Wine Spectator

Wine Spectator is a lifestyle magazine that focuses on wine and wine culture. It publishes 15 issues per year with content that includes news, articles, profiles, and general entertainment pieces. Each issue also includes from 400 to more than 1,000 wine reviews, which consist of wine ratings and tasting notes.^[1]

Among the critics in the magazine's tasting panel are James Molesworth, Kim Marcus, Bruce Sanderson, Harvey Steiman, James Laube and from 1981 to 2010, James Suckling.^[2][3] Thomas Matthews is the executive editor.

Founded as a San Diego-based tabloid newspaper by Bob Morrisey in 1976, Wine Spectator was purchased three years later by current publisher and editor Marvin R. Shanken.^[4] That year, its panel of experts blind tasted and reviewed over 12,400 wines^{[citation needed]}.

In 1981 the magazine introduced its Restaurant Awards program, which reviews restaurant wine lists on three levels: the Award of Excellence (basic), Best of Award of Excellence (second-tier), and the Grand Award (highest). As of 2009 over 3,500 restaurants held one of these awards.^[5].

The magazine organized and sponsored the Wine Spectator Wine Tasting of 1986 on the tenth anniversary of the "Judgment of Paris".

In 2008 the magazine was ranked by the Luxury Institute as the #1 business and consumer publication among wealthy readers^[6].

Other activities

Wine Spectator operates the Wine Experience, a yearly event that includes wine tastings and seminars. In 2009 over 1,000 people attended in New York City where 335 different wines were poured.^[7]

The magazine also runs the Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation, which has raised more than $10.9 million to support wine and food education and scholarship programs.^[7]

Criticism

The magazine's Restaurant Awards program has since come under some criticism.^[8][9] At the August 2008 conference of the American Association of Wine Economists in Portland, Oregon, a hoax exposé submission of the fictitious restaurant Osteria L’Intrepido was revealed by the author and Fearless Critic founder Robin Goldstein: he had won an Award of Excellence for a restaurant that didn't exist and whose "reserve wine list" was full of the lowest-rated Italian wines in history. He stated the exposé to be part of research for an academic paper^[10], whose aim was to discover what it takes for a restaurant's wine list to receive an award from the magazine.^{[9][11][12][13][14]} With nearly 4,500 restaurant applications, the magazine earns over $1 million each year from submission fees.^[15][16] Editor Thomas Matthews published an official response on the magazine's forum site.

Wine

Wine is an alcoholic beverage, made of fermented fruit juice, usually from grapes.^[1] The natural chemical balance of grapes lets them ferment without the addition of sugars, acids, enzymes, or other nutrients.^[2] Grape wine is produced by fermenting crushed grapes using various types of yeast. Yeast consumes the sugars in the grapes and converts them into alcohol. Different varieties of grapes and strains of yeasts produce different types of wine.
Wines made from other fruits, such as apples and berries, are normally named after the fruit from which they are produced (for example, apple wine or elderberry wine) and are generically called fruit wine or country wine (not to be confused with the French term vin de pays). Others, such as barley wine and rice wine (i.e., sake), are made from starch-based materials and resemble beer and spirit more than wine, while ginger wine is fortified with brandy. In these cases, the term "wine" refers to the higher alcohol content rather than production process.^[3] The commercial use of the English word "wine" (and its equivalent in other languages) is protected by law in many jurisdictions.^[4]

Wine has a rich history dating back thousands of years, with the earliest known production occurring around 8,000 years ago on the territory of modern-day Georgia.^[5][6] It first appeared in the Balkans at about 4500 BC and was very common in ancient Greece, Thrace and Rome. Wine has also played an important role in religion throughout history. The Greek god Dionysus and the Roman equivalent Bacchus represented wine, and the drink is also used in Christian Eucharist ceremonies and the Jewish Kiddush.

Etymology

The English word "wine" comes from the Proto-Germanic "*winam," an early borrowing from the Latin vinum, "wine" or "(grape) vine," itself derived from the Proto-Indo-European stem *win-o- (cf. Hittite: wiyana, Lycian: Oino, Ancient Greek οῖνος - oînos, Aeolic Greek ϝοίνος - woinos).^[7][8]
The earliest attested terms referring to wine are the Mycenaean Greek me-tu-wo ne-wo meaning "the month of new wine" or "festival of the new wine" and wo-no-wa-ti-si meaning "wine garden", written in Linear B inscriptions.^{[9][10][11][12]}
Although no clear evidence has been found of any linguistic connection, some scholars have noted the similarities between the words for wine in the Kartvelian (e.g. Georgian ღვინო ɣvino), Indo-European languages (e.g. Russian vino), and Semitic (*wayn), hinting to the possibility that this word diffused into all these language families from a common origin.^[13] Some Georgian scholars have speculated that Georgian was the origin of this word and that it entered into the Indo-European languages via Semitic.^[14]

History

Archaeological evidence suggests that the earliest known production of wine, made by fermenting grapes, took place as early as 8,000 years ago in Georgia^[5] and 6,100 years ago in Armenia.^[15][16][6] These locations are all within the natural area of the European grapevine Vitis vinifera.

Pressing wine after the harvest; Tacuinum Sanitatis, 14th century

Through an extensive gene-mapping project in 2006, Dr. McGovern and his colleagues analyzed the heritage of more than 110 modern grape cultivars, and narrowed their origin to a region in Georgia, where also wine residues were discovered on the inner surfaces of 8,000-year-old ceramic storage jars in Shulavari, Georgia.^[17]Other notable areas of wine production have been discovered in Greece and date back to 4500 BC.^{[18][19][20][16]} The same sites also contain the world's earliest evidence of crushed grapes.^[18] On January 11, 2011 in one of Armenia's Vayots Dzor province cave was found a wine making press dating to approximately 6,000 years ago.^[20][16][21] Literary references to wine are abundant in Homer (9th century BC, but possibly composed even earlier), Alkman (7th century BC), and others. In Ancient Egypt, six of 36 wine amphoras were found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun bearing the name "Kha'y", a royal chief vintner. Five of these amphoras were designated as from the King's personal estate with the sixth listed as from the estate of the royal house of Aten.^[22] Traces of wine have also been found in central Asian Xinjiang, dating from the second and first millennia BC.^[23]
Viticulture in India has a long history dating back to the time of the Indus Valley civilization when grapevines were believed to have been introduced from Persia sometime in the 5000 BC.^{[citation needed]} The first known mentioning of grape-based wines was in the late 4th century BC writings of Chanakya who was the chief minister of Emperor Chandragupta Maurya. In his writings, Chanakya condemns the use of alcohol while chronicling the emperor and his court's frequent indulgence of a style of grape wine known as Madhu.^[24]
A 2003 report by archaeologists indicates a possibility that grapes were mixed with rice to produce mixed fermented beverages in China in the early years of the seventh millennium BC. Pottery jars from the Neolithic site of Jiahu, Henan contained traces of tartaric acid and other organic compounds commonly found in wine. However, other fruits indigenous to the region, such as hawthorn, cannot be ruled out.^[25][26] If these beverages, which seem to be the precursors of rice wine, included grapes rather than other fruits, these grapes were of any of the several dozen indigenous wild species of grape in China, rather than from Vitis vinifera, which were introduced into China some 6000 years later.^[25]
One of the lasting legacies of the ancient Roman Empire was the viticulture foundation the Romans laid in the lands that today are world renowned wine regions. Areas with Roman garrison towns, like Bordeaux, Trier, and Colchester, the Romans planted vineyards to supply local needs and limit the cost of long distance trading.^[27] In medieval Europe, the Roman Catholic Church staunchly supported wine, since they required it for the Mass. Monks in France made wine for years, aging it in caves.^[28] An old English recipe that survived in various forms until the 19th century calls for refining white wine from bastard—bad or tainted bastardo wine.^[29]

Grape varieties

Wine is usually made from one or more varieties of the European species Vitis vinifera, such as Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Gamay and Merlot. When one of these varieties is used as the predominant grape (usually defined by law as a minimum of 75% or 85%), the result is a varietal, as opposed to a blended, wine. Blended wines are not necessarily considered inferior to varietal wines; some of the world's most expensive wines, from regions like Bordeaux and the Rhone Valley, are blended from different grape varieties of the same vintage.^{[citation needed]}
Wine can also be made from other species of grape or from hybrids, created by the genetic crossing of two species. Vitis labrusca (of which the Concord grape is a cultivar), Vitis aestivalis, Vitis rupestris, Vitis rotundifolia and Vitis riparia are native North American grapes usually grown to eat fresh or for grape juice, jam, or jelly, but sometimes made into wine.
Hybridization is different from grafting. Most of the world's vineyards are planted with European V. vinifera vines that have been grafted onto North American species rootstock. This is common practice because North American grape species are resistant to phylloxera, a root louse that eventually kills the vine. In the late 19th century, most of Europe's vineyards (only excluding some of the driest vineyards in Southern Europe) were devastated by the bug, leading to massive vine deaths and eventual replanting. Grafting is done in every wine-producing country of the world except for Argentina, the Canary Islands and Chile—the only countries not yet exposed to the insect.^[30]
In the context of wine production, terroir is a concept that encompasses the varieties of grapes used, elevation and shape of the vineyard, type and chemistry of soil, climate and seasonal conditions, and the local yeast cultures. The range of possibilities here can result in great differences between wines, influencing the fermentation, finishing, and aging processes as well. Many wineries use growing and production methods that preserve or accentuate the aroma and taste influences of their unique terroir.^[31] However, flavor differences are not desirable for producers of mass-market table wine or other cheaper wines, where consistency is more important. Such producers try to minimize differences in sources of grapes through production techniques such as micro-oxygenation, tannin filtration, cross-flow filtration, thin film evaporation, and spinning cones.^[32]

Classification

Regulations govern the classification and sale of wine in many regions of the world. European wines tend to be classified by region (e.g. Bordeaux, Rioja and Chianti), while non-European wines are most often classified by grape (e.g. Pinot Noir and Merlot). More and more, however, market recognition of particular regions is leading to their increased prominence on non-European wine labels. Examples of non-European recognized locales include Napa Valley in California, Willamette Valley in Oregon, Columbia Valley in Washington, Barossa Valley and Hunter Valley in Australia, Central Valley in Chile, Vale dos Vinhedos in Brazil, Hawke's Bay and Marlborough in New Zealand, Okanagan Valley and Niagara Peninsula in Canada.
Some blended wine names are marketing terms, and the use of these names is governed by trademark law rather than by specific wine laws. For example, Meritage (sounds like "heritage") is generally a Bordeaux-style blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, and may also include Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, and Malbec. Commercial use of the term "Meritage" is allowed only via licensing agreements with an organization called the "Meritage Association".

European classifications

Moscato d'Asti, a DOCG wine

France has various appellation systems based on the concept of terroir, with classifications ranging from Vin de Table ("table wine") at the bottom, through Vin de Pays and Appellation d'Origine Vin Délimité de Qualité Supérieure (AOVDQS) up to Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée (AOC) or similar, depending on the region.^[33][34] Portugal has something similar and, in fact, pioneered this technique in 1756 with a royal charter that created the "Demarcated Douro Region" and regulated wine production and trade.^[35] Germany did likewise in 2002, although their system has not yet achieved the authority of those of the other countries'.^[36][37] Spain, Greece and Italy have classifications based on a dual system of region of origin and product quality.^[38]

Beyond Europe

New World wine—wines from outside of the traditional wine growing regions of Europe tend to be classified by grape rather than by terroir or region of origin, although there have been non-official attempts to classify them by quality.^[39][40]

Vintages

A "vintage wine" is one made from grapes that were all or mostly grown in a particular year, and labeled as such. Most countries allow a vintage wine to include a portion that is not from the labeled vintage. Variations in a wine's character from year to year can include subtle differences in color, palate, nose, body and development. High-quality wines can improve in flavor with age if properly stored.^[1] Consequently, it is not uncommon for wine enthusiasts and traders to save bottles of an especially good vintage wine for future consumption.
In the United States, for a wine to be vintage dated and labeled with a country of origin or American Viticultural Area (AVA) (such as "Sonoma Valley"), it must contain at least 95% of its volume from grapes harvested in that year.^[41] If a wine is not labeled with a country of origin or AVA the percentage requirement is lowered to 85%.^[41]
Vintage wines are generally bottled in a single batch so that each bottle will have a similar taste. Climate can have a big impact on the character of a wine to the extent that different vintages from the same vineyard can vary dramatically in flavor and quality.^[42] Thus, vintage wines are produced to be individually characteristic of the vintage and to serve as the flagship wines of the producer. Superior vintages, from reputable producers and regions, will often fetch much higher prices than their average vintages. Some vintage wines, like Brunellos, are only made in better-than-average years.
For consistency, non-vintage wines can be blended from more than one vintage, which helps wine makers sustain a reliable market image and maintain sales even in bad years.^[43][44] One recent study suggests that for normal drinkers, vintage year may not be as significant to perceived wine quality as currently thought, although wine connoisseurs continue to place great importance on it.^[45]