Archive for the ‘Culture and Wine’ Category
Just who are you readers of FERMENTATION?-You are overwhelmingly male-Spread across the age spectrum-Make pretty good money-Are very well educated-Probably married-There’s a 50/50 chance you work in or around the wine industry-Are heavy wine drinkers-Are likely to spend on average more than $15 on a bottle of wine-Don’t really like your strawberry ice cream-Prefer imported autos-Are likely a dog, rather than a cat, person-Prefer substantive reading over gossip Not that surprising, but interesting. We received a total of 157 responses…
I’m not sure what to make of this:"Greenpeace today revealed that France’s iconic sparkling wine, Champagne, is threatened by radioactive contamination leaking from a nuclear waste dumpsite in the region. Low levels of radioactivity have already been found in underground water less than 10 km from the famous Champagne vineyards….The Champagne producers are facing two nuclear timebombs – one already leaking at Soulaine, and one planned at Bure. The wine producers in the Rhone region stood up to the nuclear…
I suspect we’ll be seeing more of this in the wine writing world in the weeks to come. Scott Tracy is the sommelier at La Toque in Napa Valley and very well known for his expertise. He also maintains a blog and has written about his experience at the recent re-enactment of the Paris Tasting. It turns out that Scott poured and worked the tasting. Scott’s a pretty astute guy and mentions something that I never thought of when writing…
Well, it appears California bottlings walked away the big winner at the 30th Anniversary Celebration of the 1976 Tasting of Paris held in Napa Valley and London. Only the original reds tasted in 1976 and a new collection of reds from Bordeaux and Napa were compared against one another. The winners are: Ridge Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon 1971 Ridge Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon 2000 In what must be a real surprise to many, California wines took the top five spots…
In the course of reconciling it’s wine shipping laws with last year’s equality-imposing Supreme Court decision, the state of Vermont has done something very interesting. A new law (S58) signed this month says both in-state and out-of-state wineries may now sell and ship wine directly to retail shops and restaurants, effectively cutting the middle man wholesaler out of the loop. This, in and of itself, is a pretty dramatic step given the stranglehold wholesalers seem to have over the legislative…
