Wine Term: Sustainable | WineSpeed

Sustainable

As applied in the wine industry, the term sustainable is used to indicate a winery where all viticultural, winemaking, and business practices conform to the goal of maintaining the land and environment is the best possible condition for generations to come.

California makes Port.

Answer: False.

False. True Port is a sweet fortified wine that must come from the Douro Valley of northern Portugal, in the same way that true Champagne can only come from the Champagne region of France. The Ports produced in the Douro are majestic-deep, complex, rich, thick, and thoroughly hedonistic-and considered among the most sophisticated wines in the world. In California, sweet fortified wines are made, but they aren’t Port. Confusingly, many of these wines used to be called “Port,” and some still are, despite the fact that in 2006, the United States Tax and Trade Bureau recognized the international agreement prohibiting domestic producers from using the generic terms “Port” or “Port-style” on fortified wine labels.

“When autumn arrives, I love the way my diet changes and consequently the kinds of wine I drink. Old white Burgundy with mushrooms, for example. With friends the other night we sautéed wild mushrooms and downed a magnum of François Jobard’s 1982 Meursault Genevrières. Wow! I hope the good Lord put some of that in my extraterrestrial cellar.”

—Kermit Lynch, wine importer and author of Adventures on the Wine Route

—Kermit Lynch, wine importer and author of Adventures on the Wine Route

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