Entries tagged with 'wine'
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Amazon.com will add wine to their online superstore by the beginning of October. Due to interstate regulations the wine will initially only be available to residents of about 26 states, but they're working on increasing distribution....
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On Fridays, Deb Harkness of Good Wine Under $20 drops by with Serious Grape. This week, great wine books for your library or that of your grapehead friend or family member. If you are an avid cook, you can probably rattle off the titles of the five cookbooks that you absolutely, positively could not live without. They are the books with the crusty pages, the singed covers, and the broken spines that you turn to again and again when looking for culinary inspiration. So what are the five wine books that I can't live without? My list includes a reference book, a tasting guide, an annual report, a catalogue of grape varieties, and an indispensable guide to food and wine...
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In the U.S., the term road food has less-than-appetizing connotations: soggy drive-thru burgers, chicken nuggets made from meat with questionable origins, and corn syrup-infused coffee beverages. Not so in Italy, where the Autostrada Sedici (Highway Sixteen) runs between Naples and Canosa in Puglia and is studded with rustic trattorias and local wineries. While conducting research for a new San Francisco restaurant, Nate Appleman and Shelley Lindgren found themselves cruising back and forth along the A16, which gave them "a sense of direction in the unfamiliar surroundings." So it's no surprise that they chose it as both the name of their highly acclaimed restaurant and their cookbook, A16 Food + Wine. A16 Food + Wine begins with an exhaustive overview of...
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Mike Steinberger at Slate reports on quality French winemakers who have been rejected by the disorganized government-run AOC system: "More and more, the market is treating AOC status as simply a geographic indication—a wine's birth certificate. French officialdom should do likewise."...
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In response to Tyler "Dr. Vino" Colman's essay on boxed wine, Joseph J. Cattaneo says: Without a doubt, glass bottles are greener than wine boxes.Calculating a carbon footprint based solely on trucking capacity is myopic and fails to consider the carbon costs for extraction and manufacturing.Just envision the various elements that have to go into creating a wine box. It involves many more steps, materials and energy inputs than are required for making a glass bottle.As for recycling, most communities can handle glass, which is 100 percent recyclable. Good luck finding programs that handle wine boxes.The choice is clear: glass is greener. Setting aside the biases of the messenger (Cattaneo is from the Glass Packaging Institute), does this message ring...
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Osteria L’Intrepido doesn't exist, but still won Wine Spectator's Award of Excellence in the August 2008 issue. As part of his research for an academic paper, Robin Goldstein duped the magazine by submitting the required fee ($250), cover letter, wine list, and menu ("a fun amalgamation of somewhat bumbling nouvelle-Italian recipes"). [via Eater]...
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Boxed wine usually comes in the scoffable Franzia or Gallo forms, but the quality may improve and shed its tacky taboo. In lieu of heavy glass bottles, the lighter packaging (oftentimes nicknamed the "bladder pack") is more environmentally and economically friendly. According to Tyler "Dr. Vino" Colman in a New York Times op-ed piece yesterday: a standard wine bottle (holding 750 milliliters) that travels from a California vineyard to a New York store generates about 5.2 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions, while a three-liter box generates only half the emissions per 750 milliliters. Perks of boxed wine: the box is good for table wines that don’t need to age (which includes all but a handful of top global wines); saving leftovers...
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Every other week, Deb Harkness of Good Wine Under $20 joins us to talk some Serious Grape. Here's the latest. Photograph from cynicaloptimist on Flickr Before Sideways, did you buy lots of Pinot Noir? Or did it take the film and its famous line about Merlot to get you off the ubiquitous red wine of the 1990s in favor of something a bit lighter on its feet? Wine grapes have as many promising upswings and dismal downward trends as your stock portfolio. Whenever two or more wine enthusiasts are gathered in a room, sometime after the second glass of wine the conversation inevitably turns to crystal ball gazing and trying to figure out what the next big grape will be....
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Spanish scientists have developed a portable "electric tongue" that can identify wine characteristics. "The device could be used to detect frauds committed regarding the vintage year of the wine, or the grape varieties used," says inventor Cecilia Jimenez-Jorquera. [via Engadget]...
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The New York Times reports that some fine government-approved Italian wine will, for the first time, be sold in boxes instead of bottles. Italy’s Agriculture Ministry is now offering its D.O.C. designation, which verifies the product’s origin, for some boxed wines. Worry not—the more rarefied D.O.C.G. seal is still reserved for bottles. Boxed wine has been around for several decades and over the years has gotten better and earned more respect. According to a related article in the New York Times, opening up a nice box with dinner is a bit more embraced in Australia and in Europe than on our own shores. Still, wine from a cardboard spout hasn't been able to shake its cheap and crappy stigma. Might...
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