| Encyclopedia of Wine Hokum | | | | By: Jennifer Rosen | << back  Page 2 of 4 next >> |
Fattening: Diet-guru/sadists notwithstanding, there’s no evidence that wine makes you fat and plenty to the contrary. Zero fat, zero carbohydrates (when sugar turns to alcohol the carbs are lost), takes half a bottle to equal the calories in one Snicker’s bar. In a recent study, obese patients, particularly women, who added wine to their diet they lost more weight than a control group. Does it replace nutrition? Moderate drinkers get about 6% of their energy from wine which means they derive 94% from other sources. Does it weaken dieters’ resolve? You might argue that facing steamed-chicken and broccoli every night would be unbearable without it.
German: No longer limited to sweet, sweeter and Blue Nun-of-the-above, delicious German Riesling is one of the world’s great bargains. Often bone-dry, it’s fabulous with food and low in alcohol so you get to drink more. If only the bottle would fit in your fridge.
Headache: Quit blaming sulfites. Cheese, hot dogs and dried fruit have lots more of them. The real culprit is still on the loose, but probably lurks in the skins, a much bigger factor in red wine than white. If Euro-wines are kinder on your skull, it’s probably due to the thinner-skinned grapes their climates produce.
Kabinett: Not a guarantee of dryness, only of grape-sugar level at harvest, like you care. Trocken means dry, but you can’t always trust it. Either get to know your German regions, or ask someone who’s tasted the wine. I said it was out there, I didn’t say it was easy.
Kosher: Kiddush Kool-Aid no longer, today’s kosher wine is not your father’s Manichewitz (unless he paid for it). Chardonnay, Cabernet, Merlot – Kosher now runs the flavor and quality gamut. Why is this wine different from all other wines? It’s made only from Sunday through Friday on special equipment with a guy in a beanie supervising.
Legs: These “tears” on the side of the glass are thick and slow when wine is high in alcohol or sugar, and thin and fast if not. But, unlike Queen Ann chairs and sumo wrestlers, wine can never have “nice legs.”
Magnets: Whether embedded in a coaster, clipped around the bottle’s neck or plugged in with lights zapping, magnets neither align molecules, re-arrange tannins, restructure acids nor do anything else to instantly age or mellow wine. If you experiment with their effects long enough, however, you might find yourself horizontally aligned with Earth’s magnetic field.
Meritage: Faux-French impresses some people but not the Meritage Association. Members use the term to ID their Bordeaux blend – outsiders with different blends may not. When a sommelier asks if you’d like the “merit- tahj,” why not demonstrate how the marriage of “merit” and “heritage” should be pronounced?
Organic: Still contains sulfites, a natural part of every wine. Organic winemaking is a tricky proposal, with unstable, sometimes weird results. Organic grape farming, however, is both hip and respectable and produces some of the world’s great wines.
Punt: The dent in the bottom of the bottle does not correlate with quality. It does, however, cut into wine-space, requiring a bigger bottle, so it looks like you’re getting more. Perhaps companies who pull this off are smart enough to make better wine, too.
Red: The required color for IMPORTANT wine, according to certain connoisseurs, who want no truck with Alsatian Riesling, white Burgundy, Hungarian Tokaj, German Eiswein and a rainbow of other goodies. It’s their loss and leaves more wine for the rest of us.
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