America’s growing fascination with wine has lead to an increased interest in all sorts of topics that might’ve seemed superfluous years ago. Just consult a set of wine notes for the average Napa Valley winery, and you will discover data relating to everything from barrels to brix, to pH levels, to harvest dates, to clonal selections. In any area of interest, the true enthusiast will always embrace the minute details, whether that topic is wine, baseball statistics, or Star Trek episodes. But I will say one thing about some of these oenological facts and figures: if you’ve [... read more ...]

The term “noble rot” has long been a secret handshake among wine connoisseurs, an English translation of the French pourriture noble, or what biologists would officially call “botrytis” (and even more officially, Botrytis cinerea). At its essence, “noble rot” is a benevolent fungus, critical to the production of many of the world’s top late-harvest wines. Botrytis appears in the fall — with the onset of humidity in the vineyard — helping to concentrate the sugar levels in the grapes as it facilitates dehydration. For this reason, the words “noble rot” are often synonymous with the Bordeaux region [... read more ...]

In his book “To Cork or Not to Cork,” author George Taber devotes 265 pages to bottle closures, a fact in itself that demonstrates at least one universal truth: that wine aficionados are an odd, yet passionate lot. After all, who else would read an entire book on this particular subject? Even wine guru Karen MacNeil, who contributed the foreward to the text, was at first a bit skeptical, and for very good reason. An entire book dedicated to the cork-versus-screw cap debate? Honestly, I sometimes feel that wine aficionados must be the Trekkies of the culinary [... read more ...]

In spite of our present fascination with Champagne, it should come as little surprise that one of the region’s most legendary figures, Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, remains mostly a mystery. After all, the Champagne region itself has been the source of many wine-related myths and mistruths, perhaps none greater than that of Dom Perignon, the monk at Hautvillers whom is often cited as the benevolent inventor of sparkling wine (in reality, Perignon was a gifted blender of still wines, but he considered bubbles to be a major flaw).

In the case of Clicquot Ponsardin, the mystery [... read more ...]

Being a resident of the Napa Valley, picturesque vineyards are part of my daily commute to work. As such, it becomes astonishingly easy to take the local landscape for granted, or even worse, to mindlessly follow the car in front of me, paying little attention to my surroundings. But even as the valley’s lush scenery can sometimes become commonplace, there are always moments when I will view the Napa Valley through new eyes. After all, even the most jaded Napa resident cannot help but marvel at the yellow fields of wild mustard that accompany the springtime, or [... read more ...]