Grape of the Day

It's wonderful when a brand new reader gives you an idea for a post. What happens though when she gives you just enough information to know that you have a topic, but don't know if it is how she wanted you to cover it. To most Americans, when they thing good wine, they think Napa Valley. Wedged among among a number of smaller mountain ranges, primarily the Mayacamas and Vaca, and plentiful bodies of water including San Pablo Bay that provides for the massive diurnal temperature differences in the southern part of the valley, Lake Berryessa in the northeast, and the Napa River that winds its way through the county, its a near perfect setup for growing, in particular, Cabernet Sauvignon that made Napa famous. With its now seemingly permanent drough-like conditions, hot summers with cool nights in much of the Valley, and enough natural sources of irrigation, winemakers are able to produce high alcohol content, ultra-expressive wines the likes of which are rarely seen elsewhere. Wh...

Some foods are more of a challenge than others. Last night was certainly a bit of a challenge -- seared ahi tuna in an Asian style soy-based marinade. Let's see how it worked. For starters, and while you don't have to stick to this, there is some merit, there is an old adage that says that you pair red wine with red meat and white wine with white meat and when the meat is some color in between, you just guess a lot. Well, ahi tuna has red meat and some substance to it, but doesn't do well with the big, bold red wines. It needs something gentler. Then, there is the soy sauce. It is salty. It is bold. It has lots of umami or savory. That's a tough combination. An off-dry sparkling wine would probably have done the job, but we're always restricted to what we have. Or we could go with a wine with high levels of umami. Aglianico comes to mind, but we don't have any Aglianico, at least not that I know of. Well, let's add to the confusion. The US is having a heat w...

Suppose somebody was telling you about the grapes and wines that they like and those that they don't. And, further suppose that the background for those questions made no sense. What do you do? For brackground, I was sitting with someone that I really did not know beyond having made a little small talk previously The setting was a large group dinner and we just happened to be next to each other. The discussion turned to wine and interestingly, I didn't take it there. It started with white wine and I learned that this person likes Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Grigio, but not Pinot Gris. Listening on, I learned that Pinot Gris comes from Oregon and they don't taste as good as Pinot Grigio (yes, they are the same grape as "gris" is French for grey and "grigio" is Italian for grey. The names are interchangeable and in the US, the difference is largely marketing or branding. Moving on to the reds, I learned that this same person sometimes like Merlot and usually...

Back in the olden days, such as perhaps five years ago, the process of determining when to harvest grapes was done much the same as it was hundreds of years ago. Yes, there were some improvement, but they were slow and not dramatic. The tried and true methods of determining when to harvest were having the vignerons and the winemakers walk through the vineyards, look at grapes, smell grapes, and taste grapes. They checked for things like color, skin thickness, and of course, taste. And, they relied on their memories and the good old weather forecasters. Of course, that last aid, the meteorologists have also gotten much better as their models and use of technology has improved.  Back in the late 19 century, a German scientist named Ernst Abbe invented the laboratory refractometer. Eventually, it was found that this little device could measure the brix  of the wine. Essentially, that is the sugar content of the grapes which determines the alcohol potential of the wine. Some winem...

Burgundy, or Bourgogne if you prefer. It's among the great wine regions of the world. In fact, some would say that it has no peer. Certainly, the price tags attached to some of the regions finest wines would suggest that to be the case. But, Burgundy has a scourge. You see, generally speaking, the weather in Burgundy is not my idea of great. It's typically not very warm and there is a fair amount of precipitation as major wine regions go.  If it comes within growing season, there are a few great killers of world-class Pinot Noir. One is the frost that occasionally hits Burgundy right around the time of budbreak. The second is excessive rain. Neither is the worst, however. The ultimate vintage-killer in Burgundy is large hail as it does significant damage to the grapes. And, it has for centuries, several times causing mort estates in Burgundy to declassify their vintages. Enter science. Some brilliant person had an idea. Put up a hail shield. No, we're not talking about a ph...

From preparing the soil to planting and growing and even breeding the grapes to making the wine to bottling the wine to selling the wine, science has affected every part of the wine world. We've looked at a number of these discoveries and innovations over the last 15 months or so, but we've usually done it from the standpoint of a single variety of grape. Let's consider a few frankly widely disparate applications of science and what they have done to the world of wine. We're in 2021. While what we think is making news are things like COVID, politics, influencers, and racial tensions, the one real constant is data. Big data. Really big data. And, it has infiltrated the wine world.  Different people have different ideas of what big data means. Frankly, it depends on its usage and its applications. To some, big data is just lots of data that perhaps we never had before. To others, it is the continuous processing of trillions of pieces of data making observations to change ...

I didn't sleep well last night. That's not unusual. What was unusual is that I got back to sleep right after 4AM which is when I am normally up for good. As such, I have no superbly brilliant wine thoughts today, not that I ever do. But, what I do have are a few notes and maybe a pearl of wine wisdom along the way. First, for those of you who subscribe to this blog, the good folks who run blogger, that is Google, tell me that the subscribe widget will cease to work after some date in July. If you want to continue to see this blog, you have three ways available that I can see: Bookmark and come to it frequently as in every day Follow me on Twitter @johnhlowell as I push each post out via Twitter Be my Facebook friend (that's people I know) where I also push out each post When I started doing this blog, it was to fill the six weeks of no travel starting in late March 2020 as we all knew that lockdown would be over by early June 2020 at worst (the world has never been so wrong...