Talk-A-Vino

Meritage time!

First, let’s start with the answer for the wine quiz #87, how well do you know your wines.

In the quiz, you were supposed to identify 8 different wines/wineries using the pictures of the top foils of the bottles. Here are the answers:

1. White Cottage Ranch, a winery in Napa Valley (looks like it might be closed now 😦 )

2. Burgess Cellars – winery in Napa Valley, making great Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah and other wines

3. St. Francis – winery in Sonoma, producing wonderful Zinfandel and other wines

4. Lopez de Heredia, one of the classic Rioja producers from Spain

5. Talullah, a boutique winery in Napa

6. No Girls, an extremely limited production of Syrah and Grenache from Walla Walla Valley

7. Jordan, great producer from Sonoma, probably best known for their Cabernet Sauvignon

Bonus: Casa Burmester, a boutique Port producer from Portugal, also making wonderful dry wines

And here are the same pictures, only now you can see what is what:

As I said many times before, this was a very tough quiz – people generally don’t pay attention to the bottle tops. In this round, Zak correctly identified 6 wines out of 8 ( including the bonus), so he is the winner of this quiz and he gets the distinguished prize of unlimited bragging rights. Well done!

Now, to the interesting stuff around the vine and the web!

As wine keeps growing in popularity, it becomes the subject of crime with much higher frequency. An excellent article from Mike Veseth at Wine Economist is talking about some of the latest wine crimes, where wine was stolen in a very sophisticated fashion. I like the “CSI Fine Wine” designation used for the article – definitely an interesting story to read.

Have you written about the wine mysteries in your life? Mystery is a theme for Monthly Wine Writing Competition #6, hosted by Jeff, a.k.a The Drunken Cyclist. The submission deadline is Monday, January 13th. You can read about all the rules in this post – but don’t delay, there are only few days left!

Do you like wine books? I personally do, but I don’t read them nearly enough – I read more blogs than the books lately. Nevertheless, here is an excellent list from W. Blake Gray, where he is talking about 9 of the latest wine books, all sounding very intriguing and worth reading, like “The Billionaire Vinegar”, which had been on my radar for a while. Did you read any of the books in the list? What do you think?

Last but not least – some wine numbers, for all of you, number junkies out there. The Drinks Business publication just published a very interesting article regarding the most planted grapes in the world. It appears that the most planted grape in the world as of now is nothing less than… (cue drum roll) … Cabernet Sauvignon! And hated/loved Merlot now is a close second – quite a change from Airen and Grenache being in the lead for a while. For more of the interesting interesting data, here is your link to the original article.

That’s all I have for you for today, folks. The glass is empty – but refill is on its way. Until the next time – cheers!