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What's your favourite grape variety/style and why?
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The title says it all. For me it's a hard one, I tip back and forth between a few. I am a sucker for sharp, brilliant whites with texture and acid so enjoy Chenin when it's done right and of course Riesling. What's yours?
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... good lord this is like naming your favorite child or family member...
if you can answer this question definitively you probably aren't drinking enough wine.
What am I eating? How hot is it outside? How humid is it outside? Am I having a good day or a bad day? What did I eat for breakfast?
A former table wine grape, elevated (criolla grape)
Main Post: A former table wine grape, elevated (criolla grape)
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Criolla chica (and its close sibling criolla grande) is one of the most cultivated grapes in Argentina, appreciated for its high yields and climatic hardiness. You won’t see its name on a bottle very often because it’s historically been used to make the table wines Argentinians (mosty used to) consume by the litres. But now it has seen a revival, and this bottle from the Durigutti brothers, made from vines planted in 1943 in the high altitude, cool-climate area of Las Compuertas (in Uco Valley) is a good example of what it can offer.
The vines are maintained in a low-intervention, organic fashion, and the wine is unoaked — rather it’s fermented and aged in concrete “eggs” (tanks), a very popular practice in Argentina.
One of its most striking features is its colour: I’d call it a bright, transluscent ruby, but I’d be glad to hear what you’d call it. Its nose is at first mostly cherry and forest floor (quite a bit of the latter), later on opening up to strawberry, fresh herbs and even more of the forest-floor, musty aroma. In mouth it has a zipping, medium+ acidity, very light tannins and a surprisingly spicy finish (spicy as in hot, not as in the flavour of spices). This spiciness makes the 13.7 ABV seem like more (not because of a boozy smell but given how it feels in the mouth). Towards the end, within two hours of uncorking, the musty aromas and the cherry integrated beautifully. We paired it with a classic saffron risotto.
So as you might already have noticed, the wine that results from careful vinification of the criolla grape is quite pinot noir-like. I’d say this is mostly the case, although the terroir and winemaking style changes the result quite a bit, but in general it’s sort of an oddball, rustic pinot noir.
The only wine chart you'll ever need
Main Post: The only wine chart you'll ever need
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This is overly-simplified and fairly inaccurate. Dry Rieslings exist and they can be VERY dry. Sav blanc (especially produced in hot aussie climates) can come out super fruity and on the sweeter side Sweeter red wines can come in many different varietals and simply putting both white and red on a binary scale is not really the best way to do it. Plus you have orange, green and rose wine which exists on a different spectrum all together, funky wild fermented wines which are so savoury bordering on vegetal which you can find in an abundance of different grapes. Long story short, bad wine graph, wine nerd mad.
Edit: putting pinot as objectively more dry than malbec????? Who wrote this????
Wine grapes taste really good
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Listen, listen, listen. Wine grapes okay. Primarily used to make wine right, but they taste so damn good. Imagine me 3 months ago. Hated grapes. Taste like shit in my opinion. Buy a pack of grapes because they looked oddly delicious looking.They were small dark purple and in a box rather than a bag. They were the best grapes i’ve ever had. 1000% unrivaled by table grapes. I find out these are wine grapes called pinot noir. My question here is, is why the hell are wine grapes not sold for eating purposes as much as table grapes. They are just so amazingly flavourful and instead stores sell these seedless flavourless disgusting things and call them grapes.
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Because people hate seeds
What's your favourite lesser-known grape varieties?
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Feel free to recommend wines also.
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Scheurebe - love it... so unexpected for a German grape.. so is Huxelrebe
I found Albarossa to be delicious and underrated, with international potential
Juhfark from Hungary can be deliciously rustic and powerful at the same time
Pelaverga is an obscurity from Italy that deserves to be on your table with dinner
wine: red or white, the stuff you drink
Main Post: wine: red or white, the stuff you drink
ELI5: why is wine mainly made from grapes?
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Why not apples or passion fruit?
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Apples become cider.
It is possible to make wines from other plants. Dandelion wine, for example.
ELI5: What is the difference between different varietals of wine?
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I know nothing about wine, but I like to drink it.
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Diffrent types of grapes; there are dozens of grape varieties. For example my favorite wine Pinot Noir comes from black grapes most prominetly grown in france. Should also be mentioned that white grapes doesn't mean white wine; it's about how long the grapes are left to soak. Soaked for longer = Red Wine; Shorter soak = White Wine. Also similar wines(same grape) can have diffrent names for example Pinot Noir in most of the world is Pinot Noir, but here in Italy(also my source of knowlege) it's called Pinot Nero not a huge diffrence in name. Hopefully this gives you a basic understanding of wine.