{"id":2319,"date":"2023-03-30T17:16:18","date_gmt":"2023-03-30T17:16:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/?p=2319"},"modified":"2023-03-30T17:56:38","modified_gmt":"2023-03-30T17:56:38","slug":"strange-grapes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/?p=2319","title":{"rendered":"Strange Grapes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the United States, we drink a lot of wine produced domestically, more from California than from the other states.\u00a0 For the most part the wines we drink are made from grapes brought over from France.\u00a0 The Bordeaux and Burgundy grapes are the most popular, including Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.\u00a0 But the borders of Wine Country are far more extensive, even within Europe.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/amphora.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-2320 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/amphora-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"602\" height=\"401\" srcset=\"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/amphora-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/powertasting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/amphora-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/powertasting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/amphora-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/powertasting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/amphora.jpg 1305w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 602px) 100vw, 602px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>The Georgians age their wines in amphorae, just as the ancient Greeks and Romans did.\u00a0 Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In recent years, Americans have been eager to try wines from new places.\u00a0 Of course, Italy and Spain have always been a part of American wine drinking, but German Riesling and Austrian Gr\u00fcner Veltliner have increasingly been appearing on wine lists and on store shelves.\u00a0 But what about Saperavi from Georgia in the Caucasus?\u00a0 Or Feteasca Neagra (or the \u201cDark Maiden\u201d) from Romania?\u00a0 Hungarian K\u00e9kfrankos, anyone?<\/p>\n<p>We recently had the opportunity to taste a lot of wines from countries where we didn\u2019t know that wine was made, from grapes we never heard of, including those just mentioned.\u00a0 It forced us to think about how to deal with such unique tastings.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Start with an open mind.<\/strong> Just because we hadn\u2019t heard of these wines shouldn\u2019t have made us presuppose anything about them. \u00a0The producers of many of them were eager to inform us that wine had been produced in their country for thousands of years, so if it was good enough for the Romans, why not us, too?\u00a0 And indeed many had distinctive aromas and tastes that weren\u2019t quite like anything we\u2019d tasted before.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Consider the history.<\/strong> Yes, there was wine in these parts of Wine Country a millennium ago, but what about recently?\u00a0 In a number of cases we were told that after World War II, their entire export market was to Russia, where wine drinkers prefer sweetness in their glasses.\u00a0 Accordingly, most native vines \u2013 not all \u2013 were pulled up and replaced with more familiar grapes that were left to over-ripen.\u00a0 Post Cold War, the local grapes were replanted, so that what is now available on the market is made from relatively young vines.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Judge the wines on their own merits.<\/strong> Not everything was great; a few were awful; and most were interesting but not on a par, to our tastes, with better Californian and Western European wines.\u00a0 But so what?\u00a0 Okay, we\u2019d never tasted Saperavi, so these were the best we ever had.\u00a0 And they were quite pleasant, something we\u2019d like to try again with, say, stuffed peppers such as distant Romanian relatives once made for us.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Quietly compare these grapes with what you know.<\/strong> We found a great deal of similarity of some of these wines with those from grapes we were more familiar with, especially <a href=\"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/?p=1962\">Syrah<\/a>.\u00a0 Syrah is a very adaptable grape, producing very different tastes depending on the <em>terroir<\/em>, so maybe that connection was only in our minds.\u00a0 Or was it some deep-seated ancestry?\u00a0 We certainly don\u2019t know, but this reference did enable us to think of the kinds of food that each strange grape would go well with, i.e., the same ones we would choose to go with Syrah.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the United States, we drink a lot of wine produced domestically, more from California than from the other states.\u00a0 For the most part the wines we drink are made from grapes brought over from France.\u00a0 The Bordeaux and Burgundy grapes are the most popular, including Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.\u00a0 But the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/?p=2319\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Strange Grapes<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2319"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2319"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2340,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2319\/revisions\/2340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}