ISummer is no time for sipping Port, but a cool glass of lean, minerally Muscadet hits the spot at any time of year.

More: continued here

IOnce I got the undersize, very tightly fitted cork out of a tall bottle of Taburno 2009 Falanghina, I was a happy boy.

More: continued here

This month’s edition of WineBlueBook features White Burgundy and Bordeaux wines in addition to West Coast Pinot Noirs.

More: continued here

The Walgreen’s drug store chain recently resumed selling wine and beer. But what kind of wine would Walgreen’s sell if Walgreen’s could sell wine?

More: continued here

COS winery is doing unusual things: using biodynamic methods, storing wine in terracotta amphora, using only natural yeasts - and more.

More: continued here

I can hardly think of a better piece of news than this: if all you like to do is sit around on your butt all day long, drinking red wine may keep you healthier, despite a complete lack of exercise.

While there’s no word whether the resveratrol contained in red wine can counteract the effects of pork rinds, mind-numbing reruns, and high-fructose corn syrup, it’s good to know that this magical compound found in red wine can help with conditions such as laziness, sloth, and too-fat-to-do-much-else.

And how did scientists discover this? In space, of course! Or rather, in a crude simulation of space.

It turns out that floating around weightless for a week is sort of like never getting off the couch for a couple of months. Of course, sending a bunch of rats into orbit isn’t exactly a cheap proposition, so scientists did the next best thing: they hung a bunch of rats by the tail for a few weeks. It turns out that the ones drinking red wine were not only less pissed off at being dangled by their hineys and forced to watch ESPN all day, they ended up healthier than those rats that didn’t get their resveratrol. They suffered less bone density loss, less muscle density loss, and less insulin resistance.

OK, so they didn’t actually give them red wine, they just gave them some resveratrol pills, but its practically the same thing, right? Never mind that the doses of resveratrol they got were the equivalent of several hundred glasses of wine a day. When you’re sitting on your ass all day, you’ve got time to drink a lot of red wine, right?

While doubtless good news for couch-potatoes everywhere, I think the real news here is for desk jockeys like me, who sit in front of a computer all day. Not that I really needed any excuse for having a glass of wine next to my keyboard….

Read the full story.

More: continued here

What the heck are these wines? They’re intense, oxidative, idiosyncratic, cloudy, even bizarre. A Sauvignon Blanc and a Pinot Grigio, both from California? You have got to be kidding me.

More: continued here