad, it smells bad, it feels bad. Red wine is not that. A problem is that the some of the red wine haters really like steak and they really also like wine, but not the red colored ones. What are they to do? As long-time readers of this site will know, one of the best ways to work with the richness, fat content, and flavor profile of steak is with an equally rich wine that also is quite tannic. You might even recall that the tannins (polyphenols) react with the fat to help to reduce the natural extremes of both. White wines don't have tannins, though. So, that reaction is out. We need a different approach. One such approach is to change the way we prepare our steaks. If they are drenched in butter and garlic, we need a wine that goes with that preparation. What might that be? B...

I have some friends who like big, bold red wines. I get that. I also have friends who are vegetarians and while I love vegetables with a few notable exceptions, purely from a flavor standpoint, I don't get that (I do get it if there are health issues and I'm not going anywhere near the treatment of animal issues). But, then there is the potentially confusing part which is how to handle loving big, bold red wines and being a vegetarian. Today, we explore this issue. Perhaps the best way to think about this is considering the wine as a component of the meal -- the food part of the meal, that is. So, suppose, for example, you are preparing a rack of lamb. Would you consider any or all of the following with a rack of lamb: black pepper, black olives, chocolate, plum, blackberry, cigar box (yes, I know, that's not really a food element), sweet tobacco? You would? Well, what we have done there is deconstructed a classic Syrah or Shiraz if you hang out in the southern hemisphere. ...

You're eating a meal with your spouse, significant other, a parent, child, friend, business associate, or just some other person. And, you'd like to drink wine with dinner. And, while the bottle list is pretty good, the by-the-glass is extremely pedestrian. But, you run into a problem. The foods that you order, whether it's two people or four, just don't complement each other when it comes to wine.  You need an example? Imagine that one of you orders ribeye or New York strip and the other of you orders Dover sole. Or, one of you chooses the mixed greens while the other has the bacon burger. In each case, one of you was looking for a big, bold, tannic red wine while the other was looking for a somewhat subdued, gentle white wine. It doesn't just happen with parties of two. In fact, it's more likely to happen with parties of four or more. Even if you go to a steakhouse or seafood restaurant, it seems there is always one outlier in the group. Somebody has to be dif...