Napa Auction Sets New Records For Single Lot, E-Auction, Barrel Tasting, & Blood Alcohol Level.
Live Auction stage at Auction Napa Valley 2015.
The Auction Napa Valley 2015 came to a close on Sunday night after raising $15.8 million for programs in children’s education and community health. While the total didn’t break the old record, new highs were set for a single Live Auction item, the E-Auction total, the Barrel Tasting total and how many gallons of Cabernet I can drink without falling down.
The Napa Valley Vintners reported, “Since its inception in 1981, the NVV has given more than $145 million in Auction Napa Valley proceeds to Napa County nonprofits.” The proceeds help more than 90,000 clients annually in Napa County, some of whom need the community health assistance after trying to lift all that money.
Read MoreThe Cumulative Effect In Food And Wine Pairing.
Chapter Nine, Part Six.
When pairing food with wine the cancellation effect works to your advantage once you understand how to balance the taste or texture of sweet and acidic food with similar traits in wine. While acidity and sweetness cancel each other out when combined on your palate, bitter and piquant sensations accumulate and magnify one another. The same can be said for pairing low acid foods with low acid wines so I’ll go ahead and say it; creamy or fatty traits do not cancel each other out; they accumulate on your palate (and also on your waistline). So after many years of deliberation I’ve decided to call this the cumulative effect.
The Cancellation Effect In Food And Wine Pairing.
Chapter Nine, Part Five.
Matching food and wine by weight will put you in the ballpark when choosing the proper wine, but taste is the key to hitting an astronomic-gastronomic home run. Sweet, sour, salt, bitter, umami and piquance interact with one another in predictable ways and once you understand how these principles apply at your dining room table you’ll be able to create some major league food and wine combinations. I lump these interactions into three categories I call the cancellation effect, the cumulative effect, and the neutral effect.
The WineSnark Academy for Sensory Testing, Evaluation & Debauchery (W.A.S.T.E.D.) On Food & Wine Pairing Principles.
Chapter Nine, Parts Two & Three.
Shortly after WineSnark began its detailed research into taste perception it became apparent that an undertaking of this magnitude required a research team of dedicated, compassionate wine professionals, or as they’re known in the trade, drunks.
And so was born the WineSnark Academy for Sensory Testing, Evaluation and Debauchery (W.A.S.T.E.D.). We WASTED professionals do not take our research sitting down, as getting back up is often difficult, and because thousands of grapes have given their lives to further our understanding of human physiology, biochemistry, sensory perception and stuff.
Read More“Terroir Don’t Mean S_ _ _!”
Chapter Eleven. Part Five.
When it comes to the unique “sense of place” that makes wine regions unique, most wine professionals have a tendency to take terroir for granite. But there is one influential wine professional who claims terroir is nothing more than the emperor’s new clothes, a cunning contrivance to keep wine on a pedestal and inflate prices.
Fred Franzia, the man behind Bronco Wine Company, California’s fourth largest winery, is often at odds with those who preach the gospel of terroir, people I call terroirists. In 2010 Franzia wrote on his Facebook page,
Does anybody complicate Cheerios by saying the wheat¹ has to be grown on the side of a mountain and the terroir in North Dakota is better than Kansas and all this horse s- – -?²
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