Spanish invasion

Tempranillo, from Spain, is a new favorite with the Australian grape growers.

One of the reasons for its popularity is its broad flavour spectrum. It can show strawberry/raspberry/blackberry/mulberry characters, as well as tobacco/herb/olive/tar/spice and sometimes an earthy, farmyard character. It can be quite silky, with fine chalky tannins.

On another note,

Cropping levels must be kept low. "Treat it mean," Fernandez says. "Don't allow it to sprout like a rampant adolescent," Adams adds. "It has large leaves," Leske points out, "and they're great for people in nudist colonies."

Funny!

Check out Spanish conquistador (theage.com.au)

Listen to some views about wine

I came across the link for Wine for Every Occasion in NPR.

When I followed the link, it led me to an interview of the writers of the book, Wine for Every Day and Every Occasion : Red, White, and Bubbly to Celebrate the Joy of Living, Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher being interviewed by NPR's Tony Cox on the The Tavis Smiley Show.

Listen to the quite pleasant, informative online interview by clicking on the button on the web page.

You can get the book on Amazon for the holidays, for yourself, or someone who may need an easy introduction to wine drinking. And, if you have to read it right now, you can even download it.

Cheers!

Wow! Color me happy!

I just read about a new Google service, scholar.google.com in my daily posting of Science in the News:

GOOGLE PLANS NEW SERVICE FOR SCIENTISTS AND SCHOLARS
from The New York Times (Registration Required)

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 17 - Google Inc. plans to announce on Thursday that it is adding a new search service aimed at scientists and academic researchers.

Google Scholar, which was scheduled to go online Wednesday evening at scholar.google.com, is a result of the company's collaboration with a number of scientific and academic publishers
and is intended as a first stop for researchers looking for scholarly literature like peer-reviewed
papers, books, abstracts and technical reports.

Google executives declined to say how many additional documents and books had been indexed and made searchable through the service. While the great majority of recent scholarly papers and periodicals are indexed on the Web, many have not been easily accessible to the public.
http://snipurl.com/aq4b

I tried it with keywords "micro-oxidation" and" grape" and the search came up with 437 scholarly articles. As an online researcher, I am impressed. This is good stuff, Google. Keep up the good work.

Getting to know Zinfandel

Grape Expectations has another good article, this time about Zinfandel.

Seeing red (The Publican) is helpful in learning more about Zinfandel. Oz Clarke believes cabernet sauvignon is “the world’s most famous red wine grape”. Master of Wine Jonathan Pedley is even more gushing: “It is the great aristocrat of black grape varieties. If chardonnay is a bit of a slapper these days, then cabernet sauvignon has that touch of class about it.”

When experts have such high opinions, isn't it time you got to know Zinfandel?

How to eat, drink and recover...

You have problems?

What wine to drink with what kind of food? Where to get your favorite wines? And, most importantly, what to do when you have overdone it?

Check this site out: Websites to help you wine and dine (startribune.com). Nice links!

Send over that California wine

Ah! The convenience and mischief of the internet! Putting the U.S. Supreme Court justices to work just so we can exchange bottles of wine and beer over the state lines.

You may want to read Prohibition Redux! (CNet News.com) to have an idea about what's going into the the concerns of online alcohol purchases.

A new book for your shelves

For the wine lovers who desire to learn more about Pinot Noir, a book just came out in September. Article from San Francisco Chronicle, "Most delicate grape gets a thorough probing" has very good things to say about North American Pinot Noir, by John Wintrop Haeger.

Chewing through 425 pages about one grape variety would be a chore if one were in the hands of a less capable author. But Haeger, a China scholar whose last book was the 1975 "Crisis and Prosperity in Sung China," writes with a sense of clarity and curiosity that makes his second book a pleasure to digest.

Check it out!

40 interesting facts about wine

Here are a few....

34 Wine is a sterile medium because of its high acidity, alcohol and low pH. Pathogens cannot live in it, which means it's very safe to drink. In fact, people used to mix wine with polluted or suspect water, in an effort to make the water safe.

23 The indent you see on the base of most wine bottles is called a punt. It collects the sediment in old reds and makes decanting easier; it strengthens a champagne bottle which has to withstand 4.5 atmospheres of internal pressure; it aided the stacking of inverted bottles in olden times; and the earliest bottles were more stable than if they had flat bases, which tended to be a bit wonky. Increasingly these days, the punt is for appearance.

7 Our most popular wine-grape, shiraz, originated in a Muslim country where the people don't drink wine: Iran.

(From TheAge.com -- What's in a bottle)