The subject of wine bridges many different fields of study. Before developing a love for wine, I first acquired a love for science (albeit mostly due to the fact that appreciating science doesn’t have a legal age requirement), and when exposed to different disciplines or professions, one notices overlaps in terminology that, without clarification, can cause meanings to be lost in translation. The sommelier profession is…

The 2012 Vintage (and Style) in Germany: The View from Mainzer Weinbörse

As a German, you taste the wines of the world in March during the Düsseldorf trade fair “ProWine," but you have the opportunity to taste the new domestic vintage at the end of April in Mainz, when the VDP presents their wines during the “Mainzer Weinbörse.” It makes sense, because the wines need time to develop anyway, and every added day after…

1. There is this woman named Lucie Morton.  She works as a viticulture consultant for a number of eastern growers, some of which stretch as far south as the upper lobe of my home state, Georgia.  I met her in Virginia, while driving around in the cool Blue Ridge Mountains, checking out wineries.  Virginia wines might surprise you these days.  They don’t fit the usual profile of eastern wine.  On the average, they are neither…

Atauta

“This is one of the most desolate places in Europe; it’s more isolated than Finland, even.” In dying light, Dominio de Atauta winemaker Almudena Alberca and I sped along wintry, washboard roads, rugged and empty, in the backcountry of Soria province, some 50 kilometers from the Duero’s mountain headwaters. Here, along the far eastern edge of the Ribera del Duero DO, we explored small parcels of …

One of the great ironies of the beer world is a common familiarity with the idea of "Trappist beer", but little understanding of what the label actually means. Today, there are only eight Trappist monasteries in the world that brew beer, and these are the only breweries allowed to use that name. Contrary to popular belief, the Trappist breweries are not all in Belgium. One is in the Netherlands and another -- the most…

What’s the deal with yields? Or terms like “crop load,” or “vine balance?” What does it mean to ”green harvest” or to “restrict yields?” Why would one do that? Is 30 hectoliters per hectare always better than 60 hectoliters per hectare, or two tons per acre better than four tons per acre? How is wine character actually changed by adjusting to different crop levels? These terms get thrown around, but what do they really…

Continuing on from my last article for the Guild, which looked at the visual appearance of wine, this time I’m going to focus on aspects of taste.

Here the term taste is used to refer to the experience of wine in the mouth, but we can’t discount the sense of smell here, because it is pretty much impossible to taste a wine without smelling it at the same time. This is because of retronasal olfaction: volatile molecules…

Outside France the Loire is often considered almost exclusively a white wine region; not surprising given that the region's best known wines on export markets are probably white Sancerre, Pouilly-Fumé, Muscadet and perhaps Vouvray. Actually, the Loire is a far from a red-free region as the proportion of red and rosé made is around 45%, despite Robert Parker's remarkable assertion in The World’s Greatest…