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
By Rob Tebeau Originally published in Palate Press: The online wine magazine Many wine enthusiasts are aware that cabernet sauvignon is the result of a crossing that happened long ago between sauvignon blanc and cabernet franc, but have you ever wondered just how we know that? Why do we know
Arriving at night at an airport at the end of a journey, sometimes it’s hard to realize how remote a location you’re in until you start driving around the next day. This is what happened to me when I landed in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, a few weeks ago.
I was reading a baseball chat last year with Keith Law, an ESPN writer who also answers cooking questions, when the following exchange came across (it's from memory, so might not be verbatim): Fan: Do all wine snobs always wave their pinkies in the air? Law: I drink beer, so
Imagine investing years of work developing and marketing a wine brand, and then being accused of infringing a deep-pocketed company’s trademark. It would stop you dead in your tracks. To minimize the risk of such claims, wineries regularly engage attorneys to review and register their brand names and logo designs.
As I strolled through Jean-Pierre Wolff’s vineyard, I found myself asking, “what do turtles have to do with wine?” My host gave a detailed description about the sanctuary for the Pacific pond turtle he had built amidst the vines while pointing out the numerous ladybugs fluttering around us. I pondered
In every wine region there is at least one wine that manages capture one’s personal impressions of that region—its colors, smells, and the energy of the place. Sometimes, as I touched on a couple months ago on this website, the most visceral wines can be the most unlikely. In Friuli-Venezia-Giulia,
“How about a drink?” “Yes please, a Spritz!” is the response of 100% of the students in the ancient university city of Padua, in northern Italy. The Spritz is in fact the favorite drink not only of the young people from here in the Veneto region, but also of many