by Emily Schindler
One would expect ice wine to have a long history in winemaking, but it does not. In fact, ice wine has only been around for about 200 years. The prevailing theory of its “birth” centers on a German winemaker who was surprised by an early frost. He decided to press the frozen grapes anyway, but separated them from the rest of his vintage so as to avoid ruining everything. To his surprise, the resulting wine was pure and sweet. Ever since, ice wine has been produced to some degree in all wine producing countries of the Northern hemisphere, including Austria, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland and others. The difference between ice wine and other dessert wines is that ice wines show a much clearer fruit and varietal character. This is because other sweet wines are made from botrytis (”nobl...
by Emily Schindler
Ruster Ausbruch is a specialty sweet dessert wine from Austria. In understanding what Ruster Ausbruch is, it is helpful to first look at the name itself: Ruster is pronounced “rooster”, like the bird, and it simply means that the wine comes from the town of Rust (pronounced roost) in the Burgenland region of Austria. Ausbruch is pronounced ahs-brook, and comes from the German word Ausbrechen, which means to “break out.” There are a number of dessert wines hailing from different countries called Ausbruch, and it refers to the method used to select the grapes during harvest: the grapes which have been affected by botrytis cinerea (also known as noble rot) are “broken out” of the bunch, leaving the clean, un-affected grapes behind. It is this noble rot that is being referred to w...
by Denman Moody
By Denman Moody Around the same period of history that our Civil War was coming to a close, a tiny, almost microscopic louse (read, ugly little bug) was accidentally imported, probably from the eastern United States, to Europe. The native East Coast vines somehow had become immune to the parasite’s potential danger. However, once in Europe, it multiplied and spread to such an extent that the non-immune vinifera vines of Europe—Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah, Chardonnay, Riesling, etc.—were systematically devastated. Although the nascent problem was noted in the early to mid-1860s, nobody had a clue for years what was causing the death of the vines. It was finally discovered that this louse, the phylloxera, attached itself to the roots of the vines and sucked out th...
by Darby Higgs
Terroir is a word that gets bandied about a lot lately. You need to know what it means if you want to know if the speaker or writer knows what she or he is talking about. Terroir is a French word which does not translate directly into English. It is derived from “terra” the Latin word for earth that gives us English words such as terrain and territory. But terroir is a word that has much deeper meanings than just earth. The best definition I can find is that it refers to the totality of the environmental factors which influence viticulture at a particular site. The obvious factors are soil and climate, but it is worthwhile digging a little deeper; topography and hydrology are also important. The French have developed the idea of terroir in tandem with their Appellation Control...
by Ron Kapon
Canada has been making wine since the 1800’s and today there are over 400 wineries throughout our northern neighbor. Many of you are familiar with the ice wines from the Ontario region just over the border from Niagara Falls, but I was surprised at the blank stares when I mentioned I was going to British Columbia to write a wine story. The region is small with most of the wineries classified as “boutique”. Several American & Australian wineries produce more wine than the entire BC region. The areas I visited are at the northernmost tip of wine making and vine growing (Germany is in the same latitude) where the vines struggle to grow ripe fruit with a shorter growing season. I never saw tour buses or lines of people at the tasting rooms and at most I met the owner or winemaker pou...
by Subhash Arora
If one believes in the prophesy of Adam Strum about the future of Indian wine it will strike a sweet sounding chord in the ears of the producers. As the publisher of Wine Enthusiast, the second highest circulated wine magazine in the world and owner of the largest wine media empire, with annual sales ringing up more than 80 million greenbacks and with the business experience of over 26 years, Adam can nose a winner when he sees one. And India is set to ride high in his crystal ball. Adam was on a personal visit to India for the first time with his two wine-loving daughters Erica, Jacky and his Eve Sybil with whom he co-founded the business of online marketing wine accessories, from wine cellars to corkscrews, in 1979. He sensed a great demand for wine education.‘ The USA then was wher...
by Gabrio Tosti
Integrity: the quality or state of being of sound moral principle; uprightness, honesty and sincerity. The integrity of a wine starts from the vineyard, the winemaker and her reputation. But what if one doesn't know the estate owners, how does the integrity show from the wine itself? What does integrity in wine mean? By tasting a wine just once, it's difficult to discern whether a wine has integrity or whether it is a manipulated product. Most of the time you’ll feel the effects of a manipulated wine the next day as a hangover. The palate can sometimes be deceived (in the short run, anyway). Think about food: a fast food treat might not taste bad, but it's not sincere. Over millions of years, the human palate has evolved a keen ability to determine good food from bad, but t...
by Gabrio Tosti
First of all, what does a wine score mean? It's clearly impossible to summarize in a simple laboratory number something as complex, subtle, and organic as the emotional experience of consuming wine. Also, a numerical score wrongly suggests a level of precision that doesn't exist, and a single scale can't ever accommodate a range of styles. If anything, it has meaning to the judge or, as is often the case with magazine ratings, the team that assigned the score. Every wine critic has his own palate and all industry magazines have their editorial policies. I have nothing against wine critics they serve important functions, not the least of which is to hold producers with excellent reputations to the highest standards. It's the wine score that I take issue with. Many wine critics have grea...
by Steve De Long
Statistically, Airén is the most outrageous wine grape the world has ever known. Many wine guides and sites still refer to it as the most widely grown wine grape in the world, although it has been recently surpassed by Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot (surprise, surprise!) Still, it’s the most widely grown white wine grape but this owes more to the reduction in Airén acreage than to the international ascendancy of Cab Sauv and Merlot.* Amazingly enough, Airén isn’t grown anywhere else but Spain and in Spain isn’t really grown outside of the arid plains of La Mancha. To be sure, most people haven’t heard of this bigger than life eccentric as they have La Mancha’s other bigger than life eccentric, Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The most widely grow grape varieties are determined b...
by Eve White
The smell of food wafting in the air, the sound of upbeat rhythms from the white-canopied bandstand, and the taste of North Carolina wine await on the lush green expanse known as Symphony Park. Welcome to The Great Grapes Wine, Arts & Food Festival in Charlotte, North Carolina, an all day consumer tasting where North Carolina wines are showcased against a backdrop of cooking demos, food booths, crafts and the laid-back music of jazz and blues. The white tents dot the park-like setting and although the ground is soggy from a few days of heavy rain, it does not dampen the spirits of wine lovers making their way across the manicured lawn, to buy local artwork, grab a bite to eat and sample the fruit of the vine. Eager tasters line up in front of the tents of nineteen participating North C...
