Markus Bachmann, a French horn player from Austria, has created a fermentation system that infuses the music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Vivaldi and rare orchestra and jazz recordings into wine.
“I put a speaker in the wine tank and play music during the fermentation,” he says. “The yeast starts doing totally different things to the wine.”
I do think consumers would understand the price differences in wine if they saw the ingredients that went into an $8 bottle with a kangaroo on the label.
In the long run, it’s not wonderful. Wine producers have traditionally valued concentration of flavor over yield; the balance of flavors over accelerated speed. A grape overexposed to heat develops too much sugar, which is the ingredient that turns to alcohol. Thus an overly hot year makes the wine too alcoholic. Which is fine if one just wants to get tipsy faster, but excessive alcohol also creates that hot feeling on the tongue, which masks the flavor of the wine.
A New Way to Drink Wine: Try This Four-Pack Stack of Chardonnay
Musing on a favorite pastime, James Michener once declared that “to dine in harmony with nature is one of the gentlest and loveliest things we can do,” concluding that “picnics are the apex of sensible living.” It’s a mantra I’ve taken to heart, “for of this world one never sees enough.” My habit is to bring a bottle of wine, uncivilized prohibitions against imbibing it outdoors be damned. Usually I take a wine key too, but being a forgetful sort, I’ve had occasion to force corks down the necks of bottles with objects as varied as a cheap plastic pen, splintery driftwood, a friend’s lipstick container, and the curved metal protruding from a u-lock.
This lifestyle hassle puts me squarely in the target demographic of Stacked Wines, a new company that’s offering a variation on the traditional wine bottle and betting that their container is going to be competitive with or surpass in popularity the box-enclosed plastic bladder, the Tetra Pak, the Wine Cube, and the PET bottle.Read more. [Image: Stacked Wines]
Who wants less alcohol with their wine?
That’s the trend, says writer Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl. “Fruit bombs,” she says, are out.
These wines (so jammy, so big, so plush) show well at a giant tasting, but they do not show so well at your table. You put one of these cabernet sauvignons next to a roast lamb dish and it’s like putting Godzilla at the table with Bambi. You don’t get to taste what you’re eating.
So Dara brought three low-alcohol bottles into the studio with Lynne for a tasting: La Fiera Moscato, Heinz Eifel Riesling Kabinett and Già Langhe Rosso. They made some notes.
Here’s the audio:
