The Wine Knows

For any wine that is reviewed in Wine Press Northwest (including our Wine of the Week selections), we taste blind. What does this mean?

If we taste single-blind, it means we know what kind of wine we're tasting (such as Syrah) but not the producer. If we taste double-blind, we know neither the producer nor the variety or style.

I got some pretty good responses via email to my post last week about (not) drinking and driving. It got me to thinking about another question I get rather regularly: Do professional wine tasters get drunk during big judgings?

On the way to work this morning, I stopped at a vineyard supply store and picked a new gadget. It's a refractometer, a device used to measure the sugar content in grapes (and other things, I suppose).

Leave it to the French to try to come up with a way to fix cork-tainted wines. Out of Burgundy comes a product called Dream Taste that promises to remove TCA, the compound that makes 3-10% of wines smell like a wet dog.