This week’s Wine Word of the Week is racking. Official definition from Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine: Racking is the wine-making operation of removing clear wine from the settled sediment or lees in the bottom of a container. The verb to rack has been used thus at least since the 14th century. Racking […]

Thank you for joining us for the April “virtual meeting” of the Wine Book Club. Many thanks to Dr. Debs of Good Wine Under $20 who originally proposed the idea for the WBC where bloggers and wine lovers come together for book reviews and discussions after reading a selected text. When Dr. Debs announced The […]

The Rhone Valley in France is divided into two parts, appropriately referred to as the northern Rhone and the southern Rhone. While the northern Rhone produces mostly single varietal wines, the southern Rhone is known for producing blends. The most famous AOC in the southern Rhone is Chateauneuf-du-Pape which is well-known for its Grenache-based blends, […]

How often have you opened a bottle of wine that was great the night you opened it, but fell flat on its face when you tried the rest of the bottle the next day? What about the flip side, a bottle that was just okay the first night but you loved it the second day? […]

This week’s Wine Word of the Week is capsule. Official definition from Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine: Capsule is the French and occasional English name for the sheath over the top of a cork and bottle-neck, otherwise known as a foil, just as a capsule cutter is more widely known as a foil […]

Recently, we had one of our double-blind private tastings. When we sat down for our dinner, all we knew were that the two wines in front of us were white, but we did not know their region of origin or varietal. For a more complete description of how we set up these private tastings, please […]

Cabernet Franc is generally thought of as the quiet little brother of Cabernet Sauvignon. Some people even refer to it as the “other” Cabernet. However, Cabernet Franc is actually one of the genealogical parents of Cabernet Sauvignon. Originating in Bordeaux, France, Cabernet Sauvignon is a cross between Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc. Well-known as a […]

Recently, I read Wine: The 8,000-Year-Old Story of the Wine Trade by Thomas Pellechia. While this book gives a good history of wine, it is primarily a story of the evolution of the wine merchant from early civilization to the present. Pellechia, a wine merchant himself, tells how the wine trade has been important throughout […]

This week’s Wine Word of the Week is appellation. Official definition from Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine: Controlled appellations are a method of labeling wine and designating quality that is modeled on France’s appellation controlee system. It embraces geographical delimitation and is the principle on which quality wine schemes such as the DOC […]

Our host for the April edition of Wine Blogging Wednesday, the blogosphere’s monthly virtual wine tasting event, is John of The Corkdork. He selected Fine Kosher Wine as this month’s theme in which he asked us to taste something reputed to be Fine Kosher Wine and then write about it. In the past, kosher wines […]