The most famous grape you’ve never heard of, Pinot Meunier is a valued component in Champagne, indeed having the second-most acres planted there, after Pinot Noir, yet it is seldom seen on a wine label. Thought to be an early, distant mutation of Pinot Noir, it is the tenth most planted black grape in France and is especially useful growing on north-facing vineyards along the Marne Valley where it is a safer bet against spring frosts. Meunier brings a rustic, …
Pinot Noir grapes are grown around the world, mostly in the cooler regions, but the grape is originally associated with the Burgundy region of France. Other premium cooler regions where it has found success include Carneros, Central Otago, Ontario and north eastern Italy. Pinot Noir is thin skinned, giving it lighter colour and lower tannins, and fairly high acid. It is widely considered to produce some of the finest wines in the world, but is a difficult variety to cultivate, …
Portugal has long been known for its fortified wines (Port and Madeira) but thanks to advances in winemaking technology and techniques it has recently become known for its rich, ripe dry table wines, especially from the Douro Valley. The country’s many indigenous grape varieties have been a source of confusion for some, but provide a new frontier for adventurous wine consumers. The Tourigas (National, Franca) and Tintas (Cao, Barroca and Roriz) form the basis of both Port and dry table …
Primitivo is a dark-skinned grape known for producing inky, tannic wines, primarily in Puglia where the hot dry summers allow the grape to accumulate significant sugar levels prior to harvest. A classic Primitivo wine is high in both alcohol and tannins, intensely flavored and deeply colored. It can occasionally reach alcohol levels of 18%, but is quite often around 14 – 15%. In some cases, Primitivo can mistaken for an Amarone, because of the raisined fruit and leather aromas, not …
Due west of Barcelona but about 25 km from the sea, Priorat had 12,500 acres planted to vine before the arrival of phylloxera in the late 1800s. When René Barbier rediscovered the region in 1979, there were only 1,500 acres still in existence, many planted in the 1950s. Since then, plantings have soared to 5,000 acres as of 2018. Barbier convinced Alvaro Palacios and a few other young winemakers to join together and produce 5 ‘Clos’ wineries which, when first …
Puglia is the “”heel”” of Italy and the country’s third largest producing wine region. This region is hot and flat, but that is mitigated by constant sea breezes – especially from both sides of the southerly Salento peninsula – and long-established bush vines offer some resistance to drought. Primitivo is the most widely planted and well-known grape variety, but Negroamaro and Malvasia Nera are also widely planted. As important as it is as a wine producer, Puglia is perhaps more …
Red, or more properly black, grapes, are so named because of the pigment in their skin. The flesh of the grapes produces white juice, and the juice only becomes red when left to macerate on the skins, allowing the pigmentation to leach out. A very few red grapes, known as teinturiers, have red-coloured flesh. And these can yield dark red-coloured juice, but these are rare and usually not vitis vinifera. In addition to colour, the skins of red grapes are …
The Rheingau’s fame as a German wine region is based on its superb slate soil hillsides along a stretch of the Rhein where it turns west for thirty kilometers before continuing north to the sea. This forms a perfect, almost continuous south-facing slope on the northern bank making an ideal suntrap to ripen Riesling and even a little Pinot at one of the country’s oldest and most famous climats for Pinot Noir, the venerable Assmanshausen vineyard.
Rías Baixas, Spain’s westernmost wine region in Galicia, looks further west over the Atlantic and not back at Madrid, the Spanish capitol. Despite being actually closer to Madrid than Barcelona, its isolation has been the main reason why its wines have only recently begun to be savoured and celebrated outside its borders. In this far flung corner of the country, the inhabitants speak Galician, one of the five official languages of Spain, and both the climate and the local diet …
Due north of Madrid, the wine region of Ribera del Duero straddles that river which springs from the hills just south of Rioja and rolls westward all the way to the Atlantic, becoming the Douro River as it crosses into Portugal. In 1989, it was still a sleepy and very dusty backwater famous for two wines, Vega Sicilia and A. Fernandez’s Pesquera, and much of the surrounding countryside was empty. Seven years later, the long-held Spanish laws banning irrigation and …
