Leading you inside the wine business to explore the parts of it that entertain, inspire and inform you
The Leigon Wine Blog
Featured Article:
What is Wine?
“What is wine? Seems easy doesn't it? Grapes and all that. But not so gentle reader, not so. I spent two years with the heads of the BATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Fire Arms) and the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) rewriting the definition of wine in the U.S.”
The Five Best Wine Books You Should Read Now
You can only come to know wine by the experience of tasting it, but you can learn about wine in some great and entertaining books full of photos, maps and information. They all make great gifts for the wine lovers living among you. To me there are three kinds of wine books: technical information, wine stories (often travel or history style books), and food and wine pairing books (recipes and such).
Money is Why Your Wine Tastes Like That
A vineyard planted from scratch takes three years to produce at all, and five years to produce grapes of commercial quality. Once it’s going, you only get cash flow from the vineyard once a year while, sadly, all the expenses go on every day.
Developing the Wine Mind
Most people learn about wine unconsciously, in random ways that they may or may not be aware of, or remember.
Top 10 Places to Buy Wine Online
Like wine, not all internet sites are created equal. And, like wine, each has its own personality, just like people.
Answers to the Most Asked Wine Questions
Think underground caves. Traditionally, you would take the bottle of white out of the cellar when you were ready to serve it. That would make the bottles arrive at the table at generally around 55 degrees.
New NFT Wine Tokens Announced
So now, imagine that instead of the Mona Lisa, it’s Chateau Lafite 1961. Instead of an original painting, it is a bottle of wine with its entire history of shipping, storage and ownership recorded in the software of the blockchain.
New 2021 Chateau Releases from Bordeaux
The En Primeur (“Premiere”) Season is in full swing now in France with the famous Bordeaux and Burgundy wineries selling the first “tranches,” or “lots” of the 2021 vintage. This is one of the oldest rituals in the wine business to still continue today.
Are Value Wines Better Value?
A good portion of under $10 “value,” “super-value” and “extreme value” wines are made from the green Thompson Seedless Grape grown in the Central Valley which in truth, makes a better grape jelly than it does a wine.
Fabulous Dessert Wines
The grapes that make the best of the best of white dessert wines are grown in France in the regions of Sauternes and Barsac. Chateau d’Yquem is special. No one else is even close.
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Napa Valley This Week
It only took a handful of days to destroy large chunks of vineyards during last year’s wildfires, only a handful of hours for some, but it will be four or five years, say 2027, before these vines produce anything like commercial yields again.
Can You Name the Aromas of Fermentation?
Vineyard managers spend their whole life learning about grapes, nursing grapes, talking to grapes. Winemaking is about making choices once they have the grapes.
Can You Name These
Barrel Aromas?
Wines get flavors from barrels in different ways. The wood itself imparts vanilla or pencil shavings, for instance.
What Wine Names Mean
Sometimes wine names can be the result of a country’s rigorous quality requirements—as in France or Spain—and sometimes it’s the name of a daughter or wife or the founder of the winery. Sometimes, it’s just a whim.
Could You Run a Winery? Pt 2
Without the dirt, there are no grapes. Without the grapes, there is no winery. Without the winery, there is no wine.
Could You Run a Winery?
The very best wines are the ones that actually get made. A winery is a kind of farm casino.
Judgement in Napa Pt. 2
Guessing where the wine is from is a game for Sommeliers or wine parties, but it completely unrelated to the quality of what’s in the glass before you. Judges shouldn’t care where the wine is from or who made it.
Do You Think Like a Pro? Pt 1
It was at the Judgment of Paris blind tasting that French wine experts and critics scored California wines as equal to or better than the best French wines for the first time in history.
11 Practical Wine Tasting Tips
The colder any wine is, the less you can taste it. Generally, white wines should be stored at the temperature of the chalk caves in France--about 50-55 degrees Fahrenheit.
This Week in the Vineyards
On Sunday, we drove up Highway 101 and turned East, away from the ocean, toward the layered vineyards that carpet both Sonoma and Napa Valleys. Black scar marks from last year’s fires still run across the ridges in places.
Champagne Under Siege Again
Bordeaux won’t taste like Bordeaux anymore once the grapes and the weather have changed.
Top Wine’s For Valentine’s Day
In Medieval times, Valentines Day was counted as the first day of spring. And, the first day to begin the year’s work in the vineyard.
The Perfect Chocolate & Wine Pairing
I have been to black tie wine and chocolate tastings but you can do them in your bath robe in the backyard if that’s what works.
The Perfect Wine & Cheese Tasting
When you are tasting wine with cheese you are not really focusing on the taste of the wines or the cheese either one.
Who Invented Wine?
Without wine (and beer) there would be no human civilization.
Secrets of Wine and Music
My brother, Bill, had gotten together with the conductor of the Napa Valley Orchestra and they had created a seminar on music’s effect on the taste of wine.
Insider Look at Wine Critics
Judging and giving number scores to wine originated in England in the 19th century. For the 8,000-10,000 years before that…
The Craving Spot
So, here I sit, observing the American consumer in their natural habitat, making hundreds of decisions simultaneously right before my very eyes. What’s an Assyrtiko (one of the best Greek red wines) and where exactly is Santorini? (an island off the coast of Greece in the Mediterranean.)
Tips for Cool Holiday Wine Gifts
The aromas of wine bypass your conscious mind and go straight to the amygdala (the ancient reptilian part of your brain) where they evoke memories.
Insider Secrets of Buying Wine for the Holidays
Once you know what’s going on, buying wine may not be as uplifting as having a glass on the veranda of a Tuscan winery at sunset, but it can still be exciting. It’s like figuring out a puzzle.
How to Choose the right Wine Glass
Wine glasses are, or at least can be, works of sometimes profound art and some considerable science.
Thanksgiving Winery Recipes
Don’t forget, you can look up your favorite winery on the internet and see if they have created special dishes to pair with their specific wines.
Amethyst Wine
Ancient Greeks sometimes incorporated amethysts into wine glasses or wore the gems while drinking in hopes of avoiding intoxication.
What Determines a Wine’s Price?
Most stores markup the wines higher than the real price then discount them back so it looks like a 20% or 30% or whatever discount. If a wine is discounted more than 20% there’s probably something wrong with it.
How to Taste Wine At Home
Despite popular imagination, just drinking a lot doesn’t make you able to tell the difference in anything. You have to taste with intention.
No Wine for the Holidays?
And, you know what’s sitting out there on the water for weeks waiting to get in?
Wine.
Lots and lots of wine that’s not going to get to the shelf.
Chardonnay has No Taste, Here’s Why
Winemakers and magicians are indistinguishable. You never really know how the trick is done.
Are More Expensive Wines Better?
Wouldn’t you know? 70% of the professionals picked the $12 bottle over the $150 bottle.
The Problem with Women in Wine
Wine has been dominated by men for most of its history & despite women being in many important positions in the industry today, the ethos is the same.
On Wine and Roses: Forgotten Smells
Selling wine on the streets of New York is no joke. It takes real courage, and substantial physical endurance, but it also takes smelling skills. Ninety percent of the people who tried failed because they couldn’t make that adjustment from their sense of smell to their buyer’s sense of smell.
Wine. It is what it isn’t.
Specifically in our case, the entire Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms plus the Food and Drug Administration ground to a halt contemplating the greatest existential question of all, “What is wine?”
Forbidden Fruit: American Grapes in France
People in the industry are trying all kinds of creative ways to adjust to the new climate. Not just here, but overseas, too. Some of those ways are not entirely legal.
Prohibition and Permission
Prohibition and Permission are the twin sisters of the wine business.
Birds Drunk in the Vineyard
If you are lucky enough to find yourself near a vineyard in Autumn sometime, walk out into the clouds of these small black birds and feel them scattering before you, flicking from trellis to trellis.
Tastes in Wine: Fermentation
Winemakers watch the whole process closely. Lab equipment is involved. Computers with bright colors too. Stuck fermentations can send a winery to bankruptcy.
Buying Wine at Costco
I know what I look for, but to test myself I’m off to the Costco in California with the idea of seeing the world’s largest seller of expensive wines.
Napa Harvest is Beginning
This year’s vintage is hanging in the balance, so I went up to Napa to see where the harvest stands and to try to guess where it might be going.
Smoke on the Water, Fire in the Sky
Nature is changing the wine country all over the world now. It looks like the problems are heat domes, and flooding, and bigger hurricanes, and massive late snowstorms and droughts. Those things are a problem but they are not the problem.
Wine is Not a Banana, Probably
Ariel non-alcoholic wine was made from grapes but, legally, it had no alcohol. If the Government decided that the amount of alcohol in Ariel was taxable then they would have to tax orange juice, chocolate and Diet Coke for the same reason and they just weren’t up for that.
Perfect Wines
We, who work in the business, may get fired if the Wine Advocate or the Wine Spectator doesn’t like what we’ve done. But, that is why you need the moments on the mountaintops, above the fog, listening for an owl’s wing.
Secret Life of Wine in the Summer
It is this week and the next two weeks or so that the grapes begin to develop the fruit flavors that will define the wines character and quality.
More Wine Secrets
Achat is a boutique winery that only produces 3000 bottles/year of white wine. Each bottle is numbered and it’s more or less impossible to get unless you’re in Israel.
Wine and Food Pairing
Wine and food have the same elements to pair with each other. Flavors, smells, colors, textures and in some circumstances, sound (music primarily). It’s because you are using the same brain. Your brain doesn’t change.
Hat Trick
The container completely altered their perception of the wine. In theory that should not be possible. Wine should taste like whatever it tastes like, even if you drink it out of a hat.
How Pizza Saved Wine
But, in the end, the explosion of modern pizza and wine was due to people like the great King Ferdinand I of Naples in Italy (1751-1825). Naples, Italy, as I’m sure you remember from high school history class, was originally settled by the Greeks.
California Cult Wines
Without my even knowing at the time, he drove us right into some of the greatest vineyards in the world.
Spring Wine Releases
Ah, spring. Speculators dream of big hits and wineries dream of being able to cover the electric bill.
Wine Prices
Only in the wine business do people say, “Gimme that $10 Rosé and stop insulting me with all that talk about $5 Rosés.”
American Terroir
The intense yellow carpets of mustard between the rows in February and March are mostly gone now. Temperatures in Napa are going to get up to 90 degrees over the next few days forcing the flowers out of the new vine growth by the end of May.
Mouthfeel
Wine is both a science and an art. Different kinds of personalities think about the body of a wine mostly in terms of one or the other. Winemakers have to be able to do both.
The Most Expensive Wine in the World
Of course, it sold to consumers for the same price as real Pouilly Fuisse. Profits ensued. Americans never noticed. At least not until it became a scandal on TV and the French government clamped down.
Wine Ratings
An owner of a winery doesn’t stay owner by giving wines numbers. The question is which tastes will you (the consumer) buy and which ones will send you to the pressed meats section?
Tasting Wine From Space
Some day there will be vineyards in space, on space stations or maybe even some long trip ships. This launch of Chateau Petrus was the first tiny step in that direction although that’s not why they did it.
Secrets of Taste
People have different thresholds for being able to recognize sweetness—which is to say some of us are more sensitive to sugar (or anything else) than others. Sugar levels in even the driest wine like Chardonnay or Cabernet are sometimes brought up to just below general threshold levels so your brain knows it’s there but you don’t.
Wine Colors:
What to Look for in the Glass
With practice you will develop a library of wine color in your mind just as you develop a library of aromas. Then, you can associate different color variations with the grapes, winemaking techniques or aging that causes them.
Fire and Ice in the Vineyard
The terroir is changing—weather, soil, people—and of course the grapes.
But, it’s not changing the same way or at the same pace everywhere, even in Napa Valley. Some places may become too hot, others too cold.
Wine Words:
What to Say About Wine
Not every single aroma in the wine comes from grapes or handling. The French have known this all along. They call it “terroir” which is usually translated into English as “land.” Putting words to wine is critical and anybody can do it if they want to.
Uncommon Scents: The Essence of Wine Tasting
A winery wakes up parts of you that you don’t usually pay attention to. It evokes your senses in ways you don’t normally use them, and it brings back forgotten memories. Aromas are a major stimulus for memories—think Grandma’s cookies coming out of the oven or walking into the dentist’s office.
King Tut’s Wine Cellar
The mysteries of wine: why do you buy some labels and not others? The earliest known wine labels are from King Tutankhamen’s personal really dark tomb in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt.
How to Taste Like a Winemaker (Part 2) Tasting With Your Mind
If you watch closely, you’ll see that no one can actually lie about whether they like a particular wine or coffee either one because the muscles in your face react long before the rest of your brain even knows it's there.
How to Taste Like a Winemaker (Part 1)
There are five elements to tasting wine, one for each of your five senses. Learn how to describe wine in terms of smell…and sound like a professional!
There’s a Case of Wine Heading Back to Earth From Space
CNN reports that 12 bottles of wine and 320 vines were taken up to the Space Station in November of 2019 and in March 2020.
You Can Smell One Trillion Smells…Really!
Explore how smells and words play into the world of describing wine.
Best Wine in the World?
What do Miami, Florida and Napolean III have to do with the best wine in the world?
Wine Labels
Clearly, you can sell more wine with a chicken than you can with a grape. Learn how.
Elephants & Wine
Have you ever wondered about how animals react to wine?
Great Father’s Day Wines
Looking for a special gift for Dad?
Top Winemakers Series: Juan Jose Verdina
In this edition, we feature Juan Jose Verdina.
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