Educational Blog

Did you know that every 13 seconds, a bottle of Rhone Valley wine being enjoyed someplace in the world? The Rhone is one of the major wine producing regions of France, often wrongfully overshadowed by Bordeaux or Burgundy. It's my favorite!

Can your wine actually have sodium in it?!  Surprisingly, yes. This varies by varietal, root stock, soil, terroir and region however a "typical" American wine (take a Merlot from Napa for example) will have approximately 5 mg of sodium per 4-oz pour (40 mg/l). Whites in general are slightly higher. But there are wines with far more sodium than that. Read this post for how sodium and other salts find their way into a wine!

Have you ever picked up on a subtle vanilla flavor in your wine? What about cloves and spices? That's not surprising as wine is often matured in oak barrels that share the self-same flavor compounds found in vanilla and cloves! And by "toasting" or firing the inside of an oak barrel, higher concentrations of these compounds are achieved!

Did you know that your Champagne label will tell you if your bottle is being sourced from a giant conglomerate or a small independent producer? It will also tell you how sweet the Champagne is. You just have to learn to read its secrets. Read on to learn more!

Blind tasting means that the wine labels are obscured from you and you don't know what is in your glass. Sometimes you might not even be able to see the color of the wine (if you're blind folded or the wine is in a black glass). Learn some tips to help you guess what's in your glass. Might be fun to try this at the next party you go to and impress your friends!

The other night I hosted a virtual wine tasting session on sweet and fortified wines: what they are and how they are made. We had some questions around food pairings relative to sweet & fortified wines so I wanted to share my thoughts with you here. Read the full post to learn why sweet wines make the best partners for food and expand the way you think about their role on the table!

What do those bubbles mean and does smaller mean better?