Jason Rennie's Wine Journal

• 7/26/06 - After tasting the 2004 Bechtheimer Stein Gewurztraminer by Machmer, I came to a complete realization of how temperature affects the perception of sweetness. Simply put, cold desensitizes our sweetness sensors. The Gewuztraminer tastes cloyingly sweet at room temperature, but feels well balanced chilled to around 8C. No wonder ice cream & soda (to name two) are served cold---they're so sugary that they don't taste nearly as good when warm.
• 7/22/06 - I found an on-line version of Terry Theise's 2002 catalog. It includes a lot of his philosophy on wines. One tidbit is that he won't taste wines too early---earliest he normally tastes is March (after the fall harvest). He says they change so much in process that its impossible to use an early tasting to predict what the finished product is going to taste like. Sounds like he and Willie Gluckstein (author of The Wine Avenger) would get along very well. Theise thinks that some sweetness is essential for a good food wine and that what you want in a food-wine match is synnergy. He also prefers low-alcohol wines, other things being equal (yes!).
• 7/22/06 - Found a description of various U.S. wine importers. Found it interesting that Kermit Lynch Selections transports their wines in temperature-controlled containers. I wonder if they're also pressure-controlled? When Helen and I went to Burgundy, we brought a number of wines back in our hand luggage (stored in the overhead bins on the flight). We noticed that the same wines we tasted in France tasted different after the trip home. We wonder whether the pressure changes might have had something to do with it... I ought to add the importer as a field for my wine database. It's possible that certain importers' wines align with our tastes better than others, but without a lot of information on the subject, it's hard to make any conclusions.
• 2/3/06 - I've discovered that Ikea makes a storage system line that makes for excellent cellar wine bottle racks. The line is called Gorm, and it includes a bottle rack. It's kinda like a lego set. They provide you with compatible pieces, you put them together however you want. So, you can make a shelf completely full of bottle racks, you can just put the bottle racks on bottom (which is what I did for temperature and stability reasons). You can also easily expand & create more storage as the need arises. What's very nice about Gorm is that the storage is compact and functional. You couldn't store many more bottles in the same space, yet the bottles are easy to access. Gotta love Ikea.
• 1/31/06 - Red wine is more likely to give you a hangover than white wine. I've noticed this many times over---drinking half a bottle of red wine will leave me with a headache the following morning, half a bottle of white wine won't. According to Ask Yahoo, it's due to the higher content of congeners. Though, I've never heard of "congeners," so I'm a bit skeptical...
• 1/18/06 - Things that annoy me about wine bottlers.
  1. Corks. Why use a sealing mechanism that is (a) expensive, (b) difficult to open, and (c) can negatively affect the quality of your product? I've never heard a good reason for using corks. Bad reasons I've heard include tradition and image.
  2. Heavy Bottles. The liquid in a bottle of wine weights appx. 24 oz. Is it really necessary to use an extra-thick 30 oz. (weight) glass bottle (observed: Dom Perignon Vintage Champagne bottle) when 13 ounces of glass will do just as well (observed: Chianti Reserva bottle) ? That's nearly 13 lbs. of difference in a case of wine! Bottlers: save yourself some $$$ and my back some pain and use the thinner, but perfectly adequate 13 oz. bottles.
  Yes, as you might imagine, yesterday I was about to open a bottle of wine to go with dinner, when I realized that my wife had taken the corkscrew with her for the (food) class she was teaching that evening... And, we recently did some cellar-stocking, which necessitated me carrying cases of wine down two flights of stairs to our basement... The things you think about...
• 1/17/06 - Turns out we live just down the street from a wine importer! Violette imports and distributes wines to many area stores, as well as restaurants. I met Bob, who is filling in for Richard Violette, the man who started the store 20+ years ago and still owns and runs the shop. Bob said Richard is currently in France scouting wines. Bob lives in Somerville and is a big fan of Wine & Cheese Cask, so he clearly has good taste :) Violette focuses on small wineries; Bob says Richard has been leaning toward organic/natural producers recently. I asked Bob to recommend a wine; he gave me a pure Sangiovese Chianti---said it has moderate tannins and a nice earthy-ness. He said their hours are generally 11am-6:30pm, Mon-Sat, but that they occasionally close to make a delivery or to attend to other business.
• 1/17/06 - I have finally found the perfect wine glass. It's the 12 oz. "Viv" glass at Crate and Barrel. It's not so big that it's hard to handle, not so small that you can't get your nose in to smell, and what I'd call the "crest" of the bowl is low enough to make swirling easy. And, the best part is that each glass is only $3.95, so when you break a few, those tears will be for happiness and not your wallet.
• 1/16/06 - Interesting tid-bit I learned while reading the Sothbey's Wine Encyclopedia by Tom Stevenson: sulfer is used to prevent oxidation in wine. When wine is bottled, it is exposed to oxygen and a small amount of oxygen is put in every bottle of wine. But, when sulfer is added to wine, the sulfer reacts with oxygen to produce SO₂, limiting the degree to which wine can be oxidized.
• 1/16/06 - Screw-top beer bottles are the best way to preserve half-a-bottle of wine. I've tried the standard techniques else---nitrogen, sucking the air out of an opened bottle, refridgeration---none of them work very well. I've also tried using a plastic cork to stopper a beer bottle after transfering the wine (using a funnel). After doing that for a while and then switching to using screw tops, I've found that the screw tops work a bit better (less chance that the wine goes bad/sour).
• 1/10/06 - I finally found a page that describes how to compute the calorie content of wine. The primary calorie contributor (except for very sweet wines) is alcohol, which contains 7 calories per gram and has a specific gravity of .789 (1 fl. oz. of alcohol is .789 grams).
• 1/10/06 - The lies that women are told about drinking and pregnancy. Along the same lines, here's a page that discusses what fetal alcohol syndrome is and what it is not.