Although “château” literally means castle in French, it may also be a mansion or a little house next to a vineyard that meets the requirements for winemaking with storage facilities on its property.
The longest recorded champagne cork flight was 177 feet and 9 inches, four feet from level ground at Woodbury Vineyards in New York State.
In Bordeaux, the French word "cru", or growth, is used to indicate a wine estate, vineyard, or chateau. Thus a Premier Cru, or First Growth, is a wine estate of the top (first) rank.
If you do not smell a wine or simply take a brief cursory whiff, very little information goes to the brain, and not surprisingly, you have trouble deciding what the wine tastes like.
The old rule "white wine with fish; red wine with meat" is based on matching body (the weight of the wine in the mouth) and color. The adage dates from the days when many white wines were light in body and whitish in color (like fish), and many red wines were weighty and, obviously, red (like meat). It is, however, the body and components of the wine- not its color- that are important in matching wine with food. Today many red wines, such as Oregon pinot noirs and nothern Italian merlots, are far lighter in body than, for example, barrel-fermented and barrel-aged California and Australian chardonnays. In the 1980's many of us realized this (or at leased sensed it unconsciously), abandoned the old rule, and began drinking red wine with fish and white wine with meat. By the mid-1980's top American steak houses were selling almost as much chardonnay as cabernet sauvignon.
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.”
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.
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.
*Germany is considered one of the world's top producers of elegant white wines, the best of which have almost ravishing delicacy and clarity.
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.
