Contact Wayne for an answer sheet if you get stumped finding one of the words.
Wine 101: How to Save Leftover Wine
Have some leftover wine from your last dinner party? It would be a shame to let it go to waste—and you don’t have to! Learn the best ways to store leftover wine and the most important preservation factors to keep in mind in this quick tutorial.
OK, so for most of us in NZ, all we do is return the screw cap to the wine bottle. But if you want to reduce the rate of oxidation, then I would recommend you click on this link and watch the video from Wine Spectator. I especially liked the Pro tip at the very end of the item.
Why amateur wine scores are every bit as good as professionals’
By Mark Schatzker and Richard Bazinet | Updated May 25, 2018
Article summary
Few consumer products offer as staggering a range of choice as wine. You can buy a bottle of Dark Horse Big Red Blend for $8. Or for around $500, you can get a 2012 bottle of Sloan Proprietary Red. Yet for each bottle, the same question applies: Is it any good?
The rise of the wine-rating crowd
In 2004, Eric LeVine — then a group program manager at Microsoft — launched CellarTracker, a site where amateur wine enthusiasts can rate wines. Today, CellarTracker is the web’s most popular “community” or “crowdsourced” wine review website, containing 6.3 million reviews from 113,000-plus users for more than 2.2 million different wines.
Amateur and professional wine scores correlate very tightly
How similar? We ran a statistical tool called a Spearman correlation and got a figure of 0.576. A perfect correlation is 1. An utter non-correlation is 0. A score of 0.576 may not sound impressive at first, but it can actually get worse than 0 — a negative correlation, which is what you would see if you compared, say, shortness with the likelihood of playing professional basketball.
Amateurs appear more expert than the experts
It looks very much like the enthusiasts actually do a better job of agreeing with the experts than the experts do with each other. That might sound odd, but out of thousands of wines we analyzed, only a handful contradicted this pattern. Simply put, if you want to know what the experts think, the best place to look appears to be, of all places, CellarTracker.
The better the wine, the more experts agree with the amateurs
How do wine enthusiasts compare with experts like Robert Parker and Jancis Robinson? Very well.
There is also a tendency for scores to converge as wines improve in quality. This is evident in the arrow shape of the clusters in figures comparing CellarTracker with Wine Advocate and CellarTracker with International Wine Cellar. Average scores, furthermore, are high. On Wine Advocate, the average score was 89, on International Wine Cellar it was 91, and it was 17 out of 20 for Jancis Robinson. On CellarTracker, it was 89. This tells us that experts and enthusiasts alike don’t seem to be spending a great deal of time scoring mediocre wines.
Read the full article
Hawke’s Bay Wine – Autumn/Winter edition
Hawke’s Bay Winegrowers presents your digital issue of Hawke’s Bay Wine – Autumn/Winter edition
- Studying Syrah berry size
- Turning vision into reality – a business strategy for Hawke’s Bay Wine
- Ngaruroro WCO – cautious optimism
In every issue we profile Hawke’s Bay Wine companies and personalities, wine from our region and associated sectors. We offer up a number of informed viewpoints, cover the news and present a range of wine-related feature stories.
Do you have news relating to Hawke’s Bay Wine Sector?
Email: hawkesbaywinemag@xtra.
Advertising enquiries can be directed to Kite Communications
The A – Z of wine
Glengarry’s Sunday ramblings of all things vinous, grain and glorious. Issue 9, The A – Z of wine.
Goodbye Winter. Can’t say we’re sorry to see the back of you, what with the wind and the rain and the flu; when all’s said and done, there’s only so much a warming glass of red wine will fix.
However, we turn our gaze and our palates to the more benign months with a glowing shimmer of anticipation. It’s reboot and refresh time, and what better way to kick things off than with a quick A-Z of things vinous for your general edification. From A for acidity to Z for Zinfandel, there’s bound to be a little bit of something in there to intrigue and interest many of you.
What else? We feature Zephyr wines, the appropriately-named vehicle for the impressive winemaking skills of Ben Glover. Bach Brewing, only three years old but already so weighted down with medals. An exciting new offering from Gisborne’s Matawhero winery, the Irwin Chardonnay. Belvedere vodka – Polish know-how 600 years in the making. The under-the-radar genius of Champagne Moutard.
Blue Wine Is Now a Thing You Can Drink
(From the they must be joking file – Ed)
Rosé wine? So passé. Red and white? Please, those are centuries old. But now, some good news for those seeking the next big thing in beverages: a Spanish winemaker is crafting an electric blue wine.
“Try to forget all you know about wine,” the website for the brand, Gik, reads. “Ignore all the preconceptions and standards regarding [the] wine industry and turn a deaf ear to what the sommelier told you in the wine tasting last week.”
The vino is created from an undisclosed combination of red and white grapes that has “no aging procedure.”
If you want to get technical, Eater reports that the “juice is hued neon blue with anthocyanin (a pigment found in grape skin) and indigo (a dye extracted from the Isatis tinctoria plant), and a non-caloric sweetener is added as well.” A bottle sells for about $11, and is currently available in Spain, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Germany, with U.S. expansion in the works.
So why blue? Eater asked co-founder Aritz Lopez, who made a case for his new product, even though he’s never had any winemaking experience. Apparently, Lopez and team were inspired by the concept of “red oceans,” which represent “business markets saturated by specialists (sharks) who fight for the same variables and for a reduced number of clients (fish), and end up in water turned red.
And how it’s necessary to revert this, by innovating and creating new variables, back to blue. This seemed poetic for us to turn a traditionally red beverage into a blue one,” López states. Form, meet poetic function. The only remaining question: will this turn our teeth blue, too? Either way: salud!