Wine Blog » Cabernet Sauvignon

Wine gift – Andrew Jefford’s Wine Course

Wineguy — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 05:00:14 +0000

The 12 Wines of Christmas — Day 3: The must-have wine map – San Francisco Chronicle (blog)

The 12 Wines of Christmas — Day 3: The must-have wine map
San Francisco Chronicle (blog)
As a prelude to the big holiday, Inside Scoop brings you the 12 Wines of Christmas. Each day from now until Dec. 23, we'll have a suggestion for something wine-related to make your season brighter. Wine maps are one of those supreme nerd devices. …

and more »

Andrew Jefford’s Wine Course
Let Andrew Jefford be your guide to the rich and fascinating world of wine. His wine course consists of 20 clearly defined projects, so you can learn the essentials in a helpful order and at your own pace. The first part of the book, The Tools, covers the kit you’ll need for tasting and thinking about wine, including different glasses, the varying colors of key wine types and their smell and taste. You’ll learn how to choose wine and record your impressions. The Elements explains wine’s components. Andrew profiles the magnificent seven grape varieties: Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah, and Pinot Noir, plus many more from the extended vine family. He also pictures what happens in the earth and sky as the vine grows, and the role of the winemaker in shaping the finished product. The final part of the book, The Journey, takes you on a tour of the world’s wineproducing countries, describing the characteristics of each. • “Exceptional…a must buy and read.” Robert Parker on Andrew Jefford’s The New France. • Includes helpful factfiles, “try” boxes suggesting easy tasting comparisons, and “what people love about…” summaries of the world’s main wine types.

Cabernet Sauvignon: A Complete Guide to the Grape and the Wines it Produces (Mitchell Beazley Wine Made Easy)

Wineguy — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 18:00:43 +0000

Cabernet Sauvignon: A Complete Guide to the Grape and the Wines it Produces (Mitchell Beazley Wine Made Easy)

Cabernet Sauvignon, the undisputed king of the red grape varieties, has a well-deserved reputation for producing some of the finest red wines in the world. This practical guide covers them all—from Europe and Australia to North and South America and beyond—guiding readers through the multitude of Cabernets available on the shelves and highlighting the top producers who manage to strike a perfect balance between quality and quantity to make the very best wine.

Bar Wine – Vinifera: The World’s Great Wine Grapes And Their Stories

Wineguy — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 20:00:29 +0000

Vinifera: The World’s Great Wine Grapes And Their Stories
Boxed Set of 40 Wine Grape Varietal Reference Cards. Featuring color photos, interesting history, lore and food pairings for 40 glorious wine producing varietals. A set of fascinating wine cards, or more specifically, wine grape reference cards. The information contained in these wine grape cards is fun, educational, informative and often obscure. The photographs are colorful and sumptous. An excellent wine gift for any host or hostess. A perfect Holiday gift such Mother’s Day, Father’s Day Valentines’ day or Christmas. Learn about Pinot Noir, Zinfandel, Aglianico, Albarino, Viognier, Merlot, Chardonnay, Dolcetto, Pinot Grigio, Cabernet Sauvignon, and many others. Ideal for wine tasting parties and blind wine tastings.

Customer Review: Wow!
I recieved this deck of cards as a hostess gift and was blown away by the detail and information that is on each card; the color photographs are absolutely stunning. The pairing suggestions on the back make choosing that perfect wine for your next meal a cinch and with 40 cards of different grape varieties, there are endless opportunities to explore… everytime I go to a friends house I bring a deck of these cards and a bottle of wine- they make for great conversation during the evening. These are a MUST!!!!!!!!!

Customer Review: CAN LEARN A LOT FAST
This is a really good wine guide, because it’s not like a wine guide at all. It’s fun. The photographs of the grapes are really beautiful. You’re not used to seeing the grapes themsleves in the field (Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio…etc.), so that context kind of gives you a new appreciation of what’s in the bottle. The information is a fun read, too. It’s got historical notes, where the names of the grapes come from, fun little stories, plus its packed with wine knowledge, but totally accessable. I didn’t know all that much about wines and this reference pack has made me a lot more comfortable ordering and talking about wine.

Merlot: A Complete Guide to the Grape and the Wines it Produces (Mitchell Beazley Wine Made Easy)

Wineguy — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 02:01:12 +0000

No fan rally planned for Texas Rangers this year – Boston Herald
ARLINGTON, Texas — There’s no celebration this year for the Texas Rangers. Last year, a fan rally followed the Texas Rangers’ first appearance in a World Series. This time, having lost the Fall Classic for the second straight year, there won’t be one. The Rangers lost to the St. Louis

Occupy Oakland sees rapid growth and changes – San Jose Mercury News
On the surface, little has changed at the Occupy Oakland camp on Frank Ogawa Plaza four days after defiant protesters returned after Tuesday’s early-morning raid. Tents again transform the lawn into a patchwork of blue, red, yellow, beige and army green. The first aid station and children’s corner

Merlot: A Complete Guide to the Grape and the Wines it Produces (Mitchell Beazley Wine Made Easy)

Currently considered one of the world’s trendiest wines, Merlot has long been a staple from the vineyards of Bordeaux, used in blends with Cabernet Sauvignon to add soft, supple fruit to the final product. Susy Atkins, author of Girls’ Guide to Wine, demystifies everything about this popular variety in an eye-opening and practical guide that’s great for buying a bottle at home or taking on a wine-tasting trip.

Wine gift – Wines of the World: Your essential handbook (Eyewitness Companions)

Wineguy — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:00:11 +0000

Wines of the World: Your essential handbook (Eyewitness Companions)
From Alsace to Western Australia, and from Piedmont, Italy to the Colchagua Wine Valley of Chile, Wines of the World delivers essential information about each of the 35 major wine-producing regions in the world. With detailed reports on the top producers; must-have vintages; maps; buying guides; and the style, characteristics, and flavors of hundreds of wines – this is an unrivalled, lavishly illustrated, and portable guide for anyone interested in learning more about wines.

Customer Review: Exploring Wines of the World
Earlier, I reviewed a book in the Eyewitness Companions series on French Wine. What better sequel than looking at wine throughout the world? This volume does a nice job of providing the reader with a background regarding wine and then conducting a country by country tour of the important winemaking countries of the world. As always, one gets breadth at the cost of depth. But the tradeoff appears to me to be well worth making.

The context for winemaking is complicated. The work says (Page 10): “Wine is a pure reflection of its `terroir’ [Page22--". . .a unique combination of climate, topography, and soil types [that] shapes the character of the vines. . .”], and no other single product sums up its cultural, geographical, and historical origins in quite the same way.” Wine apparently began being made in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia. Over time, grapes and wine spread throughout many countries. Trivia: France leads in wine production, with Italy second, Spain third, and the US fourth (see Page 13). Wine consumption is greatest in France. The US ranks 17th among countries.

The first part of the book explores the history of wine, the “terroir” (how the climate, soil type, etc. affect the grape), the various types of grape (e.g., merlot, cabernet sauvignon, pinot noir, riesling, and sauvignon blanc among many others), what happens in the vineyard, the winemaking process, and the style of wines (sparkling, rose, etc).

With that context as background, the book then begins a country by country examination of grapes and wines throughout the world. Countries featured include the usual suspects, such as France, Italy, Spain, the United States, Germany (and Austria and Switzerland), Portugal, and so on. In addition, new world production in Chile and Argentina are discussed as well as the wine industry in venues such as Australia and New Zealand and Greece, etc. In a short Amazon review, it is quite impossible to summarize all. So, here are a couple samplings of the discussion, focusing on a handful of countries. Part of the fun of this book, after all, is one’s personal exploration of wines of the world!

Spain: First, a background on Spanish wine, including Spanish Wine Law. Then, a region by region discussion of wines, in northern Spain, central Spain, and Southern Spain. For each region, a discussion of the characteristic variety of grapes, the types of wine, characteristics of those wines, and so on.

Chile: Again, the discussion begins with an enumeration of the “terroir” of grapes in Chile, then a listing of top producers in each geographic area, and a brief description of the major wine producers in the country. At the end, one does have a clearer sense of wine in Chile.
All in all, an enjoyable and relaxing tour of the winemaking world. Another typically well done product of the Eyewitness Companions series.

Wine online – Oz Clarke’s Grapes and Wines: The definitive guide to the world’s great grapes and the wines they make

Wineguy — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:13 +0000

Richard Sanford leads 2012 wine hall of fame inductees – Los Angeles Times
Central Coast wine pioneer Richard Sanford is among the inductees into the 2012 Vintner’s Hall of Fame, to be celebrated in February at the Culinary Institute of America’s Greystone campus in St. Helena, Calif. Sanford started one of the first

Food & Wine events: South Bay, Oct. 20-25 – San Jose Mercury News
Christopher Kimball: 7 p.m. Oct. 20. Meet the food guru, publisher and editor of “The Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook: 2000 Recipes from 20 Years of America’s Most Trusted Food Magazine.” Books Inc., 301 Castro St., Mountain View. Free. 428-1234

Oz Clarke’s Grapes and Wines: The definitive guide to the world’s great grapes and the wines they make

First published in hardcover as Oz Clarke’s Encyclopedia of Grapes, Oz Clarke’s Grapes and Wines is newly revised and updated to provide the most current information on an even wider array of grapes. Oz covers chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon, and fifteen other “classic” grapes in depth, and includes features on tradition and innovation, methods used in the vineyard and the winery, and different wine styles around the world. He also provides vivid descriptions of more than three hundred grape varieties organized in his renowned A-to-Z format, as well as a glossary of technical terms and a wine decoder that lists which grapes go into which wines.

This authoritative volume by one of the world’s great wine writers is all you need to distinguish among grape varieties— the wines they create and the flavors they contribute—and to make an informed choice on selecting the most satisfying wines.

Customer Review: Oz Clarke’s Grapes and Wines: The definitive guide to the world’s great grapes and the wines they make
Excellent resource for understanding grape origins,vintages, and vintners. Many pearls of knowledge that will lead to exlporing great wines.

Customer Review: Grapes Galore
Completely updated, you can test this, learning the recent discoveries about the origins of Zinfandel and Primitivo grapes.(pag 293).
You can learn a little more about native portuguese grapes.
You would enjoy having a kind of glossary to “translate”:
which grapes make which wines !,
so you can travel Europe strange names in the wine label, either from terroirs, clos, crus, vineyards, vignerons or wine-makers and evem fantasy names. Perfect for you, who love choosing wine by their grapes.
Schiffini, J. P. (Founder member of The Century Club)

Make Wine – De Long’s Wine Grape Varietal Table

Wineguy — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 18:00:12 +0000

Utah families help with the comeback of historic Tokaj grapes at Hungarian winery – Salt Lake Tribune
This welcome infestation creates unique flavors and makes the grapes phenomenal for wine. Tokaj wines are made using only white grapes, mostly Furmint (similar to chenin blanc), Harslevelu (similar to gewürztraminer) and muscat. Located in the

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De Long’s Wine Grape Varietal Table
Learn about Wine the Visual Way.

You consider yourself fairly open minded about wine. You’re familiar with the big five — Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, Sauvignon Blanc, and Chardonnay — and are getting comfortable with more obscure grape varieties: the occasional Albarino, Petite Sirah, or Viognier. But just when you thought you had the situation under control, your waiter suggests a Lagrein, your local liquor store is pushing Xynomavro, and your friends now swear by Pineau d’Aunis. What to do?

The popular wine reference, De long’s Wine Grape Varietal Table has been improved and expanded. Just as with the first edition, the world of wine grapes is organized in a clear, concise and easy to use reference similar to a periodic table. The table contains 184 red and white grape varieties organized by both body (vertically) and acidity (horizontally). The Wine Indexes, which help to answer the bacchanalian question “what grape are you drinking?”, now include all wine regions worldwide. To fit all the additional information in, the table is now 24 x 36 inches (printed on 110 lb. acid-free archival paper), and the indexes now comprise an 88 page perfect-bound book. The table and index book are packaged in an attractive and sturdy gift box.

It makes a great gift for novice or expert lovers of wine and is the first in the De Long’s Wine Info Series, a concise set of wine information guides.

Customer Review: top chart
An excellent tool for training, eduction or just curiosity. It is very easy to understand and reference.

Customer Review: Fabulous Chart.
I have many friends who enjoy wine, some of them in the food/hospitality business. They are all jealous of this chart.

Rate a Wine – Great Wine Made Simple: Straight Talk from a Master Sommelier

Wineguy — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 06:00:12 +0000

Great Wine Made Simple: Straight Talk from a Master Sommelier
About one-third of the way through Andrea Immer’s Great Wine Made Simple, the author recounts an anecdote that could serve as the book’s theme–alligator, rabbit, and squab were all introduced to her the same way: “Tastes like chicken.” And as demonstrated by Immer, who went from debentures to de Rothschild when she quit Morgan Stanley to eventually oversee the 50,000-bottle cellar at Manhattan’s famed Windows on the World, the leap from pigeon to Pichon-Lalande is analogous: teaching novice wine drinkers what to expect is what her book, aptly subtitled “Straight Talk from a Master Sommelier”, is all about.

With emphasis on her “Big Six” varietals–Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Merlot, Pinot Noir, and Cabernet Sauvignon–this “Immer-sion” class of tastings lets amateur sippers differentiate the typical qualities of each, while illustrating wine terms such as dry, crisp, oaky, and tannic. Practical advice abounds; one chapter devotes itself to finding useful info on a wine label while avoiding “Stupid Label Tricks,” those bits of puffery or unfamiliar flavors (how many have actually tasted lychee or red currant?) that can be confusing the average buyer. And her “Flavor Map” concept–dividing the wine world into three climate zones–eschews memorization in favor of some rudimentary geography.

Throughout, her pronunciation guides are accurate and personable (“If you’re pronouncing ‘Riesling’ right you have to smile.”); and she provides a great postgraduate curriculum of buying strategies, including the pros and cons of wine shops versus your nearest Costco; and a consumer advisory about restaurant’s “award-winning wine lists.” –Tony Mason

Customer Review: A near perfect introduction to wine for beginning and experienced wine drinkers
Andrea Immer Robinson’s Great Wine Made Simple (2005) succeeds brilliantly in making sense of the complex worlds of wine. I have read several introductions to wine, including Michael Broadbent’s Michael Broadbent’s Wine Tasting (Mitchell Beazley Wine Guides), Jancis Robinson’s How to Taste: A Guide to Enjoying Wine, Mark Oldman’s Oldman’s Guide to Outsmarting Wine: 108 Ingenious Shortcuts to Navigate the World of Wine with Confidence and Style, and Kevin Zraly’s Windows on the World Complete Wine Course: 2008 Edition (Windows on the World Complete Wine Course) and I recommend them all, but I learned the most from Andrea Robinson’s book. Her original and easy-to-follow approach will greatly enhance the appreciation of wine for new and experienced wine drinkers alike.

There are dozens of wine grapes, but Robinson reduces this complexity by emphasizing the “Big Six.” These are three white grapes (riesling, sauvignon blanc, chardonnay) and three red grapes (pinot noir, merlot/cabernet sauvignon, syrah or shiraz) that provide most of the world’s quality wines. Each group of three is listed in ascending order of body style, i.e., light, medium, or full. She clarifies these styles by comparing their weight, richness, and thickness in the mouth to skim milk, whole milk, and cream. Robinson then lays out tasting sequences with easily available wines that show the distinctive quality and body of each grape. You quickly get an idea of the world’s primary wine styles.

In the succeeding chapters on taste, Robinson recommends that you taste wines side by side in carefully chosen pairs that will highlight key tastes. This method is far superior to tasting one wine at a sitting. Wines can generate a seemingly infinite number of tastes and here Robinson simplifies things by concentrating on pairs of wine that exemplify the major style terms of dry, crisp, oaky, tannic, buttery, grassy, spicy, floral, and Old World vs. New World.

In another great innovation, Robinson introduces flavor maps of the wine world combining where grapes are grown with climates. The maps are a bit hard to read at first, but well worth the effort, because they help you predict what a wine will taste like once you know where it’s from. For example, white grapes grown in cool climates may produce light bodied wines with apple or pear flavors while white grapes grown in warm climates may produce full bodied wines with pineapple or mango flavors. I found the flavor maps to be the most valuable part of the book, because they help you organize the world’s wines into a system that explains why they taste the way they do.

The remainder of the book is more conventional in its approach, with surveys of French, Italian, American regions and so on followed by such topics as shopping for wine, wine and food, and wine gear. In these sections, Robinson continues to communicate key information about wine without oversimplifying.

I think Great Wine Made Simple does make a few missteps. A major omission is that only the briefest mention is made of serving temperatures. She does note that whites tend to be served too cold and reds too warm. Robinson’s 2008 Wine Buying Guide for Everyone, which I also highly recommend, does a satisfactory job explaining how to serve various types of wine; but I like Andrew Oldman’s general rule that white wines should be chilled for several hours and then removed 15 minutes before serving while reds should be refrigerated for 15 minutes before serving. Robinson could have said more about how to analyze the finish of a wine. Here I like the approach of her mentor, Kevin Zraly at Windows of the World in New York City, who describes what you should expect at fifteen second intervals in the minute or so after you have swallowed the wine.

Robinson occasionally criticizes other wine writers for being too technical. In part she does this because she feels that beginners will lose interest when confronted with overly technical prose, but this assumes that readers don’t know how to select a basic introduction to wine as opposed to a more advanced book. Robinson’s ideas easily stand on their own and are not strengthened by disparagement of those who write at a more detailed level or use specialized wine terminology.

To end, my criticisms are minor compared to Robinson’s substantial achievement. She has assembled an impressive apparatus for appreciating wine. My wine knowledge increased by several orders of magnitude after having read her book, and I know I will be returning to it for years to come.

Customer Review: Simply the Best
This is simply the best introduction to wine and winetasting that I have found. Many wine books get bogged down in minutiae, without telling you why it is significant. For example, they will spend three pages telling you about the soil and climate in a small region of say, France, without telling you how it affects the flavor and quality of the wine (i.e., why you should care). Somewhere in there will be a vague one sentence statement about how the wines taste “fruity” or “fresh.” Andrea Immer’s book actually concentrates on how to taste wine, using all your senses, and what specifically to look for in the color, nose, and flavor. She gives you a list of wines to taste, and through a series of tasting exercises you learn to recognize different flavors and aromas in wine. Her flavor map is an ingenious way to explain what flavors to expect from wines of the same grape grown in different climate zones, and it works! One heads up though, be prepared to drop some change on these tastings. Many of the tastings in the earlier chapters are affordable, but in the later chapters (read France and Italy), we found some of the wines to be cost prohibitive. While the earlier tastings are absolutely essential to getting the most out of the book, we chose to dispense with some of the later ones (Maybe some day I’ll buy that $80.00 Barolo). My suggestion: Buy the book, do the tastings in the first five chapters, and learn a heck of a lot about wine.

Jancis Robinson’s Guide to Wine Grapes

Wineguy — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 08:00:28 +0000

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Jancis Robinson’s Guide to Wine Grapes
Hailed by the Wine Advocate as “perhaps the most gifted of all wine writers writing today,” Jancis Robinson has been voted the Wine Writer’s Wine Writer by her peers, dubbed “the undisputed mistress of the kingdom of wines” by France’s Madame Figaro, and won the 1995 Wine Literary Award of the Wine Appreciation Guild. Holding the prestigious rank of Master of Wine, Robinson lectures and judges all over the world, and recently hosted a ten-part PBS series Jancis Robinson’s Wine Course. She also edited The Oxford Companion to Wine, which won every major wine book award in 1995–including the Julia Child Cookbook Award (Wine, Beer, or Spirits) and The James Beard Book Award–and which has been praised by Frank Prial in The New York Times as “easily the most complete compendium of wine knowledge assembled in modern times,” and by Anthony Dias Blue as “one of the definitive reference books on the subject.”
Now, in Jancis Robinson’s Guide to Wine Grapes, Robinson provides wine aficionados with a handy, on-the-spot guide to the most central aspect of wine making–the grapes themselves. Here are over 850 grapes, ranging from such widely acclaimed vines as Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Muscat, Pinot Noir, Riesling, and Sauvignon Blanc, to economically important if less distinguished vines such as Airen, Grenache, Muller-Thurgau, Trebbiano, Syrah, and Rkatsiteli. Robinson offers a fact-filled introduction–discussing everything from rootstocks and wine blends, to vine pests and disease–and glossary of technical terms (from botrytis and carbonic maceration, to fanleaf and foxy, to skin, sugars, tannins, and yield). She then examines the world’s grape varieties in alphabetical order, describing the basic characteristics of the wine produced by the grape (dry, sweet, high or low acidity, the bouquet), its likely quality, the regions that produce the best wine, and, if a blended wine, the blends that yield the best results. (As an added guide to the wine a grape might produce, the Guide includes an easy-to-use visual aid: a horizontal bar with a band which shows the range of quality, from ordinary to superb.) Robinson also shares much fascinating wine history, her deep insight into the wine industry, and more important, her own judgment on a wine. And Robinson does not hedge in judging a wine: discussing Carignan, France’s most planted red wine, she comments “Its wine is high in everything–acidity, tannins, color, bitterness–but flavor and charm. This gives it the double inconvenience of being unsuitable for early consumption yet unworthy of maturation.” And for Trebbiano, the most planted white grape in Italy (and with Ugni Blanc, which is the name of the grape in France, the second most planted white grape in the world), Robinson notes “the word Trebbiano in a wine name almost invariably signals something light, white, crisp, and uninspiring.”
Perhaps most important, this portable book can be used in the store as a buying guide. With Robinson’s Guide, simply find the grape variety on the label–or, if not listed, turn to Robinson’s unique Grapes Behind the Names appendix in the back–look up the entry on that grape, and you will discover everything you need to know to make an informed decision to buy or pass. With Jancis Robinson by your side, you can evaluate a bottle of wine on the spot, no matter where, when, or by whom it has been produced.

Customer Review: If you don’t know wine grapes, you will!
Everything you ever wanted to know, and everything you needed to know about grapes!

Customer Review: Brilliant, of course!
What can you say about the most comprehensive encyclopaedia of wine grapes written by the world’s foremost expert on the subject, when that person also happens to be a clear and charming writer as well? If you want to know about grapes, find out from the woman who has offered her entire cellar to the person who can outstrip her knowledge on the subject. Wonderful!