Today is International Pinot Noir Day! To celebrate, we present some fun Pinot Noir facts for you today: Pinot Noir means ‘Black Pine Cone’ – ancient vine growers were pretty literal with the naming of this grape as the grape cluster looks like a pine cone, and the…
Happy Ohio Wine Month! Ohio has a rich history of wine production dating back to the 1820s in the Ohio River Valley. By the late 1800s, the Catawba grape was the most important grape in the state’s wine production, originally planted by Nicholas Longworth. Today, the Catawba grape…
Happy Oregon Wine Month! Break out the Chardonnay! Break out the Pinot Noir! Break out the Pinot Gris! But save those Rieslings! Oregon, especially the Willamette Valley, is a cooler climate growing region and has developed some of the most astounding of the aforementioned varieties in wines. Hell,…
Happy Michigan Wine Month! With 13,700 acres under vine, Michigan is currently the 4th largest grape-growing state in the US with the #6 spot for production, just a hair behind Oregon. Most of the acreage is devoted to Niagara and Concord grapes for table use, which make up…
Well, if they make wine in Tahiti, they can surely make wine in Hawai’i – and they do. Not just fruit wines, but grape wine too. Volcanic soils are dominant and ridges in the high altitudes of the volcanic mountains are used to plant grapes above 1500 feet. …
So now our theme emerges in the Off The Beaten Path series. Coat tailing. Picking up from our previous article on Tunisia and people we reached out to not knowing where it was on the map, our next wine producing country is much the same. Somewhat sandwiched, but…
Ok, no lie, we were holding off on writing about the Loire for as long as possible. What direction should we go? How should we present the information? What is the best way to simplify such diversity? This is not an easy region to generalize. There are some…
Well, time to break it up a little in this series! The Alsace AOC of France makes it easy to figure out what is in the bottle (for the most part…more on that later in the post). As we mentioned a few times earlier in this series, the…
Ok, it’s officially the theme for this series. You’ve heard of Burgundy, so we will skip over that part. But as with all facets of the Understanding AOC writings, what is in the bottle!? If it is a red wine, it is Pinot Noir. If it is a…
We feel like there might be a theme building here with the Understanding AOC series, but we will skip over the introductions to Champagne as the most widely recognized sparkling wine in the world. At one point in time the wine was in danger of losing its signature…