Welcome to Betty's Wine Musings, where you'll get fabulous wine tasting tips and wine tasting notes, discover personalized wines, and more! Whether you are a wine veteran or just getting started, there’s always something more to explore about the wonderful world of wine.
Tonight, I was delighted to try WineShop At Home’s new Family Ranch Heritage White Wine. This wine is new for two reasons:
Nine years ago (!), I wrote an article on screw caps vs. cork. In light of New Zealand’s incredible push for screw caps, I thought it might be time to revisit the topic and see what new information I could find. Boy, did I find a lot of new information.
There’s nothing better than hearing the sound of a cork popping out of a wine bottle. The anticipation. The romance. The special occasion.
But what if you’re on a picnic, and you forgot your corkscrew? Do you have to do what that one famous guy did, using your shoe against a tree to try to dislodge the cork? Hopefully not. Hopefully, you brought a bottle of wine with a screw cap.
Why is New Zealand so committed to screw caps? Aren’t they bad for the environment? Aren’t they associated with cheap wine? Can an age-worthy wine age as well with a screw cap?
According to WineAnorak, “With its Screwcap Initiative,…New Zealand is now leading the way in advocating the widespread use of screwcaps as an alternative to corks. It could well be that in 30 years time, people will… consider that New Zealand’s greatest contribution to the world of wine is not its remarkable Sauvignon Blancs,…but instead the way it led the wine world to shift from variable, taint-prone corks to embrace screwcaps.”
In reading through the WineAnorak article, it looks like New Zealand’s main reasons for adopting screw caps are:
One of the biggest concerns about screw caps is that they don’t work well for age-worthy wines. But according to Wine Folly, that’s no longer the case. “The longtime argument that corks are better because they breathe has been dispelled as ‘breath’ is now emulated in both screw caps and cork alternatives. Today you can buy screw caps with calculated levels of ‘oxygen ingress’ overtime.”
Another downside of screw caps is that they aren’t as environmentally friendly as corks. While it’s true that they don’t come from a natural resource, they’re almost always recyclable because they are made from metal.
The Final weakness that screw caps face is their reputation. People assume screw-capped wine is poor quality. But when you consider the number of amazing New Zealand and Australian wines that are screw capped, you need to think again.
Screw-capped wine is much easier to transport and doesn’t require a corkscrew, which is all-too-often easy to forget.
Jancis Robinson had a great writeup that I wanted to end my article with.
“I too love the ‘pop’ sound of a cork being pulled (and, especially, the popping of a champagne cork which, restaurateurs report, can have an instant effect on other diners), and I love the idea that cork is an ecologically sound material with a long tradition. But I feel even more passionately about how difficult some corks are to extract (especially from Italy’s narrow bottlenecks), how they can eventually crumble and fatally let in air, and how frequently they are affected by ‘cork taint’ and result in completely spoilt ‘corked’ wines…Screwcaps provide the perfect seal, with different types of liner allowing differing levels of oxygen transfer…It seems as though screwcaps…are much more effective than other stoppers at retaining the natural fruitiness of wine, so seem particularly suitable for aromatic wines such as Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling.”
I’d love to hear your thoughts about screw caps vs. cork. Cheers!
Last week, my company went out for pizza. Being the resident wine expert, I was tasked with ordering the wine, which I happily did. I ordered one Chianti and one Zinfandel, because I know these wines to be very pizza friendly. But when pairing wine with pizza, did I do my best? I did a little research and thought I would share with you what I learned.
[Read more…]Guess what July 25 is! National Wine and Cheese Day! Woo hoo! Yet another Hallmark holiday to celebrate! If you’re like me, you get a kick out of these holidays, but they drive you a little crazy. Who came up with them? Who benefits from them? What are we supposed to do to properly observe them? Yada yada yada. With that said, National Wine and Cheese Day is one of the few that is simply too good to pass up. So let’s celebrate!
Thank goodness for Google, where you can learn just about anything. I learned that this day was created in 2014 by Jace Shoemaker-Galloway who, according to Linkedin, is a “go-getter gal looking forward to new journey.” In 2014 and 2015, she was a newspaper columnist for The Voice, where, “she also wrote a newspaper column dedicated to traditional, not-so-traditional and downright wacky holidays.” Pretty cool.
While people have paired wine and cheese for hundreds of years, initial pairings were all about location. Going back for centuries, certain cheeses and wines came from the same village and even from the same farms. According to checkiday.com, “In France, in the Brie region, Brie cheeses have long been paired with local wines like Beaujolais. In Italy, Asiago cheese has long been paired with wines that came from the same region, such as Italian Chianti and Brunello.”
According to daysoftheyear.com, combining an astringent food, like wine, with a fatty food like cheese, creates truly delectable pairings. They say that “astringent foods have a tendency to bind with the elements in saliva that lubricate and cause them to clump and lose their ability to lubricate… The more you consume astringent foods the drier they make your mouth!… This is where the cheese comes in with its fatty texture and often pungent flavors. Each bite tends to coat our mouths just a little more making it lubricated with fat… We love the flavors, but the constant build up of flavor can often be overwhelming, and that’s when wine comes to the rescue!”
One of my favorite wine experts is Karen MacNeil, author of The Wine Bible. She has three simple suggestions for wine and cheese pairing:
Checkday.com offers a few more helpful tips:
This is your change to combine wine and cheese in ways you’ve never imagined. Be adventurous. Have fun. Find a favorite wine (or two or three) and sample it with some of your favorite cheeses. Do some regional tastings as describe above. Follow the tips I outlined above. But throw in some misfits to see what you think.
Very importantly, observe the social media worthiness of the day by posting pictures on your favorite social media channels and using the hashtag #NationalWineAndCheeseDay.
As an independent wine consultant with WineShop At Home, I absolutely enjoy bringing a taste of the Napa wine country home to you one sip at a time. Whether you simply love to drink wine, seek a special personalized wine gift, or are in search of a new wine jobs opportunity as a wine consultant, feel free to contact me for a truly unique wine tasting experience!
Nancy Sinatra sang about summer wine very beautifully: “Strawberries cherries and an angel’s kiss in spring. My summer wine is really made from all these things.”
With summer being all about relaxing, having fun and staying cool, how can your summer wine help you in these areas? In this article, I’ll highlight some tips for getting the most out of your summer wine.
