One of things I always thought remarkable about wine was its employment of four out of five senses all at once. Sight, smell, touch, and taste. But it is becoming increasingly apparent that I need to go ahead and add hearing to the list. I suppose you could listen to bubbles emerging from great Champagne, but I’m more interested in how sound impacts taste, than the sound of wine.
It is no surprise that context influences the way a wine tastes, or that sound impacts the taste of wine. Several studies have demonstrated this, and one need look no further than the field of sensory science in food with their “neutral” environments designed to create as much objective focus on a 
product as possible (of course is creates its own context, who after all tastes in a white room with red lights and black glasses?). This alone is an admission by scientist in the field that they need to normalize context so that the variable, psychological wacky human being can be used as an objective instrument.
Even with that, it is both amusing and instructive to witness additional nuance added to sensory research. In a Public Radio Continue reading
Crushed Chronicles: The life of wine is a game of Tetris
Want to find out what a wine grape harvest really is? Follow our intern, Sarah Green, as she chronicles her experience as a first time cellar rat. This entry highlights how winemaking can be much like a game of Tetris.
There is a list of things I would never have expected about wineries. At the top of that list: 
everything. Within the top 5: at every facet, wine production feels like a life-sized game of Tetris.
Consider a cellar. Any old space will do. Large, cavernous. Big tanks in a few areas. Machinery and pumps and sumps and hoses and nuts and bolts and clamps and valves and endless bits and bobs ranging in size from – to be specific – the tiny to the enormous. A few sources for water. A handful of electrical outlets. Drains all over the place.
Now let’s go into harvest mode. There’s a crush pad – sorting table, hopper, crusher-destemmer. There are bins of fruit being forklifted around, getting dropped onto the crush pad, getting moved into tanks. Empty bins need cleaning and moving. Fruit needs sorting, monitoring, moving, sulphuring, dry-icing.
There are punch downs and pumpovers with their tools, pumps, and hoses. There is pressing with its, well, press and its digging and its barrels and its own pumps and hoses. And all the cleaning and the moving.
Nearly everything in the entire winery is currently in use and in your way. Your hands are wet. The cellar is loud.
And now take a relatively simple task: moving your pump or barrel or bin or forklift or, really, Continue reading
Donelan Wines Syrah Cuvees: The difference between Keltie and Christine
Today we are bottling the 2009 Cuvee Kelite! This video is a brief description of what makes Cuvee Christie and Cuvee Keltie, both 100% Syrah and 100% Sonoma County, different wines: