A guide to selecting, serving, and enjoying wine
Wine makers in Alsace have been active since the Roman conquest.
The Alsatians themselves are a mixed French-Germanic lot, with many of the older inhabitants still speaking Alsatian, a Germanic dialect, at home. Despite living in the smallest wine making region in France, these proud people rightfully boast of their centuries old wine making traditions.
Germany has hundreds of wine festivals every year. But to provide all that fun requires an even larger amount of hard work in its justly world-famous vineyards.
Viticulture, the process of growing wine grapes, has been raised from ancient art to a complex combination of science and art. Add in all the other special knowledge and skills required to produce the end product —bottled wine— and you have a Herculean (or is that Dionysian?) task.
Wine, like anything else, will always change over time. The trick is to control the variables that affect wine storage and avoid harmful changes. The variables needing to be controlled are air, temperature, light, vibration and humidity.
It’s possible to get a college degree in Wine. Absent from most curricula, though is a good course on the right way to serve wine.
Skill in the art of wine tasting doesn’t require an advanced degree in oenology (the science of wine making). But listening to professional wine tasters, it’s easy to get that impression. Bouquet, clarity, earthy, crisp, open, nostalgic — huh?
While it’s not that easy to spot a great wine on the shelves of your local wine merchant, it’s dead easy to identify a bad wine with just a sip or two.
One of the joys of wine is learning to select wines that you enjoy while continuing to challenge your palette. Nobody can teach you everything you need to know about selecting wine, but we can give you a few starting points.
Some agriculture regions would be almost worthless without the grape and the wine it produces. The best wine grapes grow in surprising places.
Wine — Ancient Art, Modern Science, and Global Business
In one form or another wine production has been carried out for thousands of years. Pottery discovered in Persia (present-day Iran), dated at 5,500 BC show evidence of grape use for wine making. Jars from Jiahu in China containing wine from wild grapes date to between 6000 and 7000 BC.
