Personal Wine Blog

Taste in wine, as in all matters aesthetic, is inherently subjective: you might love a wine that your friends do not find enjoyable, and vice-versa. Even among professional wine critics, ratings for the same wine can be highly variable, so how do you choose a luxury wine gift that’s guaranteed to impress?

How It’s Made

When a winemaker decides to produce a sweet wine, he or she faces a dilemma: sugar is required to make the wine taste sweet, but the sugars in grape juice are converted into alcohol during fermentation.

How It’s Made

There are three basic methods to know about rosé wine production: limited skin maceration, saignée or “bleeding,” and blending.  As we mentioned in our guide on Red Wine Basics, red wine gets all of its color from the time it spends in contact with the skins of the grapes during fermentation.  As such, a winemaker may purposefully craft rosé wine by reducing the maceration to a period of hours or days depending on the desired color, which ranges from pale pink to cherry red.  This is widely regarded as the best technique for rosé production.  The method known as saignée is a variant on this procedure and involves “bleeding” juice from a maceration, creating a rosé wine as a byproduct of red wine fermentation.  Finally, rosé can be made by blending a small amount of red wine into a white wine to give it color, but this practice is prohibited in most wine regions. The notable exception to this is Rosé Champagne - the world’s most expensive type of rosé wine - which is almost always assembled from a blend of red and white base wines. 

How It’s Made 

We love a cool, crisp white wine, especially in the heat of summer. But do you know about white wine's life and it' journey from being a cute lil' grape to getting in your glass?

Here are the white wine basics you ought to know.

As Alanis says: "You... Youuu... You... Outta knooooowww.

How It’s Made

When grapes destined to become red wine are harvested, they are brought to the winery to be sorted and crushed.

The ability to accurately describe the flavors of a wine and distinguish between different grape varietals is not an innate gift granted to so-called “supertasters” at birth; instead, it is a learned ability that must be cultivated through study and practice.

There are four steps you can take to become a more effective taster and prove your taste pallet:

1. 1. Look—observe color, clarity, and viscosity.
2. 2. Smell—detect fruit, non-fruit, or oak.
3. 3. Taste—experience sweetness, body, acid, tannin, and alcohol.
4. 4. Finish—exhale out of your nostrils after swallowing.

In today’s marketplace, wine bottles come in a wide variety of sizes for differing occasions, but it’s not always apparent how and why these vessels got their names. This guide breaks down the different wine bottle sizes and their names to demystify the terminology and make you a more savvy wine patron.