Each week I get an email from a local wine store I occasionally frequent in which they feature a “daily wine, “a weekly wine,” and a “monthly wine.” The difference between the three categories is essentially based on price, but the monthly wines tend to be wines that can also benefit from a bit of age. Longtime readers of my blog will know that for the past 3 years, Bill and I have been working on turning a part of our basement into a wine cellar. We are close to being done – Bill just has two more shelves to build and then we should be in good shape. But the question that …

Since Presidents’ Day was Monday, it seems like today would be a good day to talk about some of the ways in which wine and politics intersect. I always call wine the most interdisciplinary subject of them all and this is definitely one aspect of wine where this can be seen. As you open a bottle of wine to enjoy with dinner tonight, consider some of the following interesting tidbits.

Drinking with Jefferson

As I mentioned in my blurb on this week’s Wine of the Week, Thomas Jefferson, our nation’s third president, is widely considered to be one of the first true American wine connoisseurs. Jefferson’s five year stint as the …

Recently I came across an article in which the author observed that he had heard from various people in the wine trade (in restaurants and stores) that customers were requesting wines with lower levels of alcohol. I found this to be an interesting development, but potentially problematic. It raises the issue of how one assesses alcohol in wine and whether just looking at the number on the bottle can tell you the whole story.

So let’s first step back and address what alcohol is to wine. Alcohol is formed during the fermentation of the grapes. Sugar in the grapes is converted by the yeasts into alcohol and carbon dioxide. If the …

Greetings to you all! I hope that everyone had a lovely Valentine’s Day yesterday. My husband and I opted to celebrate with a nice dinner at home and I decided that it was a good occasion to open up something really special – a bottle of the 2002 Mouton Rothschild. The wine showed some lovely developed aromas of leather and tobacco in addition to notes of black currants and plums and the tannins were fairly soft and approachable. The wine was part of a group of wines that I purchased as futures quite a long time ago and it was nice to see that it had held up well and still has a …

It is always fun when two of the things you enjoy come together. While I probably would say that my passion for wine is much stronger than it is for running, I do love to run and I have 2 marathons and a number of half-marathons under my belt. So you can imagine my interest was piqued when it was announced this week that there is going to be a marathon in Sauternes and that the winner would receive a magnum of Chateau d’Yquem – in addition to winning their weight in Sauternes. Now that is a prize I would be willing to run realllllly fast for!

Although it might not seem …