Something we often complain about is the price tags of wine. And it’s totally understandable - wine, on the surface, is just fermented grape juice bottled in a glass container. How hard can it be to consistently grow grapes, make wine, and sell to customers at a low price while still allowing the families who make the wines to earn a decent living?
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We taste many wines for this column and we always hope for the best, but, look, we’re human; we do open some with greater anticipation than others. One wine we tried recently was a sparkling rosé of Tannat from Bending Branch Winery in Texas. Here are the first two words of our tasting notes: “We’re surprised.”
May 16, 2020"We've spent the last 20 years really refining the ethos. And that is site-specific, single-terroir, single-vineyard in some cases, wines of character and immerse drinkability." " Jacques de Klerk Radford Dale
January 20, 2020"There was a long time during which great Soave was difficult to find because many producers were focused on volume. I am proud that my grandfather and father, and now my brother and I have always been determined to offer the highest-quality Soave possible." Dario Pieropan
January 11, 2020"People learned the technology – the Bordelaise technique of aging the wines and people learned the style of blending of wines from different villages, but forgot the singularity of character and uniqueness of the terroir." Miguel Angel de Gregorio
"In Sancerre the date, the time we pick your grapes is of great importance to get a wine of quality that will be easy to make later." Take a 360 tour with Sancerre winemaker Aurore Dezat.
"I just took a sip of a wine and I feel like I stepped into darkest space." Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher on channeling Stanley Kubrick and the rebirth of the Sicilian wine industry.
"Plavac Mali is something that we cannot measure, or we cannot say it's similar, or like some other wines from other countries. It's special. It has this special terroir. You can feel the land and taste it in the wine." Fani Marinović-Skaramuča of Skaramuča Winery
Macedonia has been making wine since the times before Alexander the Great. During the communist years as Yugoslavia quality suffered as producers were encouraged to make bulk wine. Today private winemakers are showing the interesting qualities of native Macedonian grapes.
Emerging wine regions need winemakers who have the creative vision to push through boundaries and challenge conventions. Red Tail Ridge in the Finger Lakes is working with Teroldego and other nontraditional grapes such as Dornfelder.
