What does the term Brix mean?

Brix is the scale that winemakers use to measure the sugar level of grapes.

Alcohol Irony

The word "Alcohol" is derived from the Arabic language (al kohl or alkuhl). Consider the fact that a large proportion of the Arabic population is forbidden from consuming alcohol for religious reasons.

The origin of "Honeymoon"

In ancient Babylon, the bride’s father would supply his son-in-law with all of the mead (a fermented honey beverage) that he could drink for a month after the wedding. Because their calendar was lunar or moon-based, this period of free mead was called the “honey month,” or what we now call the “honeymoon.”
(can't help it- this is a picture from my recent wedding =)

Lead Crystal

An English glassmaker named George Ravenscroft discovered in 1674 that adding lead oxide to molten glass made it softer and easier to work.  As a result, lead crystal could be cut into elaborate designs.  But even more important, lead made glass more durable and more brilliant.  

In 1991 researchers at Columbia University found that wine and other acidic beverages left in lead crystal decanters for several months could absorb possibly dangerous amounts of lead.  Subsequently, the FDA recommended against storing acidic foods and beverages for long periods of time in lead-glazed pottery or lead crystal decanters.  The specific health hazards, however, are still not known.  Since wine does not stay in a crystal glass long enough to leach lead from it, drinking wine from lead crystal glasses is considered safe.

Nelson Mandela

Elected in 1994, Nelson Mandela was South Africa's first black president and the first to be elected with voter participation from all races. Mandela's release from prison in 1990, after more than twenty-seven years in confinement, signaled a new era in South African politics and paved the way for the lifting of trade sanctions and the importation of South African wine into the United States.

Sad but true

In years with very bad weather, a top château in Sauternes may decide to make no sweet wine rather than lower its standards. Salvaged grapes will be sold to lesser châteaux, and the top château will take the enormous financial loss of having no product for the year. So, about twice a decade Château d'Yquem may choose not to make any sweet wine.

Beaujolais as dessert

According to the famous French chef Paul Bocuse, one of the favorite traditional desserts of wine-growers in Beaujolais is freshly picked wild peaches sliced into a glass and topped with black currants drenched in cool Beaujolais.  

The world's most exclusive pinot noir bash

Every July Oregon's Willamette Valley hosts one of the most prestigious pinot noir festivals in the world: the International Pinot Noir Celebration.  Tickets are sold out within days of the event's announcement.  Top pinot noir winemakers from Burgundy, Oregon, California, and elsewhere pour their wines for devout pinot noir lovers.  The culmination is the Saturday night salmon dinner, when some of the world's most famous pinots are consumed with wild salmon cooked in a traditional Native American manner over open fires.

Nice legs

The rivulets of wine that roll down the inside of the glass after a wine has been swirled are called legs in America and in Britain. The Spanish call them tears; the Germans, church windows. Some wine drinkers look for great legs, falsely believing that nicely shaped legs (and who knows what that means?) portend great flavor. In fact, legs are a complex phenomenon related to the rate at which liquids evaporate and the differences in surface tension between water and the wine's alcohol content. Legs have nothing to do with greatness.

*With wine, as with women, there is very little meaningful information one can deduce by looking at the legs.

Virginia Dare

Thought to be the oldest branded wine in the United States (dating from circa 1835), Virginia Dare was named after the first child born of English parents in America. The wine was made from a grape called scuppernong, a native variety that is still grown in the South. This white Virginia Dare was originally called Minnehaha. There was also a red wine called Pocahontas.

Who produces wine in the United States?

Though it seems hard to believe, every state in the United States produces wine except three--Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming.  No state, however, makes a huge amount of wine except one:  California alone produces more than 90 percent of the United States total.

Separating the great from the not so great

More than any other country in the world, France loves to rate her vineyards and her wines. Several of the major French wine regions have their own powerful and often complex classification systems that rank vineyards and/or wine. Bordeaux alone has four separate regional classification systems. Though the classifications are controversial and the rankings are usually fiercely debated, no one in France, it seems, thinks of doing away with them.

Bottle Shock

Much to the agony of winemakers, wines that have recently been bottled occasionally develop bottle shock--a temporary condition wherein the wine tastes lifeless, as though it has lost its aromas and flavors.  Bottle shock can happen to any wine.  It is thought to be the result of the agitation and, possibly, exposure to oxygen that happens during bottling.

Winemakers, of course, easily recognize this condition since they have also tasted the wine before it was bottled and therefore have a point of comparison.  Wine drinkers, however, may misinterpret a bottle-shocked wine as one that's of poor quality.  That said, to experience what a wine with bottle shock tastes like, you'd have to open it within a few days or perhaps a week of it having been bottled, since after the wine rests for a few weeks more, the bottle shock goes away and the wine tastes again as it originally did.  Luckily, most wines for sale in shops and restaurants were bottled months if not years before, so the chances of encountering bottle shock are fairly slim.

The Quick Sip on Germany

*Germany is considered one of the world's top producers of elegant white wines, the best of which have almost ravishing delicacy and clarity.

*The vineyards are at the northern-most extreme of where grapes can ripen.

*The majority of fine German wines are not sweet. The exceptions are the expensive late harvest dessert wines beerenauslesen and trockenbeerenauslesen, which are crafted to be sweet.

Topping Up Wine & Campagne

The time to top up a wine is when there are about two sips left in the glass. If you top up more frequently, you never get to experience how the wine evolves in the glass. With Champagne, there's another menace- temperature. Just as the constant topping up of coffee means you never have a really hot cup, constantly topping up Champagne leaves you with a quasi-chilled glass of bubbly.

Top Ten Descriptors A Winemaker Hates To Hear

10. Wet rodent
9. Labrador breath
8. Mace
7. Moist navel lint
6. '63 Chevy Nova exhaust
5. A men's room at a baseball park during a game
4. Mustard gas
3. Velveeta
2. Old running shoes
1. Old running shorts

-John Cunin, owner of the Cypress Club, San Francisco

A Braille Wine Label

Chinese in the Vineyards

In The University of California Book of California Wine, Jack Chen, writing about the contributions of the Chinese, notes that in the 1880s, Chinese made up 80 to 85 percent of the vineyard workers in California. For the prior decade, however, anti-Chinese sentiment had been building as the economy worsened and unemployment rose. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, banning further immigration. By the 1890s, Chinese who worked in vineyards were being taxed a punitive charge of $2.50 a month, and labor leaders had successfully forced several wineries to add the racist statement "Made with White Labor" to their bottles.

Warning: This Label is Misleading!

"Contains Sulfites." With the initiation of that federally mandated warning label in 1988, wine drinkers began to worry. What were sulfites and why were they suddenly being put into wine? In the confusion that followed, wine was blamed for everything from headaches to rashes.

The facts were these: WINE HAS ALWAYS CONTAINED SULFITES. The compounds occur as a natural by-product of fermentation. Historically, winemakers have also added small, controlled amounts of sulfites to wine to prevent oxidation and spoilage.

Historically, the regulations on sulfites in wine have been stricter than those applied to salad bars (cut fruits and vegetables used to be routinely sprayed with large amounts of sulfites to keep them from wilting and turning brown).

In addition to wine, sulfites are found in beer, cocktail mixes, cookies, crackers, pizza crust, flour tortillas, pickles, relishes, salad drssings, olives, vinegar, sugar, shrimp, scallops, dried fruit, and fruit juice, among other foods and beverages.

A punt is something that we are familiar with from American football, but what is its meaning in the world of wine?

The punt is the indentation at the bottom of a wine bottle. Its initial function was to prevent the flat bottom of wine bottles from scraping tabletops. Some hold Champagne bottles by the punt while pouring- an awkward, inelegant, pop custom (no pun intended).

With which grape varietal is Pinot Noir usually blended?

Pinot Noir is unusual in that it is most often not blended at all. (and as this label shows, Pinot Noir is the main red grape grown in the Burgundy, or Bourgogne, region of France)

One of the world's most expensive wines

The famous Chateau Petrus in Pomerol makes the world’s most expensive Merlot, which sells for up to $2,500 or more. The vineyard only consists of 12 hectares (around 30 acres). This particular Merlot was actually one of the favorite wines at the White House during the Kennedy years.

Thanks again, Mr. Pasteur!

Many people assume that when a wine oxidizes, it turns to vinegar. Actually, the wine takes on a nutty flavor. Thanks to pasteurization, wine very rarely turns to vinegar.

Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) was the great French scientist whose work has saved millions of lives. He made so many famous discoveries (ex: the rabies and anthrax vaccines, inoculation for smallpox, the 'Pasteurization' process) that he was able to build an institute in Paris for research, teaching, and treating diseases. Inaugurated in 1888, the Pasteur Institute ranks as one of the foremost research centers in the world.

Wine DNA

Wine has so many organic chemical compounds it is considered more complex than blood serum.

What do winemakers use to 'fine' their wine?

Egg whites, bull’s blood, and gelatin have all been used as fining agents to remove suspended particles from wine before bottling. Egg whites are still commonly used.

Who was blind?

Dom Perignon (1638-1715), the Benedictine Abbey (at Hautvillers) cellar master who is generally credited with "inventing" the Champagne making process, was blind.

Presidents and their wine...

-Thomas Jefferson bought over 20,000 bottles of European wine during his presidency, and he helped stock the wine cellars of the first five U.S. presidents. He was very partial to fine Bordeaux and Madeira. In fact, four Bordeaux First Growths he once owned are now involved in a law suit.

-Barack Obama, according to friends, is a founding member of the wine and cheese club.

-Richard Nixon was a Francophile when it came to wine, but he kept the labels covered with napkins to hide the fact that they weren’t produced in America.

How many varieties of wine grapes exist worldwide?

10,000