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Wine Country in the Off-Season
  uty called; I absolutely had to go to San Francisco to cover Macworld Expo. As a Mac Alpha Geek, there was just no choice in the matter. That this was the first week of January was just an amusing coincidence - hey, I like 3 feet of snow to slop around in.
Hearing all this, my wife Salli, a non-geek, said "Great, we can do a winery tour in Sonoma County before the show". And so we did.
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n her seminal work on grape varieties,
Vines, Grapes and Wines
(1986),
Jancis Robinson writes: "Syrah presents a conundrum. In France where it
represents less than 2 percent of all red-wine grape plantings, Syrah
is worshipped. In Australia where it represents 40 percent of all
red-wine grape plantings, it is largely ignored. There is a moral here
somewhere: perhaps it is that growers will always make a lot of
mediocre wine in preference to a small quantity of wonderful stuff, if
the option is open to them."
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undreds of corkscrew models have been
patented since the late 18th century, many of them
variations on a few standard themes. By the 1980s
it might have seemed there was hardly room
for another option when Texas inventor James
Hallen came out with his first
Screwpull. The
'Table Model' consisted of a hard plastic frame
that rests on the bottle top and a six-inch long
teflon-coated helix with plastic handle attached.
Inserted through a hole at the top of the frame, the
sharp-tipped, narrow helix penetrates the length
of the cork and then draws it out in one
continuous motion. For simplicity, ease of
handling, leverage, and control, this corkscrew
represented a significant step forward in the art
of cork extraction, and it soon replaced
once-popular barrel models in wine cellars
throughout Europe and proved a sensation in its
country of origin too.
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or as long as winemakers have put corks in
bottles, inventors have tried to fashion ways to get
them out. Cork-finished bottles date back more
than 300 years, corkscrew patents over 200.
Between 1795 and 1908, over 350 corkscrew
patents were issued in England alone. By the end
of the 19th century, American inventors had
been awarded 250 patents of their own. On the
Continent, French, German, Iberian, and
Italian creators produced a plethora of other models.
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With White Chocolates: Willamette Valley Vineyards Edelweiss
y old buddy Muscat comes to my aid in both wines here. It's present
beside Riesling and Gewurztraminer in WVV's West-Coast founded
Edelweiss, a semi-sweet white wine. Unlike Asti Spumante, Moscato
d'Asti has just a prickle of carbonation so tastes sweeter.
Muscat-based Asti is a terrific sparkling dessert wine
not-withstanding. I'm just reaching for something more esoteric.
These wines might not be sweet, strong,
and full enough for the other variations of chocolate, but I think
they'll work out here.
White chocolate is often combined with fruit and berries, and these wines' superior fruit acidities will complement.
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