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Keeping Wine for the Long Haul
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You don’t need a fancy space to cellar wine. Just some
patience.
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To enjoy aged wine, is it necessary to construct an elaborate
wine cellar, carved into the depths of your home? Absolutely not. The most
important part of creating a space to store your wine is finding a place
where they will not be attacked by wine’s major enemies: light, heat, and humidity.
There’s a reason why most cellar-worthy wines come in a dark brown or green bottle. Just as your skin doesn’t appreciate too many UV rays, neither does your wine. Heat will cook wine, ruining it fairly quickly. Wild fluctuations in humidity can damage the cork, allowing too much oxygen to invade the bottle. So to start aging wines, find the coolest, darkest spot in your home. As long as there are no radical fluctuations in heat or humidity, you should be ok. So why go through all this gratification-delaying effort? As wines age, primary, fruity flavors start to mingle with the unexpected delight of savory secondary notes. Wine is a living thing, constantly evolving and changing. And not just red wine; if you’re looking for value for the cellar, German Riesling can offer astonishing levels of pleasure and complexity. Just don’t wait too long to enjoy them. Many wines are made to be enjoyed as soon as the are bottled. Particularly white wines, lighter reds, sparkling wines, and most wines under $30. The wines that really benefit from age tend to be the big reds from Bordeaux and Burgundy, Spain, Italy and California. You can keep tabs on the “drinkability” of your wines through websites such as cellartracker.com, which tells you whether to drink or hold specific bottles.
from The Daily Sip, January 28, 2013
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Tri-City Herald talks about the nursery in Benton City
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2012/08/13/2060887/benton-city-nursery-offers-certified.html
WINE SPECTATOR
If you are not familiar with the Wine Spectator’s rating system, here is a little background. The Wine Spectator is a monthly publication featuring wine from all over the world. Among the articles and interesting wine facts you will find the Wine Spectator Buying Guide. The Buying Guide is a collection of ratings on newly release wines, these ratings are the direct result of the Wine Spectator editors’ tasting process. The rating system is based on 100-points, these 100-point scores are given to represent the overall quality of the wine.
100-point scoring system:
95-100 Classic
90-94 Outstanding
85-89 Very good
80-84 Good
The Wine Spectator also features wines monthly. The categories of featured wines are as follows:
Highly Recommended: The most impressive wines of the issue as selected by Wine Spectator.
Collectibles: Wines that will gain the most potential value with age.
Smart Buys: Wines available at the most affordable price.
Best Values: Wines that are overall good prices, widely available, and have consistently solid scores.
Girlfriends~ author unknown
I just finished taking an evening class atStanford. The last lecture was on the mind-body connection - the relationship between stress and disease. The speaker (head of psychiatry at Stanford) said, among other things, that one of the best things that a man could do for his health is to be married to a woman, whereas for a woman, one of the best things she could do for her health was to nurture her relationships with her girlfriends.
At first everyone laughed, but he was serious.
Women connect with each other differently and provide support systems that help each other to deal with stress and difficult life experiences. Physically this quality "girlfriend time" helps us to create more serotonin - a neurotransmitter that helps combat depression and can create a general feeling of well being. Women share feelings whereas men often form relationships around activities. They rarely sit down with a buddy and talk about how they feel about certain things or how their personal lives are going. Jobs? Yes. Sports? Yes. Cars? Yes. Fishing, hunting, golf? Yes. But their feelings? Rarely.
Women do it all of the time. We share from our souls with our sisters/mothers, and evidently that is very good for our health. He said that spending time with a friend is just as important to our general health as jogging or working out at a gym.
There's a tendency to think that when we are exercising we are doing something good for our bodies, but when we are hanging out with friends, we are wasting our time and should be more productively engaged~not true. In fact, he said that failure to create and maintain quality personal relationships with other humans is as dangerous to our physical health as smoking!
So every time you hang out to schmooze with a gal pal, just pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself for doing something good for your health! We are indeed very, very lucky. Sooooo let's toast to our friendship with our girlfriends. Evidently it's very good for our health.
