Sparkling wine is serious business, but it’s also serious science. The process of making methode champenoise sparklers sparkle, from secondary fermentation in the bottle to the time you take a sip, is governed by the physical laws of how gases behave. Scientists who care about fluid dynamics have written a
Traditional wassails were—and still are, I suppose—seasonal hot drinks made with wine or beer, sugar, spices, eggs, and bits of toast floating on top. Today, we’re far more likely to find toasty, bready flavors in a more fashionable (and still seasonally appropriate) beverage: methode champenoise sparkling wine. How those characteristic
It’s a self-evident truth, not to mention a basic principle of homeostasis, that what goes in must come out. Around this time of year, huge trucks full of grapes go into wineries. Months or years later, the bottles of wine that come out of those wineries look a lot smaller
People who concern themselves with "consumer acceptability" of fruit know that sugar is a pretty good predictor of how consumers will feel about a given apple or grape or orange; the more sugar (that is, the higher the °Brix level), the more people like the fruit in question. But the
Residual sugar seems like an obvious concept. Residual sugar. Sweet stuff, left over. In wine. But like many concepts in the wine world, it’s not that simple. Yeast eat sugar to make alcohol. This much we all know. So why would the yeast stop before all the sugar is gone?
By asking if you’re wine intolerant, I’m not asking whether you’re one of those folk who can’t stand walking into a wine shop, or watching your host spend minutes perusing the wine list at dinner, or listening to (so-called) wine-snobs describe the contents of their glasses in detail. You probably
It’s a flavor! It’s a feeling! It’s an airplane! No, it’s astringency! On the surface, astringency seems like pornography. It’s easy to recognize, even if it’s difficult to define. The problem is that it isn’t really all that easy to recognize. In wine, astringency is easily and often confused with
This being a manifesto against use of the word “dry” in relationship to wine, I herewith present ten points on why “dry” should be banned from all wine-related speak. Some people use “dry” as the opposite of “sweet” in relation to the amount of residual sugar in wine. Wine with