Did You Know ?

• Australians are the biggest wine drinkers in the English-speaking world? Of all countries, Americans rank 19th, after Belgium and Romania, with about 18.6 liters per capita.

• The "winecask" or bag-in-box is an Australian invention that changed the marketing of wine in this country, and the world?

• Grape varieties do not determine the degree of sweetness in the wine; the winemaker does. Any grape can be made into wine as sweet or dry as you like.

• The color of red wines comes entirely from the skin. The juice of most wine grapes is clear, and red wines must be fermented with their skins in order to extract color.

• The world's most widely planted wine grapevine is not chardonnay...yet. It's airen, which is not planted commercially here at all.

• Shiraz is the same wine as hermitage (and, in France, syrah).

• Wine bottles often have a punt. This is: a) to collect the sediment in old reds and make decanting easier, b) to strengthen a bottle of champagne, which has 4.5 atmospheres of pressure inside, and c) increasingly these days, for looks.

• Wine breathes through the oak staves of the barrel, referred to as "aging" or "maturation", a process of slow, controlled oxidation.

• How the bubbles get into the champagne bottle is simpler than may seem. When wine ferments, it produces carbon dioxide. When it ferments in a closed container, such as a bottle, the gas trapped. When you release the pressure by popping the cork, the gas comes out of its dissolved state and you have an effervescing wine.

  

• Bubbly is more intoxicating than still wines because the carbon dioxide gas speeds the alcohol into the small intestines, where is is absorbed faster than in the stomach.

• Bubbles cannot form in a glass of champagne without there being deformities on the glass surface. These are microscopic cavities which trap air pockets, which then act as bubble-formation sites.

• There are more than 700 chemical compounds in wine which have been identified and named. Probably a couple of hundred contribute significantly to flavor, making wine potentially one of our most complex foods.

• Grapes and wine share flavor compounds with various herbs, spices, vegetables, other fruits and organic things. This is why tasters use words such as "peach", "vanilla" and "capsicum" to describe them.

• Wine is a sterile medium because of its acidity, alcohol and pH. Pathogens cannot live in it, which means it's very safe to drink. In fact, people used to mix wine with polluted water or suspect water, in an effort to make the water safe.

• Sulfur dioxide has been used as a sterilant and antimicrobial agent in winemaking since ancient Roman times. Although it hasn't been declared on labels until quite recently, its a traditional and almost universal part of winemaking.

• Moderate wine drinking decreases both the risk of coronary heart decease and mortality rates in people aged over 40.

• Until the mid 1960, England did not require any wine labels on bottles.

• All the gold medals and trophies and all the rave reviews by wine writers and magazine tasting panels, are worth NOTHING if you do not like the wine!

Return to our Homepage