Growing grapes and making wine in Bellevue
Posted in tasting on Jan 18th, 2010
That old rule, red with meat and white with fish, goes a surprisingly long way. But when you’ve got a situation it doesn’t cover or you’d just like a second opinion, try Natalie Maclean’s Wine and Food Matcher. Here’s what happened when I tried to find a wine match for eggs.
Posted in Recipes, tasting, troubleshooting on Dec 3rd, 2009
Mulled wine: just the thing on a cold night, a Christmas tradition, and just possibly a way to rescue my wine from store-bought grapes. Here’s how I plan to make it.
Posted in tasting on Nov 15th, 2009
Wine from supermarket grapes is bland, so use frozen concentrate like Welch’s instead. It’s easier, cheaper, and tastes better.
Posted in tasting on Sep 14th, 2009
Once upon a time, food and wine pairing was as simple as, “red wine with meat and white wine with fish.” Then I learned about full bodied whites that can stand up to meat and realized that it can get more complicated. Then [...]
Posted in tasting on Apr 5th, 2009
Can a good label make your wine taste better? Not in the sense that it alters the chemistry involved in your senses of taste and smell, but your enjoyment of wine is more than chemistry. A California Institute of Technology experiment showed that expectations and psychology have a big impact on how much people enjoy [...]
Six of us gathered for a great evening that began with a tasting. Not just any tasting, it concluded a three year experiment that tested the effect of boiling on making mead. Two meads went head to head that night. I made one with a ten minute boil, and the other was as identical as [...]
Posted in tasting on Oct 8th, 2008
Greg Mankiw teaches economics at Harvard University, and I read his blog regularly. He recently spotlighted part of a Boston Globe Article on the lighter side of science. He zeroed in on the work of another economist – ok, I know what you’re thinking, “as exciting as one economist talking about another sounds, what [...]
Posted in commercial wine, tasting on Sep 15th, 2008
For those of you who don’t know, Costco is a chain of warehouse stores, mainly in the US and Canada, that allows you to buy in bulk from a limited selection at terrific prices. It can be a good place to buy wine, but I hadn’t seen them sell it under there own label – [...]
Posted in storage and aging, tasting on May 21st, 2008
Back in March, I wrote about freezing wine: that it can preserve an open bottle and even improve it. It was something I had to see to believe, and I did. I froze a half-full bottle of red wine for over a month, thawed it out, shook it up (that’s one of the steps!), and [...]
Posted in commercial wine, tasting on Mar 19th, 2008
I’ve written about Olympic Cellars before. They’re the winery being threatened by the United State Olympic Committee for using the word “Olympic” in their name. They also make a cranberry wine. Well the Lady of the House and I have recently tried some of their wine, and the Dungeness Red (a 2004 Lemberger) really stands [...]