Wine Blending: Sacrilege or Genius?
Depending on what kind of company you keep, mixing bottles of wines may be the worst possible pastime.
Those who pride themselves on knowing a good wine will no doubt throw their nose up at the idea of a wine mash-up, but the rest of us love the idea of learning more while having a little fun.
My new favorite site, BuzzFeed, put together a little collection of articles about the process, the good and bad of mixing wines.
Australians Enjoy Blending Shiraz and Viognier
“…but few realize that even when a bottle is emblazoned with the name of just one grape - cabernet sauvignon, say - the labyrinthine regulations of EU labeling law allow that only 85% of the wine has to be made from it. The remaining 15% could be anything, and you don’t have to declare it.”
Sampling Blends - Some Successful, Others Not So
“One man blends his way to the perfect bottle of wine”
A Blending Calculator for Adjusting Alcohol Content
The Napa Valley Wine Blending & Tasting Kit
I think, if you aren’t exactly a wine connoisseur, this is a great way to train your taste buds for wine. Get a group of friends together and start mixing. Think of it as a poor-man’s cocktail party.
Wine Blending - [BuzzFeed]
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Comments
eartheist says on March 27th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
The art of blending wine has been practiced for over 500 years. For example, if you buy a bottle of Bordeaux, you buy a blend of the grapes grown in the Bordeaux region: Cabernet, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, Malbec. It is evolved genius - sacrilege doesn’t enter the picture.
Paul Freeman says on March 29th, 2007 at 4:21 am
Mixing wines can be fun, but I don’t think it’s the best way to train your taste buds for wine drinking, if you’re “new to wine” there are much better ways to introduce your pallet to the various flavors. - Trying wines from the same region, but with different grapes, the same wine, but from different years and of course, using more then one glass so you can drink the wines your tasting side by side to get a better impression of how they compare. It’s also good to try different food flavors along side to see how that impacts the wine.
With regards to grape content of a normal bottle, it’s normally safe to assume that unless a wine states “100%” of a grape, it isn’t. The French been particularly troublesome because they don’t mention any grapes at all, only the region.