Wine: Swirl, Sniff & Taste!

As Joan Collins rightly said, “Age is just a number. It’s totally irrelevant unless, of course, you happen to be a bottle of wine.”

The story of wine starts from the village of Jiahu in central China where it has been identified on pottery shards, a fermented beverage with composition of rice, honey and fruit, which is dated to be 9000 years old.

Types of Wine

• Red Wine: Still wine made with black grapes. These can range from light to dark and bone-dry to sweet.

• White Wine: A still wine produced from green and sometimes black grapes. Flavors span from rich and creamy to light and zesty.

• Rosé Wine: Still wine from black grapes produced by removing the skins before they deeply color the wine. Also formed by blending red and white wine together.

• Sparkling Wine: It involves a secondary fermentation causing bubbles and can be red, white, or rosé.

• Fortified Wine: Typically a dessert wine, but many dry-style fortified wines exist, such as dry Sherry.

Some Interesting facts on Wine

• How to hold a wine glass? By the stem! Otherwise, the heat from the hand raises the temperature of the wine and diminishes the experience of its taste.

• Killing women for drinking wine! Sad, but this was the law in ancient Rome that if a husband found his wife drinking wine, he was at liberty to kill her.

• Bathing in wine is traditionally seen as a rejuvenating process for the body. The Yunessun Spa in Hakone-Machi, Japan, is where guests can swim in red wine.

• The wreckage of Titanic is believed to contain world's oldest wine cellars.

• In Vietnam, if you order Cobra blood wine, the waiter will take a live cobra, kill it on the spot, drain the blood into a shot glass of rice wine, and top it off with the cobra’s still beating heart for you to gulp down.

• Red wines are considered to have some beneficial effects on health if had moderately; such as lessening the chance of developing Type 2 diabetes by 30% and cardiovascular disease; and increase in mortality.Hippocrates used it too, in many of his recorded medicines. Additionally, it has no fat or cholesterol, so it can be had guilt-free.

• Due to less enzymes in the stomach lining that is needed to break down alcohol simply, women are more inclined to the effects of wine than men.

• China has become the leading market for red wine, not just for its flavor but also, the color is favored by the government, and is considered lucky.

• The “Cheers” ritual started back in the Middle Ages, when poisoning was a favorite way to get rid of an enemy. To be sure their glass was poison-free, drinkers would first pour a bit of wine into each other’s glass, so if there was poison in one, it was now in both.

A Tip: Wine, Cheese & Olives = Heaven!