Valentine’s Day is synonymous with romance, and what better way to express your love than with the timeless combination of chocolate and wine? Explore our curated selection of chocolate and wine pairings designed to elevate your Valentine’s celebration to new heights of indulgence and passion.

Christmas, for the most part, is for the children, but it is also our most profound celebration of birth, transcending into the love of and love for children, who are the future for all of us.

Revisiting the Sparkling Wine Saga As we all know, only sparkling wine that comes from the Champagne region of France is called “Champagne”. The rest of the world is stuck with using “sparkling wine” to describe their bubbly. And to their credit the “Champenois” have done a fantastic job branding Champagne. In so doing, they […]

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 […]

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 […]

By Andrew Hodson and Veritas Vineyard and Winery Tasting:  Acid/Sugar Balance I’ve spent time in the series describing how best to analyse wine as part of our understanding and evaluation of any wine be it sparkling or still.  We have to, as a first step, witness the properties of the wine we are tasting and […]

How to understand Sparkling Wine – the continuing  saga. By Andrew Hodson of Veritas Vineyard and Winery We saw last week that when you actually taste something, say for example a Veritas Mousseux the smell and taste combine to create what we call-”flavor.” The problem is there is no way that we can measure what […]

by Andrew Hodson | Veritas Vineyard & Winery – Charlottesville, VA What’s a Pet Nat got to do with Sparkling Wine? I talked last week of how the British were formative in what was to become  the product we now know as “Champagne” but before Champagne became Champagne there existed a way of making wine […]