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 …

I came across a news headline on Decanter.com that caught my eye this morning: a bottle of vin jaune from the Jura was purchased at an auction in Arbois for a record €57,000. Yep, €57,000. And the bottle is from 1773! How unbelievable is that?

What I love most about this story is that the bottle was purchased by a group of wine lovers who plan to actually open the bottle and drink the wine. So many times with older bottles people buy them to hold on to them and keep them as some sort of museum piece. I think it is fantastic that this bottle of wine will actually …

My baby turns 5 today and I can’t believe where the time has gone. In talking about his birthday with a few of my fellow wine lovers, the talk turned to whether or not I have purchased any wines from the vintage of Peter’s birth year – 2006.

It got me to thinking that since we spend a lot of time on this blog talking about how great French wines are for everyday drinking that we haven’t gotten around to discussing one of the other wonderful things about French wine – collecting it and saving it for the future.

Buying wine and storing it so that you can drink it down the road (or …