Winology: Quick Wine Facts and Fun stuff.
Facts about Bordeaux Wines.
Top producers will go to extraordinary measures to protect their grapes. Famous examples include Petrus drying out the vines with a helicopter during the 1987 harvest or Château Figeac circulating the hot air above the vines in spring 2017 to prevent frost damage.
As a result, in Bordeaux, you need to know your vintage. Good vintages seem to come every five years, sometimes two years one after another. Good years include: 1995, 2000, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2015, 2016.
Millennial Women Drink Half the Wine in America
According to a report on the US wine market conducted by the Wine Market Council, young people in their 20s and early-to-mid 30s now drink almost half the wine bought in the US. And, get this: among high-frequency wine drinkers under the age of 30, women are out-purchasing men two-to-one when it comes to wine.
According to Wine Spectator, the report also says that the wine that Millennials are drinking is not their parents’ wine: it is from more diverse regions, it’s more expensive, and it is more likely to be sustainable and organic.
The Oak Barrel and Wine
A typical oak barrel holds either 59 or 60 gallons. Since oak is naturally porous in nature, as the wine passes time in the barrel some evaporation inevitably takes place with about five gallons or so being lost via evaporation. This natural process results in increased concentrations of both the wine’s aromatics and flavor profile. The oak used for making wine barrels is influenced by a number of factors. Where is the barrel from? How was it dried? How was it toasted? What standard practices are employed by the cooperage that made the barrel?
World’s Earliest Wine
By Mark Berkowitz, Archaeological Institute of America
Residue on a potsherd dating to the time of the first permanent settlements in the Middle East suggests that wine-making began 2,000 years earlier than previously thought. The sherd, ca. 7,000 years old, came from one of six two-and-one-half-gallon jars excavated two decades ago from the kitchen area of a mud-brick building in Hajji Firuz Tepe, a Neolithic village in Iran’s northern Zagros Mountains.
Residue from a jar from Godin Tepe, in the nearby middle Zagros Mountains, was dated to 5,100 years ago, until now the earliest evidence of wine-making.