Wines of Washington Oregon and Idaho

Wine Drop

 

This is a place were wine information is placed that does not have a home

 

A Sheffield-plated wine cooler that George Washington gave to Alexander Hamilton in 1789 The story behind the wine cooler goes that Washington ordered it in 1789 for the president's house and upon his retirement gave it to Hamilton. The cooler has stayed in the Hamilton family, until present day. Currently Helen Bowdoin Spaulding owns the piece. She is the daughter of Hamilton's great-great-great-grandson.

Terroir, french for soil, refers to the type and quality of soil, and more broadly to the microclimate and overall environmental conditions, of a vineyard or winemaking region. All these factors impart a unique flavour to the wine. Red grapes need a longer growing season than white grapes. Many BC wineries have vineyards in the southern Okanagan region for their red grapes.

Loius Pasteur discovered that when too much oxygen was allowed to contact wine, vinegar bacteria formed and spoiled the wine but small amounts of oxygen made the wine mature.

Acidity in a wine is desirable only to a certain degree. Alll wines have a certain amount of acidity. White wines have more acidity than reds and overly acidic wines will have a tart taste. Red wine can be chilled; the term room temperature comes from earlier days before central heating thus the wines were served at a much colder temperature. Just five minutes in a bucket of ice water. If you find your red wine is harsh and unbalanced, chill it.

To produce a really good buttery Chardonnay, the grapes are sometimes put through a secondary process known as malolactic fermentation. This reduces the typically crisp flavor found in many Chardonnay wines and brings out a rich buttery taste.

A wines' body is its weight on the palate Light bodied wines feel about as heavy as skim milk,while full bodied wines feel like half and half or cream

The Wine Bible, has sold over 380,000 copies compared to the average for a wine book of only 6,000 copies

Washington's first wine grapes were planted at Fort Vancouver by the Hudson's Bay Company in 1825 . Chateau Ste. Michelle is the oldest winery in Washington state. It was founded as the American Wine Company , a 1954 merger of the National Wine Company (NAWICO), founded in 1934, and the Pomerelle Wine Company.

Grapes were first planted in the Oregon Territory in 1847 by Henderson Luelling , a horticulturist who travelled to the territory on the Oregon Trail . The first recorded winery, Valley View Vineyard was established in Jacksonville (in what is now the Rogue Valley AVA) in the 1850s by Peter Britt, several years before the state was founded in 1859. In the first Oregon census in 1860, wine production was listed at 11,800 liters (2,600 gallons), though it is certain that not all of this came from grapes.

Events of 1979 that put the Oregon wine industry on the map. Eyrie Vineyards ' 1975 South Block Pinot Noir placed in the top 10 at the Gault-Millau French Wine Olympiades , and was rated the top Pinot Noir , one of several non-European vintages to outplace French wines in the competition. Not only did the competition establish Oregon as a region capable of producing top-quality wines, it also established that premium winemaking was not the exclusive province of Europe , France in particular. French winemaker Robert Drouhin arranged for a rematch, pitting the Eyrie pinot noir against a group of French wines considered to be finer than those in the Wine Olympics. The winner was Joseph Drouhin 's Grand cru 1959 Chambolle-Musigny; the Eyrie came in a very close second.

The 1980s also saw continued efforts at marketing the Oregon wine industry. The Oregon Wine Advisory Board was established in 1983, and in 1984 the Willamette Valley and Umpqua Valley AVAs were established. In 1986, the International Pinot Noir Celebration was started at Linfield College in McMinnville , and in 1989, Willamette Valley Vineyards became the first publicly traded winery in the state

Chapelle Winery - Founded in 1976, as Idaho's first winery , Ste. Chapelle is named after the beautiful La Sainte Chapelle in Paris,

In 1989 Americans threw away enough aluminum cans to build 6,000 DC 10 airplanes

The letters VVSOP on a cognac bottle stand for - Very Very Superior Old Pale.

There are two beers that are trademarked Budweiser. The one known as the "King of Beers" is the American brand while the Czech brand is the one known as the "Beer of Kings". They are NOT the same brand

The MAI TAI COCKTAIL was created in 1945 by Victor Bergeron, the genius of rum, also known as Trader Vic. The drink got its name when he served it to two friends from Tahiti, who exclaimed "Maitai roa ae!" which in Tahitian means out of this world - the best!

The first U.S. consumer product sold in the old Soviet Union was Pepsi-Cola.

The Bible refers to wine some 242 times and ancient tablets have recorded 25 descriptive words for wine. Early evidence of crushed grapes dates back some 7,000 years

Nicole-Barbe Ponsardin, better known as the Veuve Clicquot , revolutionized the Champagne trade, invented the riddling technique and sought brand identity by selling her wines with the iconic orange cap.

Founded in 1772, Veuve Clicquot is among the most prestigious Champagne Houses. Its extensive holdings, many originally purchased by Madame Clicquot, stretch throughout the top-rated areas of the Champagne region and are exceptional in size and quality. As in madame Clicquot's day, bottles age in the House's vast, vaulted cellars in Reims, portions of which were constructed some 2,000 years ago by the Romans. The remarkable Madame Clicquot (1777-1866) is considered one of the first business-women of the modern era. Widowed in 1805 at the age of 27, Madame Veuve Clicquot (born Ponsardin) defied every convention of the day to take the helm of her late husband's small Champagne House. She personally supervised cellar activities and introduced innovative production techniques still used today. Champagne Veuve Clicquot is known internationally for its classically styled and full-bodied Champagne

Mary Penfold of Penfold 's in Australia. Before and after her husband's death in 1870, she ran the estate, supervised blending and experimented with varietals. By the 1870s, Penfold's claimed to be selling one-third of all wine in South Australia.

Merry Edwards Another successful female coming from California, Merry Edwards, the eponymous owner of Merry Edwards Winery in the Russian River Valley, has had her share of successes and obstacles during her career. Starting as an amateur making The Merry Vintners wines during college, she turned her love for wine into a successful career. An early-believer in clonal variation, she studied and tested different clones of Chardonnay in an effort to prove her hypothesis on the differences between clones of the same varietal. She was the founding winemaker for Matanzas Creek until 1984, and after a few career setbacks during the 1980s, she went on to found her own winery with help from her family in 1997, where she has been producing wine ever since Please see women winemakers

Ali Boyle is the co/owner and marketing manager for Alexandria Nicole Cellars. Ali and Jarrod Boyle founded Alexandria Nicole Cellars in 2004. Located on their 243-acre estate vineyard, Destiny Ridge, in the Horse Heaven Hills

"Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance."

--- Attributed to Benjamin Franklin

"I made a mental note to watch which bottle became empty soonest, sometimes a more telling evaluation system than any other."

--- Gerald Asher, On Wine, 1982

 

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