wine sooth

Young adults and alcohol.

There has been much discussion lately about lowering the legal drinking age. Tom Wark has argued strongly for lowering the legal drinking age in the past and has again spoken in support of the idea.

Lowering the legal drinking age will not do anything to reduce road fatalities and it will not make 18, 19 or 25 year-olds more responsible with alcohol. The parenting attitudes and practices of an entire country would need to change to affect a difference in the behaviors of 18-25 year-olds.

Not that it would be easy. And it would not happen overnight. Then, there is the fact that we are still dealing with individuals whose brain development is not always ready for truly adult decisions. (more…)

Chopped Liver

Did you know there are vineyards south of San Francisco? Really, there are! Over 100,000 acres! That’s Napa and Sonoma put together. But it seems that, in some people’s mental maps, there is no noteworthy wine country outside of these two regions.

I make no contentions that Napa and Sonoma don’t produce quality wines. They do. I don’t argue that these regions don’t deserve their reputations. They do. However, when news reports about frosts and weather flukes as well as harvest updates omit mention of the Central Coast and call Napa and Sonoma the premiere wine country and when wine websites categorize Central Coast wines as “Other California Wine”, I am compelled to make a point of clarification. (more…)

(Introducing: Wine Surveys) 

Wine Surveys logo.

Depending who you ask, the incidence of TCA tainted wines is somewhere in the 3% to 10% range.

Remy Charest started a discussion at OWC to explore this very topic. Several members brought some opinionated perspectives to the table and at one point, wine maker Nathan R. Carlson proposed that we conduct an on-going poll or survey to get a real-world sense of the incidence of TCA taint.

Serendipitously, I had created Wine Surveys just a few days earlier, intending it index wine-related surveys. (more…)

UCWS.

Recently, Alice Feiring, announced a re-design of her blog. She posted a mock-up of the new look and, lo and behold, there they were: UCWSs - the Ubiquitous Circular Wine Stains which adorn too many wine blogs to count.

Second in popularity only to the OTWGs (Omnipresent Tilted Wine Glasses - a sin of which I am guilty), the UCWSs are the staple design element of many wine blogs and sites. I don’t know if this is because it’s an easy image to get on iStockPhoto or if is bundled with a narrow set of master templates sourced by web and blog designers. (more…)