Category Archives: Underrated Wine Regions

Class Recap: “Crossing the Rhine”

Alsace may be in France, but it faces Germany. There is sausage, and coq au vin made with riesling, and grape varieties named on the labels of your tall, fluted wine bottles. Across the Rhine, Baden grows a bunch of grape varieties whose names mean “from Burgundy”. Württemberg drinks juicy, glou-glou red from a grapeContinue reading “Class Recap: “Crossing the Rhine””

Chile’s Dark Side of the Moon

The people writing the histories of Chilean wine usually start the clock in the 19th century, in the Central Valley south of Santiago, where titled families who got rich through crown concessions for silver and copper mining went into politics and then retired as gentlemen farmers, on big irrigated haciendas where they planted Bordeaux varietiesContinue reading “Chile’s Dark Side of the Moon”

Green Spain

Verdant, and green, and mild, we’re a long way away, literally and figuratively, from the sangría/bullfight/flamenco/paella Spain that lives in a lot of our imaginations. From the French border on the Bay of Biscay to the fractal Atlantic-facing coastline of Galicia, this is a land of cod fisheries and sidrerías, bagpipes and runes carved inContinue reading “Green Spain”