Feature Stories

Home
Wine
Feature Stories

Yeast Martyrdom: Toasty Flavors in Your Sparkling

Erika Szymanski
Feature Stories
5 min read
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

Merlot and Cabernet of Italy

Elisabetta Tosi
Feature Stories
5 min read
The history of enology in Italy is rich in fairy-tale-like stories like this one. Once upon a time, there was a young Italian nobleman who loved two things: racehorses and French wines. His name was Marquis Mario Incisa della Rocchetta. In 1929 he was finishing his degree in agriculture at

Making Wine: The Use of Enzymes in Modern Winemaking

Geoffrey Moss
Feature Stories
4 min read
Enzymes are a natural and fundamental element of the winemaking process.  Nowadays, they are also a commercial product found in many wineries, another utility in a winemaker’s toolkit.  They have the potential to make more extracted and more aromatic wines and to accelerate the winemaking process.  They also have the

Five Reasons to Love Austrian Red Wines

Meg Houston Maker
Feature Stories
6 min read
I recently polled a few friends to get their quick take on Austrian reds. Replies ranged from “Yum!” to “Huh?”—but heavily weighted toward the latter. True, Austria’s better known for crisp whites like Grüner Veltliner, but red grapes are grown everywhere, too, and make up a third of vineyard plantings.