One Australian Winery Ditches Screw-caps and Returns to Corks.
July 31, 2012 
Rusden Wines, (a winery located in the Barossa Valley region of Australia) has announced it’s giving-up on the screw-cap, and will return to bottling all of its wines under a cork. Rusden winemaker Christian Canute cited “persistent quality control issues” for the reason behind the move.
“Our wines are handmade and bottled without fining or filtration. Under a screw-cap I have noticed the wines ‘sweat’, producing overly dominant reductive characters, a problem we have never had under cork,” Canute went on to say.
Napa Valley-based Rutherford Wine Company has also moved from synthetic closures back to cork citing both environmental and technical benefits, and in the UK, large retailers have switched products back to cork for environmental reasons.
Click here for the full article from Harpers.
My Thoughts…
Maybe I haven’t been reading as many wine magazines and trade journals as I usually do, but this is actually the first story I’ve read where a winery has had quality issues with screw-caps. I do have to say that it came as quite a surprise!
I’ve certainly experienced plenty of problems with synthetic corks and will personally never buy something older than 3 years, if I know it’s sealed with a synthetic closure (albeit difficult to ascertain without removing the seal). They just seem to let in too much air.
It will be interesting to see if there are many other wineries that make the move back to cork…
Posted in News | Tagged Australia, Barossa, Cork, Screw Cap, Screw Cap Wine, screwcap, Stelvin | Leave a comment //Real Actors Read Yelp Reviews.
July 31, 2012Now why didn’t I think of this!?!?!? Genius!!!
I wonder if the same thing can be done with bad wine reviews…
Know the Grape: Grüner Veltliner.
July 30, 2012 
Grüner Veltliner [groo-nur felt-leen-er]
Origin
According to DNA analysis, Grüner Veltliner is thought to be a cross between Grüner Muskateller and Traminer grape vines. The first mention of Grüner Veltliner was in documents dating back to 1855. Before then it was referred to as: Weißgipfler. And you thought Grüner Veltliner was difficult to pronounce!!!
Grüner (its name for short) is also known as, GrüVe, Green Veltliner, Greener Veltliner, Manhardsrebe, Veltliner and Weißgipfler, but luckily, most are labeled just plain Grüner Veltliner!
Place
Grüner is found primarily in Austria (around 1 vine in every 3 vines is Grüner) and also in the Czech Republic, but almost nowhere else in the world.
Most of the best Grüner in Austria comes from the three towns of Kamptal, Kremstal, and Wachau, three districts to the west of Vienna. To use a generalization, the Grüners from Kamptal are soft, Kremstal medium bodied, and Wachau has the most powerful wines. The Danube River follows through all three regions.
Posted in Facts | Tagged Austria, Gruner Veltliner, Kamptal, Kremstal, Wachau | 3 Comments //An Interview with Wine Cork Artist Scott Gundersen.
July 30, 2012
What’s your background and is this your full-time job?
I grew up in North-West Michigan, and I always loved building and drawing. After high school I headed to Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo to study art and education. For the past 10 years I’ve been teaching high school art, carving out a few hours a week during the school year to make my own art and a few more hours during the summer.
How many pieces of “cork art” have you already done?
“Trisha” is my third piece (and smallest) of the three pieces I’ve created. My first portrait in wine corks was of my wife Jeanne and used a total of 3842 wine corks.
A year later I created a portrait of a friend from Rwanda, named Grace that used 9,217 wine corks. I’m in the beginning stages of creating my biggest piece yet, a self portrait that will probably require 12,000 to 15,000 corks. The bigger I create a piece, the more detail I can include. I very much like my smaller pieces, yet they present many challenges in creating accurate, interesting portraits.
Those Magnificent Men and Their Wine Glass Machines!
July 27, 2012Szymon Klimek has too much time on his hands. This Polish guy builds amazingly intricate machines inside of wine glasses that are fully-functional and serve absolutely zero purpose…apart from looking AWSEOME! Below is his latest, called Sponge.
Posted in News | Tagged Wine Glass, wine glass design | Leave a comment //Made from 0.1 millimeter sheets of brass and bronze, Klimek’s miniature machines dance effortlessly in wine-glass enclosures that measure little more than 4 inches across. Klimek’s latest creation, Sponge, is a steam engine-like machine named for the latticework of tiny, interconnected brass pieces that expands and contracts as the engine runs. Sitting in a wine glass about a foot tall, a small silicon solar cell powers a concealed electric motor, which drives the 3-inch flywheel. He doesn’t work to a specific scale, but customizes his designs for each glass: the opening of Sponge’s wine glass and the diameter of its flywheel differed by less than a millimeter.
A Guide to Rioja Classifications.
July 27, 2012Below is a really handy guide to how Spanish wines are classified, in terms of the minimum length of time they’ve spent in the barrel/bottle. Since terms such as Crianza and Reserva will frequently appear on bottles of red Rioja, but are infrequently explained, it’s useful to remember their definitions!
I have a simple mantra I learnt many years ago in order to memorize the length of time red Rioja’s are aged for. It is simply: 1&1, 1&2, 2&3.
The first number is the minimum amount of time a wine spends in the barrel, and the second number is the minimum length of time it spends in the bottle. Therefore:
Crianza = 1 year in the barrel, 1 year in the bottle.
Reserva = 1 year in the barrel, 2 years in the bottle
Gran Reserva = 2 years in the barrel, 3 years in the bottle
This chart, put together by the nice people at Snooth, explains in a little-more detail:
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