The Wine Demystifier

Sounds weird right?  Truth be told, “W” proved more problematic than I thought it would when doing this A-Z, but then I though about a term I hear quite a lot when referring to a wine making process and one that you sometimes see mentioned on labels so I thought I would do a very quick (and hopefully not too geeky) explanation. What is whole-bunch fermentation?  (aka whole-cluster) As the name alludes, it is a process which involves fermenting…

The rise of veganism globally (you only need to see how many vegan restaurants are on the High Street these days) has invariably led to much wider interest in what constitute vegan and vegetarian ‘friendly’ products.  While it is obvious meat or fish aren’t suitable, it’s a much greyer area with other products...take wine for example. When I was working for a wine merchant, one of the most popular questions fielded was from customers asking which of our wines…

Phonetically pronounced “Chak-hul-ee”, apart from being hard to pronounce and worth a huge numbers of points in scrabble, the main thing to note is Txakoli (or Txakolina) is not a grape, but a wine style.  Never heard of it? I wouldn’t be surprised.   Even today many of these wines are made for, and consumed by, the local market with few wines being exported, but this is thankfully beginning to change. Where is Txakoli from? Spain.  As you may have…