I have always loved Port. Especially 20 year old Tawny Ports. Sweet and bold, complex and delicious. But now I’ve discovered dry wines being produced in Portugal, thanks to a recent trade tasting put on by ViniPortugal. The wines are diverse and interesting, and considering the quality, a good deal. Here’s 10 things you don’t, but should know, about Portuguese wine.
1. There is more to Portuguese wine than just Port. Read more
If you’re like me, you’re rising tomorrow at an insanely early hour to watch the royal wedding of Will and Kate. That means being up by 4 a.m. Pacific time for me. At that hour I want something interesting to sip on while watching the spectacle, um I mean spectacular event, on TV.
When nothing but bubbles will do
There’s been much speculation over what the royal couple will drink as they toast their marriage. Read more
Fashion designers are celebrities. Chefs are rock stars. What about sommeliers? These wine professionals are getting their 15 minutes of fame too. Instead of going to cooking school, people go to somm school. Maybe that’s why 100 people signed up to take the Introductory Course and Examination given by the Court of Master Sommeliers on a recent weekend in San Francisco.
If you think becoming a sommelier is all fun and drinking wine, you should know this. It’s no cake walk. You have to read and study, study, study, and practice identifying wines tasted blind.
What was I doing there, about to take the introductory course?
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What do you do with that cork you just popped out of a wine bottle? Most likely you throw it away (you certainly don’t sniff it). Cork is a renewable crop; cork tree barks grow back nine years after harvest. Why not keep the cycle going with used corks? We all pop more than 13 billion corks every year.
Cork comes from Cork Oak trees, and Portugal is the largest producer of cork worldwide. There’s the ongoing debate about cork being the best closure for wine bottles. It gets points for being sustainable and biodegradable, and for allowing a little air into wine to help it age. Downsides include cork taint, trichloroanisole (TCA), and over time, cork can dry out and often crumbles when when you try to pull it out of an older bottle of wine.
You know you can recycle wine bottles (and if you don’t, Earth Day on April 22 is a good time to start). You may not know that you can also recycle corks, but you can. And I’m not talking about home crafting them into coasters or bulletin boards.Read more
This doesn’t happen often. Riedel, maker of some of the most expensive wine glasses in the world, is having a sample sale in New York City. Save the dates – April 26 through April 28 from 10Am – 7pm. If it’s anything like Riedel’s first ever sample sale last summer, it will be worth getting in line extra extra early. I know because I was at that sale and number 5 in line.
Whether you agree with Riedel that specific glass shapes make the wine taste as good as it should, and better than any other wine glass out there doesn’t matter. The line is sexy and modern, and looks great regardless of what you pour in it, be it a $200 Napa Cab or 2 Buck Chuck (has anyone tried that, does 2BC taste better in Riedel?) Read more
When you think of Oakland, the other city by the San Francisco Bay, you probably don’t think of it as wine country. There aren’t any vineyards, bucolic settings or palatial wine tasting rooms. Instead, you find a gritty, industrial vibe, one that dares to thumb its nose at traditional wine country. This is wine country in the city.
23 wineries now call Oakland and surrounding areas home. This is more than a trend, not only in Oakland, but around the country. City Winery is in New York City. Boedecker is in Portland and Henke is in Cincinnati. While the labels may have appellations from Napa Valley to Long Island to the Willamette Valley, the grapes are brought into a downtown setting to be made into wine.
Part of the attraction for vintners going urban is cost. They don’t have vineyards, and downtown industrial space can be a lot less expensive than a small plot in Napa or Sonoma. What you do find is real passion and talent for winemaking. Most urban wineries make small lots, but it’s the wine they want to make, and drink. The tasting rooms are accessible to a wider population too. Imagine taking the subway to a winery. You can in New York. Urban wineries are changing the landscape, so to speak, and definition of wine country.
The gauntlet has been laid down. A survey about American drinking habits finds more people (60%) drink wine without food than those who drink it (40%) with food. This calls into question everything we’ve ever been told about the holy unity of food and wine pairings. Does pairing matter?
The Himalayan Mountains and the Sonoma County wine country couldn’t be further apart. But not to one sommelier, so inspired by a man who leads expeditions up and down Mt. Everest, that she put his name on a wine label.
Meet Ngima Sherpa. Nepalese by birth, with family in Tibet, he now has a wine named for him, Ngima’s Cuvee. Last night Ngima (pronounced knee-ma) was at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in San Francisco for the launch of this wine.
The French have it, the Italians have it, but does America really have a wine culture all its own? You bet we do. It took awhile for this to develop, but in 2010, for the first time ever, we Americans drank more wine than the French. Quite an accomplishment.
How did we get here? How has wine become a part of our culture? That’s the focus of How Wine Became Modern: Design + Wine 1976 to Now, a current exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Oh yes I did. I brought a boxed wine to a recent gathering of my cookbook club. A few weeks earlier an odd-shaped box arrived on my door step. Super heavy for the size of the box. What in the world could it be? A box of wine. Sure, why not. Hmmmm.
The octagonally-shaped box holds three liters of wine, which is equal to four 750 ml bottles. No wonder it was so heavy.
This is the latest model I’ve seen in modern day boxed wines. I know, boxed wine has an image problem, but it’s been more for what’s inside the box (usually plonk) than the box itself.