Enobytes Wine Blog

I’m reminded every day that the appreciation and enjoyment of wine is a very personal experience. What you like may not be the cat’s meow for someone else. This was evident at the ’10 Oregon Wine Industry Symposium (OWIS), “Technical Tasting: Seeking Closure & Hi-Tech Winemaking“.

Most of the attendees were winemakers, viticulturists and industry folks in the know when it comes to high-tech stuff like RO, ultra-filtration or VA (don’t worry, we’ll get to these wine geek terms in a later post) but what blew me away at this event were all the differences in opinions between the wines we tasted.

There were a few hundred industry folks locked in a room (well, not literally) for a couple of hours to taste and discuss closures and Hi-Tech Winemaking. Harry Peterson-Nedry from Chehalem Winery moderated the session with panelists Domingo Rodriguez (Winesecrets), Clark Smith (Vinovation) and David Paige (Adelsheim Vineyard).

We kicked off the technical tasting with a comparison between cork and screw cap closures, blind tasting two white wines – identical in every way except one was bottled using cork, and the other under screw cap.  So what’s the verdict? Read the rest of this entry »

They stole my idea. Well, no, not really, but sometimes I think someone planted a chip in my head years ago. A while back, I thought it would be cool to build a hideaway spiral cellar beneath my garage. It seems as though someone’s beat me to the punch with (drum roll, please) Spiral Cellar!

The cool part about this cellar is that it requires no power to maintain its constant temperature. The watertight, pre-cast cylindrical system is sunk into the ground and relies on the surrounding earth for its insulation.

Is money burning a hole in your pocket? Then install one or send me some green because my makeshift closet cellar is not making the cut. Can anyone spare a dime? I only need 30K.

We all complain and obsess about today’s wine styles – whether it’s excessive tannins, over-oaked chardonnays, excessive alcohol, too many vegetal aromas, bret, sulfites, and on and on and on… Well here is your opportunity to participate in a very special tasting to experience what some of our postmodern winemakers are up to these days and what they are doing to address some of these concerns.

If you are questioning what postmodern winemaking is, essentially, it’s a philosophy built on getting back to terroir driven wines and giving science a back seat when it comes to making great wines.

Last month, we kicked off a segment called, “Wine Selection of the Month”, where our forum members suggest a theme, a wine, a varietal and/or region to explore, and then everyone shares their tasting notes and experiences.

This month, we’ve selected to sample distinctive terroir driven expressive wines offered by a postmodern winemaker, Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re not into Viticultural research, I’ll forewarn you ahead of time that you’d probably enjoy getting your tooth extracted more than you would reading this post.

Photo credit: Harvard Gazette

If research bores you to death, then run, run for your life! If wine geekness is setting in and you enjoy learning about wines & vines and a bit of history, then read on and let the wine geek force be with you.

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I am writing this article as a follow up to support Marc’s infamous “Corks Versus Screw Caps” story. If you have not had the opportunity to read it yet, please do so. The article debuted on LocalWineEvents.com, and we received an overwhelming amount of responses, comments and questions pertaining to the post.

Many readers observed the need for educating wine stores and supermarkets about their corked wine return policies; some wondered why corkscrews were not accepting in the market; but the majority questioned the validity of bottle aging and screwcaps. Read the rest of this entry »