fermented beverages made from grape juice
Wines are about where they come from. There is a critical piece of info on a wine label I’ve been overlooking. When the label on a bottle of wine says “Cabernet Sauvignon”, I rarely get further than thinking that’s the kind of wine in the bottle. I’m looking for a […]
So you’re about to walk into a wine tasting room. Maybe you’ve never been, maybe you’ve done this before but never been quite sure how it’s supposed to go: do I have to swish and spit, or what? It’s kind of overwhelming. There’s so much to know about wines, right? […]
I guess it’s not too soon before Christmas to share the very best recipe for hot spiced wine I know. I make a single gallon of this at Christmastime every year, in honor of the man from whom my family got it. We called him Bud; he was my sister’s […]
I have a desperate fascination for ancient wines, beers, and meads. I love everything about them – trade patterns, methods of making and storing them, recipes, social usage, storage/presentation vessels, agricultural sources for ingredients – it just doesn’t end. And when I say ancient, well, I’ve stopped using “historical” ’cause […]
Most recently updated August 18, 2015 I am chagrined each time I see someone online asking whether there are period sources. You bet there are! Here is a running list of historical primary sources for brewers. Secondary sources are on another blog post, yet another has modern how-to books, and there’s one […]
All right, I need a break from writing about beer… so I’ll move over to something I honestly enjoy – wine. Muller-Thurgau is a lovely German white flavored with elderflowers. Tempranillo is Spain’s ‘noble grape’. Both turn out to have fairly old, interesting histories, going back further in time than you […]
Talking with Lori Titus at The Bee Folks this morning (as I was picking up thirty pounds of buckwheat honey) she mentioned that their honey had been Star-K certified, and have been since 2009 – and I realized there’s a whole world out there I know nothing about. Not that that’s […]
I’ve been researching the history of alcoholic beverages in the Middle East. Here’s a snippet of what I’ve found so far: Brewing as we enjoy it in the West originated in the Middle East – all of it: wines, beers, and distilled beverages all came to Europe from the Middle […]
DNA studies by Ferdinand Regner indicates that one parent of the modern Riesling vine is Gouais Blanc, known in Germany as Weißer Heunisch , brought to Burgundy from Croatia by the Romans[1]. This was widely grown by French and German peasantry in the Middle Ages. The other parent is a […]
Tempranillo is a variety of black grape native to Spain. It is called Spain’s “noble grape”, and is the main variety used in Rioja[1]. Spanish cultivation of vitis vinifera, the ancestor common to wine grapes, began in earnest in classical times with Phoenician settlement in the southern provinces. Later, according […]
Müller-Thurgau is a white grape created by Hermann Muller from the Swiss canton of Thurgau in 1882. However, it is a cross of Riesling with Madeleine Royale[1], which is a Chasselas seedling, and both Riesling and Chasselas are very old vines. There are several written references to Riesling as a […]