Month: September 2009

Wine has five components that determine taste and quality: alcohol, acid, tannin, sweetness/dryness, and fruitiness Continue reading →

Wine has five components that determine taste and quality: alcohol, acid, tannin, sweetness/dryness, fruitiness. Know these and you can hang with wine snobs (if that’s your thing). More important, you can enhance your enjoyment of wine. Continue reading →

California, epicenter of image, got it wrong with Petite Sirah. Big, bold, black, loaded with tannins—there is nothing petite about Petite Sirah wine.

It’s not Sirah, either, but a cross between Peloursin (mother, a humble Rhone grape) and Syrah (father, the bedrock Northern Rhone grape) created by in the early 1880s by Dr. Francois Durif. First notable because of resistance to powdery mildew then ravaging the Rhone, the new variety failed to produced distinguished wines. As a result, Durif (as it is still called in France) never made it big in its country of origin. Continue reading →

Buying wine: intimidating. So many choices and prices. We hunker in our wine foxhole, timidly buy familiar bottles. Continue reading →

Labor Day: bittersweet holiday. Summer’s wrath wanes. Kids back to school. Your baseball team drives for playoffs—or not. Football kicks off. Continue reading →