1607

The year of the earliest recorded attempt to produce wine in the U.S. Made by Jamestown colonists, the wine was based on wild, musty-tasting scuppernong grapes. Ultimately, several French winemakers had to be dispatched to the colony to help improve the flavor.

Port—by law—can only be blended, aged, and bottled at shippers’ warehouses, called “lodges” in Oporto.

Answer: False.

For most of its history, Port was matured in the lodges by law—a system that effectively insured that the big Port shippers monopolized the trade and that small growers were excluded from creating their own brands. That changed in 1986, and today Port can be, and often is, aged, bottled, and shipped directly from the farm estate (called in Portuguese a quinta). Today there are more than 100,000 vineyard properties in Portugal’s Douro Valley, the region from which all Port comes. These are owned by the shippers themselves, as well as the region’s roughly forty thousand growers, each of whom owns, on average, no more than a scant acre of vines.

Crush

Used as a verb, to crush means to break the grape skins so that the pulp oozes out and fermentation can more easily begin. As a noun, crush is the general term used for all… Continue reading

1607

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