How Old Can You Go?
As we became more and more obsessed with wine, we began discovering older wines – wines from the years we were born (for the record, we are not that old…), and wines from famous old vintages (for example 1961). Wine is magical – is there any other substance you would willingly consume that was made in the 1960s?
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Why We Are Wine Critic Atheists
We’ve written several blogs already on our skepticism of wine critics – from wrong predictions on how certain wines would hold up over the ensuing decades to the unreliability of the 100 point wine scores. But, I think it’s time we face up to the disturbing truth, wine critic scores have no correlation with reality.
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Is There Apple Juice in My Wine?
We are extremely excited to announce that our first wine book is now available to purchase! The Amazon page for this book (where it’s available in both paperback and Kindle), is finally here. Very very soon, it will also be available on Audiobook (stay tuned!).
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Del Dotto, and the Beginners Guide to French vs. American Oak
People either love or hate Del Dotto in Napa Valley (I think one could fairly say that I fit into both categories – I both love and hate it). On one hand, their tasting room has over the top Roman-style art and architecture that screams “I don’t know how to spend my money”. Their barrel tasting tour is in a cave system that seems built more to showcase the cave than provide storage. And their tour guides / poures can be a bit pretentious (as well as not always the best educated) and spout such phrases as “during sorting, other wineries pull out their worst grapes – while we sort the other way, we only pulling the best grapes to go in our wine.” – insert eye-roll. On the other hand, any tasting that almost exclusively comes from barrels is automatically great in my book. Del Dotto focuses on cabernets and has many different ones on their list, which my husband loves. And, they are extremely generous with the number of wines to sample (more on that lower down). But the best thing about Del Dotto is the education your palette receives on oak. They let you try the same exact wine aged both in French and American Oak (just hope you remember what you learned after their generous number of wines to sample).
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Neil deGrasse Tyson-ing Wine Terminology – Translating Snooty Terms Into Actual English
We are a huge fan of the astrophysicist (and host of the Cosmos television show) Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. My husband and I even saw him speak at the Colorado School of Mines in our home town of Golden, Colorado. Perhaps the most memorable part of a very memorable lecture was when he explained that physicists / cosmologists are the only profession who don’t use bizarre and overly complex jargon to make them sound smarter than they actually are. As he explained, what do physicists call black spots they observe on the sun? “Sun Spots.” What do physicists call the big red spot one sees when looking through a telescope at Jupiter? “The Big Red Spot.” What do physicists call the most important concept in physics, the start of our universe where the entire Universe exploded from an area smaller than the head of a pin? “The Big Bang.” Compare these terms to the most important term in all of microbiology, the building block of life. What do they call it? “Deoxyribonucleic acid.” See – physics terms make sense, other science terms do not.
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