The room-temperature rule was written for stone-walled rooms and fireplace warmth. Modern kitchens have made it a quiet disservice to every bottle of Gamay sitting on the counter.
Author: TERROIR Editorial
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The classic wine pairing rules were built for French and Italian tables. Tonight’s dinner is Thai, Korean, Mexican, Indian, or Japanese — and the old axioms have nothing useful to say about any of it.
Etna’s wines have earned comparisons to Burgundy — not for their flavor, which belongs entirely to the volcano, but for the precision of a classification system that maps each lava flow to a distinct wine. An introduction to the contrada revolution.
A 15% tariff compounds at every tier of distribution. TERROIR examines how wine tariffs are reshaping prices, consumer habits, and the wines themselves.
Before the sun has cleared the trellis line, a viticulturist in Fresno walks the headland to the irrigation controller mounted on a steel post at the corner of the block. The screen shows a tile of soil-moisture readings from sensors buried at thirty and sixty centimetres beneath the vine row, and the day’s evapotranspiration estimate from the nearest CIMIS station. The drip schedule for the block is set to replace, this week, half of what the canopy will lose. The line is in the ground, the water is metered, the timer is armed. The decision the controller encodes is not…
The first time a wine chemist isolated the molecule responsible for the green-pepper aroma in Cabernet Franc, the gas chromatograph was reading concentrations measured in nanograms per litre. Methoxypyrazines do not need much company to make themselves known. At the threshold the human nose first detects them, they are present in the wine at the order of billionths of a gram per litre, which is to say a few parts per trillion: a sensitivity lower than nearly any other aroma compound the lab tracks. The bell-pepper note in a glass of Chinon or a barrel sample from Saint-Émilion is not…
Walk into any working vineyard in Val do Salnés in late spring and the first thing you notice is that the vines are over your head. Not by accident. The canopy sits on a frame of granite posts driven into the soil at roughly two-metre intervals, lashed with wire, holding the foliage and the eventual fruit a metre and a half clear of the ground. The Galicians call the structure a parral, a pergola scaled up to the size of a vineyard row and built to lift the vine clean of the damp earth that the rain on this coast…
On the wine lists that have started paying attention, the half-bottle section is no longer a polite afterthought tucked between the dessert wines and the digestifs. It is its own page, or its own column, or in the more deliberate programmes its own short folded insert: a tight selection of 375ml bottles arranged with the same care as the full list, often by the same hand. Read it carefully and a pattern emerges. The producers repeat. The appellations repeat. What sits on the half-bottle page is, in most cases, a compressed version of what sits on the full one: the…
Open the membership page of the International Wineries for Climate Action and the document is laid out the way a tax code is laid out. Three tiers, labelled in plain language. Applicant at the entry rung, then Silver, then Gold. Each rung carries a numerical threshold on a separate column, and each threshold is bound to a specific category of greenhouse-gas emission. Scope 1 here. Scope 2 there. Scope 3 noted with a footnote on coverage. The architecture is the article. It tells a member exactly what has been counted, what has not, and what level of reduction the seal…
In November 2010, a small festival opened in Riebeek Kasteel, a wheat-and-wine village ninety minutes north of Cape Town. There was no marquee sponsor, no judging panel, no ribbon cutting. A few dozen winemakers poured side by side under the name The Swartland Revolution, a title they had chosen for themselves with a straight face. The organisers were three producers working within twenty kilometres of one another: Eben Sadie of Sadie Family Wines, Adi Badenhorst of AA Badenhorst Family Wines, and Andrea Pretorius, who would within a few years take her husband’s name and run Mullineux Family Wines with him.…