Latest news with #vintners
Telegraph
5 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
How ‘sunset wines' are transforming traditional cocktail hour
Orange-wine drinkers used to style themselves as insurgents against the claret establishment. Now this wine colour hasn't just gone mainstream, it's been joined by a dreamcoat array of other shades of amber and rosorange and coral and fuchsia and cerise and vermilion. These sunset hues span variations on the orange and orange-rosé themes. They also exploit a territory once known as clairet: the boundary between a very dark pink and a vibrantly translucent light red. How 'sunset' wines get their colour Orange and rosorange wine get their colour from 'skin contact', a process that has spawned a thousand innuendos and isn't quite as exciting as it sounds. Simply, most wine grapes contain pigment in the skins but have pale flesh and juice. This is why it is possible to make white Champagne from the black grapes pinot noir and pinot meunier, and why it is called blanc de noirs. White wine is made by pressing grapes so the juice is removed immediately from the skins (and other solids), taking with it little of the pigment. In red winemaking, the grapes are crushed and fermented in contact with the skins, seeds and pulp, which results in more of the colour, and other compounds such as tannins, transferring into the wine. Playing around with those norms and with the length of skin contact time, and the maceration temperature, can give you a different range of colours. Fermenting white grapes with the skins brings orange hues into the liquid; removing the fermenting juice of red grapes from the skins sooner can give you different shades of pink through to light red. Combining both approaches gives you rosorange. What do skin-contact wines taste like? These sunset wines are everywhere, but they're not very easy to classify. In restaurants, some wine lists, like that of Bar Valette in east London, have replaced the traditional red, white and rosé taxonomy with red, white and 'Neither red nor white'. Meanwhile Bobo Wines, the bag-in-box company, has called its version from Alsace Vin Blouge (a blend of blanc and rouge). 'The wine world's newest darling… part-white, part-red, maybe even part-orange… boundary-defying but utterly smashable,' goes the blurb. This exactly nails the attraction. In appearance, such wines tempt the Instagram lens. In flavour, they engage aperitivo-hour drinkers, who look for wines with the appeal of a light cocktail; often fruity and chilled, perhaps with a vestige of florality and a tinge of either astringency or sweetness. They're not wines you need to think about. They're not wines you match to food (they go with everything). They're pure social: bar wines, beach wines, festival wines. Here are the ones I think you'll enjoy. The best skin-contact wines
Wall Street Journal
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
California Chenin Blanc Is Back, And Now Is the Time to Buy
Grapes regularly fall in and out of favor among winemakers and growers. Chenin Blanc fell so far in California, it practically dropped off the winemaking map. In 1991 there were just under 31,000 acres of Chenin in the state; by 2024 the total had slipped to just over 4,000. Now, thanks to a band of impassioned vintners, California Chenin is back. The best Chenins I tasted for this column were some of the most memorable California wines I've tasted this year.
Bloomberg
05-06-2025
- Automotive
- Bloomberg
Billionaire Bill Koch on Collecting Wine, Avoiding Counterfeits
Hi, Top Shelf readers, it's Elin McCoy, with the latest on wine. Although vintners in Provence are complaining about the new roadside wine vending machines rolling out across their region, I can't think of a better start to summer than having rosé at the ready.
Wall Street Journal
23-05-2025
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
What Does It Take to Sell Wine to Millennials and Gen Z? Donkeys, for One.
Will wine drinking end when Boomers and Gen Xers no longer raise their glasses? If you've been reading the same headlines I have, you might think this could happen. Here, a small sample of the bad news: 'Dour Grapes: Why Wine Makers Are Struggling to Attract Gen Z and Millennial Drinkers' (Fast Company); 'Boomer-Centric Wine Industry at a Crossroads as Gen Z Turns Away From Alcohol' (Fortune). But do these headlines tell the whole story? Do younger drinkers truly lack interest in wine, or have winery owners failed to figure out what they want? I talked with vintners all over the country and found a number getting quite creative to draw in millennial and Gen Z drinkers as well as boomers and Gen X.
