Champagne and sparkling wines like Cava or Prosecco are great wines to celebrate with. The good folks over at Snooth have assembled a comprehensive guide to sparkling wines. I highly recommend it.
More importantly, though, I recommend that you erase any idea from your mind that sparkling wines are only for special occasions. Any wine that you enjoy is a good enough wine to drink any time you want. This includes sparkling wines, and even Champagne. You do not need to wait for a special occasion to enjoy a bottle of sparkling wine. Indeed, opening a sparkler can turn an ordinary Tuesday night into a special night–for no other reason than it’s Tuesday.
Winemakers have been aging wine in oak barrels as long as anyone can remember. California Chardonnays are often described as “oaky.” So what is it with oak and wine, and how does oak affect a wine’s characteristics?
There are countless facts that answer these questions. Our friends over at Snooth, however, have condensed these facts down into an article for their Wine 101 series: There’s Oak and then there’s Oak. What I particularly like about this article is that it gives you excellent examples of how oak has created a signature style for a winery such as Silver Oak.
Jamie over at Wine Anorak’s educational blog has an important post. It is so easy to get caught up in the wine learning, tracking our progress, checking off topics. We forget that when it comes to wine, the journey is the reward.
Kevin Zraly is the creator and top guru of the esteemed Windows on the World Wine School. Today he shared with me that he has a collection of articles he’s written.
Kevin is the closest thing to a rock star that the wine education world has, and he’s been kind enough to let me use some of his materials in the past when I’ve taught classes. He’s a gentleman and a scholar, and I can’t recommend his articles highly enough.
Go get them!
This evening I learned that this blog has been chosen to be featured in AllTop.com’s wine page. Being included alongside luminaries like Vinography.com, Wine Spectator, and eRobertParker.com is a real honor. There are tons of other great wine bloggers in that list, and I urge you to go check them out.
What’s AllTop.com, you ask? As the site describes itself, it’s almost like a digital magazine rack. Each page (and there are dozens of them on a lot of different subjects) pulls the headlines from the sites that the editors feel are among the best on the web. Each headline links back to the original article. So, you can do all of your wine, autos, politics, or whatever reading from one web page.
To all of you who submitted this site to AllTop, who subscribed, follow me on Twitter, and have left comments to show this site has loyal readers, I thank you. Now I’m fired up to go write some more kick-ass articles. 