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 [...]

I’ve been preparing my list of historical brewing sources.   I am chagrined each time I see a post from a newbie on one of the brewing history forums, asking whether there are period sources.  You bet there are!  Clearly my eleven-page bibliography needs to become a searchable database available from [...]

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 [...]