Auslese

Plural auslesen. Literally, “select harvest.” A level of full ripeness according to the traditional German system. In the Modern VDP system in Germany, denotes a wine with significant sweetness.

Some winemakers are adding seawater to fermenting grapes in order to improve the wine’s longevity and amplify its flavors.

Answer: True.

As most wine drinkers know, wine can taste pleasantly salty—even when there’s no actual sodium chloride in it. Certain grape varieties, for example, can taste a bit salty (sangiovese is one), and wines made from grapes growing near a sea coast can, too. So maybe it was only a matter of time, but several winemakers in France and Portugal are now experimenting with adding salt to their wines, a practice that was described in ancient Roman texts. In particular, adding seawater was typical since it helped preserve the perishable beverage, in the same way that salt was used to preserve meat. Contemporary vintner Hervé Durand’s family estate, Mas des Tourelles, in the southern Rhône Valley, stands atop the remains of a Gallo-Roman winery. Known for his “Archeological Roman Wines,” Durand makes a version of Turriculae, a wine made from an ancient recipe that includes seawater as well as ground fenugreek and iris flowers. In Portugal, Port producer Dirk Niepoort learned of the practice from a traditional wine producer in the Azores and convinced fellow vintners Anna Jorgensen and Anselmo Mendes to join him in experimenting with salt. Filling their fermentation vessels to 1% seawater, they found the results had a tangy, saline flavor that gave “more life” to the wine without overly diluting it. “As it is common with food, a pinch of salt is important to ‘awaken’ other flavors,” says Mendes. He has a point.

Missoula Floods

During the Last Ice Age, the repeated episodic freezing and melting of glaciers near Lake Missoula in western Montana resulted in an estimated 25 cataclysmic floods from ruptured ice dams. The massively destructive floods, which… Continue reading

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