All posts in February 2019

Though it’s widely assumed that the juice of red grapes is red, and that of white grapes runs clear, in fact, with rare exception, nearly all wine grapes express juice that is devoid of any color at all. So where does red wine come from? It results when dark-skinned grapes are crushed and their juice…

Birds gotta fly, vines gotta climb. It’s the way of things, and for most of the history of winemaking, it proved convenient to give domesticated grapevines the opportunity to do what comes naturally by planting them alongside trees. The advantages of this strategy are obvious.  A vine that could embrace a sturdy tree trunk for…

Millions of wine drinkers rely on tasting notes provided by professional critics to guide their wine-buying.  Recently there’s been quite a bit written that’s skeptical about just how reliable such notes are.  I’m not going to address this contentious issue today, except to note that one of the serious shortcomings of these notes is the…

 Winemakers with property on the steep hillsides that overlook Germany’s Mosel River between Trier and Koblenz enjoy a worldwide market for their cooly aromatic, austerely-structured white wines. The road to success in the Mosel hasn’t always been paved with euros, however.  For most of the 19th century, the region was trapped in a vicious cycle…

The bold adventurers who first landed on the shores of what they thought of as the New World didn’t come alone. The newcomers brought horses and pigs to the Americas, and returned bearing the potatoes, tomatoes, squashes and maize that would subsequently enrich the diet of generations of Europeans. Though the Americas had native grapevines…