Category — buying wine

Stories and news from the wine world:

• Wine Word of the Week: Clarification
  — Clarification is the wine-making operation which removes suspended and insoluble material from grape juice, or new wine, in which these solids are known as lees.
• Sulfites in Wine
  — Sneaky Sulfites Cause Splitting Headaches, or Do They? The truth behind sulfites used in wine.
• Wine May ‘Protect Against Dementia’
  — The beneficial effects observed are due to compounds called flavonoids, found in red wine.
• Time Works Against Opened Wine Bottle
  — The problem arises when you taste several wines or simply don’t want to drink an entire bottle by yourself or with a friend.
• Report: American Wine Industry Healthy
  — Wine Intelligence, a London-based wine industry consulting and market research firm, is reporting that American wine is doing just fine…

Stories and news from the wine world:

• The Vintner’s Case for Global Warming
  — French winemakers are buying land in northern areas that haven’t been able to produce wine in centuries. Areas like upstate New York, Ontario, and British Columbia that were marginal wine producers are becoming important winemaking centers.
• Winemaking: Requested Recipe (Pineapple Wines)
  — By the time the fruit reaches your local market, the intense flavor and sweetness made be decidely reduced. For that reason, pineapple wine made from canned pineapple or pineapple juice are, generally speaking, every bit as good as wine made from fresh pineapple fruit.
• Using Wine Recipes for Fruit Wine
  — Once you have all the basic equipment together you can start looking for wine recipes to make your own fruit wines.
• Winemaking Calculators Go Online
  — New website’s free tools provide help for busy winemakers.
• Wine Critics and their Discontents
  — You might think that the job of wine critic would be heavenly—traveling the world, tasting wines and talking and writing about them. What could be better? But there are downsides and trade-offs to the job.
• Wines to Make a Party Swing
  — So you’re having a party? There is nothing worse than going to a party and being given a bad tasting glass of wine. There is no excuse for this, and so this article gives you a few ideas on what to serve your guests.
• The Way to Make Wine: How to Craft Superb Table Wines at Home
  — Written by a vintner and science editor with twenty-five years experience, The Way to Make Wine is the most readable and reliable handbook among the many winemaking guides.

Many of us walk into a wine store not really sure what we’re looking for and end up a little overwhelmed with the choices. The Fat City blog offers up 10 wine buying tips. Here are a few good ones:

Tip number 4: “Natural human behavior is to look at the first thing that catches your eye. That’s why producers display their ratings so prominently. Don’t be a slave to ratings. Especially watch out for wines advertising ratings in the low 80s. Ask yourself why a producer would be advertising their mediocrity.”

Tip number 6: “Look at the vintages. You don’t have to know good years or bad years just know that white over three years old, especially under $20, are getting long in the tooth. On the other end, reds can be too young. Watch out for ones that are only a year old.”

Tip number 7: “Pick up the damn bottle and look at the back. If a wine has a whole paragraph with an ebullient description about the wine, they’re probably completely full of shit. It means they’re specifically dumbing down the wine and pandering to a certain demographic. Move on to something that the producer is confident enough in to let speak for itself.”

Lost in the Liquor Store: Part I [Fat City]

Photo by blackbirdboy

Some good ones in this list…

Bargains [The Wine Camp Blog]

Interested in purchasing Lakeland Winery wines by the bottle online? Stay tuned….our online wine store is opening soon…

Photo by K. Todd Storch

The Wall Street Journal recommends that French wine lovers should run out and grab a few bottles of the 2005 Burgundy vintage:

“Drop everything. Go to a good wine store right now, buy a bottle of 2005 red Burgundy and open it for dinner tonight. Set aside some time to go back tomorrow to buy more to lay down for the future.”

Tastings: The Right Stuff [WSJ.com]

…you realize they don’t sell wine. But, according to the Financial Times, that is now going to change:

“Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, is to start selling wine in the US, entering a business fraught with regulatory complexities and littered with the wreckage of previous failures.

Amazon is looking to recruit a senior wine buyer, whom it says will be responsible for “the acquisition of a massive new product selection” for its site. The wine sales will augment a rapidly expanding non-perishable groceries business that Amazon launched two years ago.”

Amazon to enter US wine market [Financial Times via Tasting Room]