Wine Tips
  • look down over your glass – the riper the grapes, the deeper the colour, the closer to the equator the grapes were grown.
  • using a white background, look at the colour of the wine just inside the watery rim to get an indication of its age. For a red, blue and purple indicate youth, while yellow/orange indicate a more mature wine. Reds get paler and whites get darker as they age.
  • the best time of day to taste test a wine is between 10 and 11 AM. The best time to enjoy a wine is, of course, anytime!
  • the more body a wine has, the less chilling it may need.

Did you know.......
  • Australian wine has a six month lead on Californian wine produced that same year. Southern hemisphere harvests happen in the fall (our springtime), while northerly grapes grow into the fall (the springtime of Australia’s next vintage.)
  • In a process known as green harvesting, vintners prune a portion of immature grapes from the vine with the belief that it will provide an additional energy boost to the remaining bunches, helping them to better ripen and acquire higher concentrations of flavour compounds.
  • Veraison is the term for the growth stage of grapes in which anthocyanins and carotenoids replace chlorophyll, giving the grapes their color.
  • Oak chips can be used instead of barrel maturation or to supplement the oak flavour by a used barrel. These chips are added before fermentation of the must, with a dosage of approximately 1 gram per litre and can range in size from pencil- shavings to the more common cashew size. Oak chips cost less than one twentieth that of oak barrels.
  • Only 3% of all American oak harvested every year is used for barrel production. Most of it is used for furniture, construction, etc.
  • Of the approx 1.3 million barrels made each year (mostly in the Midwest), only 60- 80,000 go directly to wineries.
  • Cork trees are a relatively young species of oak.
  • Portugal is the center of the world’s cork production with approximately 1.6 million acres. It yields more than half the world’s total production.
  • A cork tree is sufficiently thick enough to be harvested by its 25th year. The average life expectancy is 170 years.
  • The older the tree, the more cork it yields.  A 200 year old tree in Lisbon yielded 2700 pounds of cork in a single stripping.