Where is your cellar?  What, I am standing on top of it?

Wonder if this provide a smoother pour?

What else will you trade?

Look what you can do with leftover corks!!

That is easy!  Multiple glasses with no spills!

You may often come across this word “fining” when it comes to wine, but what does it mean?

Fining is a process used to clarify and stabilize wine (and other beverages too actually), using various agents including clay powders, egg albumen, milk and probably most famously isinglass – a substance extracted from the swim bladders of fish.

The fining agents float down through a vessel (moved only by gravity), binding with impurities and proteins as they fall, thus producing wines that are “clean.”  The process, in term, become a concern for many vegans since the fining agents used are animal based.

The benefit of fining is to remove some of the undesirable materials in the wine, such as certain proteins that can cause haziness in the color of the wine, excessive bitterness or astringency, or off-flavors / odors.

However, the process sounds gross no?  Fining and filtration are processes that were frequently used previously, but nowadays, the practice is to tone down the use of such practices to make a more “natural” wine.  Still, the fining process happens in most wineries, including many of the highly regarded ones around the world.

No wonder we feel fabulous everyday!

When people say wine has high acidity, what does it mean exactly?

Acidity – means the sour and tart taste in wines (and you can often find it in high end grape juices as well) that is caused by the presence of organic acids such as tartaric, malic and citric acids. It leaves the same taste and sensation in your mouth as when you eat lemons or limes (detected most readily by a prickling sensation on the sides of the tongue and a mouth-watering aftertaste).

Acidity is very important in wine, which affects the wine’s balance, freshness and the ability to age by acting as a natural preservative. Acidity is one of the most important aspect that allow white wines to age. Wines without sufficient acidity can taste flabby and flat, but on the other hand, wine with too much acidity can be too sour and sharp to drink – like putting an entire lemon in your mouth. Acidity also helps in pairing a wine with food.

Mourvedre, or otherwise known as Monastrell in its native Spain (and to a lesser extent, Mataro in certain part of the world) is a black-skinned variety that has been grown in vineyards all around the western Mediterranean for centuries. Thought to have originated in Spain, it is now grown extensively throughout the Iberian Peninsula, southern France, California and South Australia.

Mourvedre likes warm, dry climates and has small, thick-skinned berries – textbook traits for making wines with intense color and high tannin levels. In fact, it is the variety’s mouth-drying tannins that earned it the French nickname Etrangle-Chien (the dog strangler). The grape has a meaty, herbal aroma (often descirbed as animale) and high tannins, and are typically blended with the likes of Grenache (or Garnacha in Spain), Syrah, Carignan (Cariñena in Spain) or Cinsault. You will most often come across this grape in the southern Rhône Valley – typically in blends coming from Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the southern part of France, and parts of Spain. Single varietal wine from Mourvedre is rare – and usually only found in the New World.

Whether blind or not, all tastings seem to end up like this . . . for some at least.