What to do about creeping prohibitionism

Is red wine a "prescription" for good health? Let's discuss. wineandchampagnegifts.com.

Why are there perpetually conflicting reports on either the health benefits or health risks of wine?

Simple answer: Wine is an alcoholic beverage. It is the alcohol content that is identified as the potentially dangerous substance, often as a carcinogen (i.e., cancerous agent)...

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How to be a pompatus of wine

Lodi winemakers at work (Markus Niggli, Layne Montgomery).

For me, moving to Lodi fifteen years ago was a conscious act of embracing my inner wine lover. There were practicalities. At the time, I was hooked on Zinfandel as the best possible everyday drinking wine, and Lodi was where nearly half of California's Zinfandel was grown. 

Mind you, by then I had already been around the world and had the privilege of walking through many of the world's greatest vineyards and wine regions, as part of my previous career as a restaurateur... 

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Piquepoul, Grüner Veltliner, Cinsaut, Blaufränkisch—four contemporary varieties foreshadowing the future of California wine

Early morning Picpooul Blanc harvest, Acquiesce Vineyards, Mokelumne River-Lodi appellation.

How is your contemporary wine grape IQ? Are you up on the latest "alternative" varietals? Should you even care?

If a grape makes perfectly delicious wine, I would say "yes" to the last question. The way I see it: There are many grape varieties—hundreds of them, probably, grown all over the world—that may be new, unknown, exotic or even strange to most of us here in America. Yet in the parts of the world where these grapes come from, they are practically pedestrian, making perfectly familiar drinking wine.

What may be strange here is usually an everyday thing elsewhere. Or vice versa. Take, in a reverse-case scenario, a grape everyone knows here in California: Zinfandel, which (despite the commercial dominance of grapes such as Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay) is still the most widely planted grape in Lodi. Zinfandel, however, is not grown in Spain, France or Germany, three of the largest wine countries in Europe. And why should Spain, France or Germany care about Zinfandel? They have plenty of grapes of their own to make wine from...

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Is wine no longer cool? (And other pertinent questions)

Popular Lodi restaurant and alternative wine (i.e., handcraft or natural) destination, Guantonios Wood Fired. Shelly Guantone.

Once I was standing in a Berkeley wine store with a reputation for "cool" wines, when I saw a woman burst through the door, march straight to the counter and ask, "Can you help me pick out a white wine to drink tonight?"

In his best, calming, Al Franken-like voice, the store manager said, "Okay... may I ask what food you would be having with your wine?" The woman's reply was, "I'm not having any food... all I'm asking for is a very good white wine, preferably very dry, not something fruity or from California, and it has to have alcohol!"

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Everything about tannin, particularly in terms of the wide range of red wine grapes grown in Lodi

Tannin is a major sensory attribute of red wines. Like the important role acidity plays in all the variations of white wines, sparkling wines and rosés, the factor of tannin content varies among all the red wines of the world. 

Differentiations among red wines depend primarily upon the grape variety from which the wines are made; and since many red wines are, in fact, blends of different grapes (in the U.S. "varietal" wines can be labeled by a single grape variety if at least 75% of the wine consists of that grape), tannin levels can vary depending upon the virtually endless variations of red wine blends produced around the world.

Technically, tannin is a class of biomolecule found primarily in seeds of grapes, but also in skins and, if included, stems. Since red wines derive their color from the pigments (i.e., anthocyanins, also important for extraction of flavonoids) in the skins of black skinned grapes, they are typically made by fermenting complete with skins and seeds; thereby extracting tannin which, together with pigments, are collectively referred to as phenolic content...

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