Wine Culture

This article is Part II of a two part series by Céline Guillou. Part I, "Green Wine: What Does "Green" Mean? Does it Taste Better?", can be viewed here . Organic Wine For many years, the simple mention of “organic wine” inspired a less than enthusiastic reaction from wine consumers, who generally viewed purveyors of organic wine as “tree-huggers”.

It goes without saying that “green” is the new red. Talk of “green” is all over the media and fast spreading to every industry – food, automotive, home improvement, and now wine. But when it comes to wine, does “green” really taste better? And, more importantly, what does it actually mean?

First-time wine cellar owners often dream of being able to select wines from their collections for decades to come. Unfortunately, unless you are buying delicate, heavy bodied wines from Old World vintners, you may find that your favorite wine may only be drinkable for a very short time.

Anyone who has tried to buy wine over the internet may be well aware of the obstacle course of wine shipping laws tripping up oenophiles all over the U.S. today. Unless you are fortunate enough to live in what is referred to as a “reciprocal” state, it may quite literally take an act of congress for you to buy a bottle of that great boutique wine you tried during your wine country vacation last year.

On a warm Tuesday in June, my wife Emily gently told me she thought she might be pregnant with our first child. We hadn’t planned this, and I was having trouble adjusting to the idea. The next evening I was eating Chinese food , and when I opened the fortune cookie, I decided to interpret the fortune in light of whether Emily was pregnant.

This is the second article ( Part one is here ) in an investigative series on Sicilian wines. Part Three of this series will be a focus on the Sicilian palate, foods and wines from the southern most region of Italy. My wife’s cousin, Fabio, navigates the winding roads up the east side of Mount Etna as naturally as the breeze follows the Sicilian coastline. We are en route to the small mountain town of Randazzo where Fabio’s friend is the winemaker at a winery called Gurrida . Over the course of an hour, we have passed thousands of acres of vineyards and citrus groves and several ancient villages carved (literally) out of lava.

You did want to know how to say, “Trockenbeerenauslese,” didn’t you? Auslese - OWS-lay-zuh Beerenauslese - Buh-air-en OWS-lay-zuh Deutsche Landwein - DOYTCH-uh LANDT-vine Deutsche Tafelwein - DOYTCH-uh TOFF-el-vine Eiswein - ICE-vine Kabinett - Kahb-in-ET Qualitätswein bestimmter Anbaugebiete -...

You know how they say you can’t really understand the ins and outs of winemaking until you’ve walked a mile in an underground cellar, surrounded by 3000 gallon holding tanks and palettes of oak barrels - what, you’ve never heard this? Well, it’s true, because no matter how much you read about the winemaking process, or hear winemakers talk about their craft during barrel-tasting weekend, you cannot appreciate the art and science that is winemaking until you’ve experienced it firsthand. This is why, come end-of-summer, so many devoted wine geeks sign up to work crush at a winery. And this is why I ended up at a certain small-scale winery one recent Friday morning.

By nature, my mind has always rebelled against being force-fed facts like a goose whose ultimate destiny is foie gras. But comes a time.....Comes a time when you need to prove you know the difference between your Charmat, Crémant and Charente...your Brouilly, Rully and brouillis...your Guyot, Grolleau and Grillo. And evidently, for me, the time was now.

Remember Peabody’s Improbable History from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show? That dorky kid, Sherman, who’d probably be an internet billionaire today, would do whatever Mr. Peabody, the dog, told him to and off they’d go, visiting Attila the Hun or the Spanish Inquisition in the Wayback Machine. They’d screw history up but manage to get it all back together eventually and the whole result was some fine campy humor that delighted my juvenile mind.