News about wine making and wine appreciation by our Deaf fellows and friends, news not about people
Editor: Rusty Wales, the vintner of Prince of Wales wines
Wine Quotation: "Making good wine is a skill; making great wine is an art" Robert Mondavi, the pioneering vintner who helped put California wine country on the map, died at his Napa Valley home recently (May 2008) . . . (1913-2008)
Editorial Comments: Sulfites and Your Wine With a glass of wine in my hand, I received the similar comments from some friends, "I love wine but its sulfites give me headache . . . ". Allow me set the record straight:
• All wines contain sulfites. Yeast (without which wine cannot be produced) naturally produce sulfites during fermentation so there is virtually no wine which has no sulfites at all. If you still think sulfites are causing your headache, try eating dried apricots. These 2-oz dried apricots typically have 10 times the sulfites more than a glass of wine. If you eat those apricots and have a reaction (headache), then you know you may be allergic to sulfites.
Fun fact: Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd president of the United States, was a winemaker and avid wine collector. A bottle of his 1787 Bordeaux, Chateau Lafite, was sold during an auction in 1985 for $160,000, long after it had turned sour and undrinkable!
Wine Making: Never make your own wine before? Are most manual booklets difficult to read? Have no fear! Bobby, our very own Deaf Grapevine webmaster, has developed an easy-to-see/easy-to-understand photographed wine making, step by step. Never before has such instruction anywhere been so clear until Bobby created this one. It is with our pride that we install this instructional manual for beginner wine makers to our DG. Answer to the trivia question from the last issue: Sulfites are added to wine: d) to sanitize bottles. Winemakers have been adding sulfites to wines for thousands of years. The Greeks and Romans did that in their times. Besides sanitizing, sulfites protect damage to the wine caused by oxygen and also it prevents organisms from growing in the wine causing vinegar.
Today's trivia question: Tannin is:
b) taste of full-bodied wine c) a preservative coming from grape skins/seeds during fermentation d) color of grape skin.
News in the Deaf World:
The first placard of 22-slide wine workshop, so much to learn about wine!
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