Efflorescence, or simply flowering, of the vines is one of the most sensitive and crucial periods in the life of a vine. If you remember in my last post I talked about crucial times in the life of a vine. At that time it was all about bud break when the dormant bud on the […]

I was debating whether “Bud Break” for the vine is Christmas or Easter and thinking about it, it is clearly Easter. First of all Easter and bud break occur at roughly the same time and secondly for the vine it is a re-birth and thanks to Mother Nature she never disappoints us, except perhaps when it comes to timing.

Winter 2021 Happy Benevolent Snow It was this time last year when we started to hear about this novel coronavirus and it was this time last year that we were forced to shut down.Our world as we knew it was turned upside down. The humdrum routines of daily life evaporated. It’s hard to imagine how […]

Andrew Hodson’s Newsletter This season of mellow fruitfulness seems like and is like no other, as you may well say is true of everything about 2020.  Autumn is always my most favorite season of the year. The time when autumn leaves start to fall almost as declarative of a change in season as spring is […]

Witnessing Taste Components: Flavor and Finish I started this saga on Sparkling wine but I realized early on that before one can fully appreciate the subtleties of sparkling wine I had to first cover the basics of appreciating regular wine be it still, sparkling or even fortified.  The word “appreciate” is a bit loaded  in […]

The Continuing Saga of Understanding Sparkling Wine Part 5 Witnessing wine – The Body of the wine The properties we consider when we taste wine come under the following categories, Sweetness  Acid Tannins Alcohol BODY Flavor intensity Flavor identity Finish Getting back to witnessing wine, one of the most difficult qualities to describe is what […]

I thought I would give “ witnessing wine” a break for a week because I recently had the delight to try our latest 2019 release of Viognier as well as experiencing a recent Viognier with Jennie Mcloud of Chrysalis vineyard. I was stoked to witness two superb wines that really are unique to Virginia.The thing […]

With Andrew Hodson, Veritas Vineyard and Winery Witnessing taste components in wine – Alcohol. Just to do a brief recap – to witness the properties of a wine and here although I am featuring sparkling wine in the blog these principles apply to all wines from Asti Spumante to Zinfandel. Each time we taste we […]

By Andrew Hodson, Veritas Vineyard and Winery Brief recap, to witness the properties of a wine we go through the same framework each time. We have covered the appearances of wine and how to adequately smell the wine and in our last few segments we have been talking about describing the tasting of wine in […]

Summer 2020 Retrospective It’s the autumn equinox time to think back on the summer of 2020. Remember at the beginning of 2020 we came out with quips like I hope the year 2020 will bring us 2020 vision, a clear insight into what lies ahead. Well we all know that what we have seen thus […]