Test your wine knowledge with quiz questions from our expert.
True or False: A wine's phenol content determines its level of perceptible astringency?
False
While a wine with more polyphenolic compounds(such as tannins) is likely to feel more astringent in your mouth, according to Clark Smith's book "Postmodern Winemaking" it's the way that tannin molecules are assembled that primarily determines how much astringency we perceive in a finished wine.
Tartaric acid is rare in plants, but is prevalent in grapes, varying in concentration based on grape variety and the soils types in which the grapes are grown. This kind of acid develops during flowering and remains stable in the fully-matured grapes. Tartaric acid helps in stabilizing wine and retaining its color, and are the cause of the crystals that appear in some wines when they age (resulting as a by-product of tartaric acid’s solubility).
Cream Sherry’s name comes not from its lactose content (there's none), but instead references its signature richness, which is the result of combining the dry Oloroso style with sweet wine made (the latter traditionally from Pedro Ximénez grapes).
Drinking sparkling water between wines serves as an ideal palate cleanser, but drinking it between sips can cause what effects on the perception of a wine’s flavor?
Diminish a wine’s sweetness and make it seem less tannic
Just as it does for sparkling wine, the CO2 in sparkling water can have a drying effect on any wine you’re drinking at the same time, primarily by reducing our perception of the wine’s overall fruitiness. CO2 can also have a softening effect on tannins, the bitter elements imparted by a wine’s seeds and skins.
Drinking tap water in between sips of wine isn’t a good idea, if you want to ensure that you don’t contaminate the taste of the wine that you’re drinking. Even small amounts of chlorine, present in most tap water, can do what to the taste of wine in your
All of the above
Chlorine is a disinfectant, and can significantly diminish our perception of a wine’s fruitiness. This effect in turn increases our perception of a wine’s tannins (adding bitterness) and its acids (causing it to taste unbalanced). Fortunately, when this is caused by drinking the small amount of chlorine in tap water, the effect is temporary.
True or False: Almost all wines contain residual sugar, even if they are fermented to “dryness?”
True
Wine grapes contain several types of sugars, but all are in relatively low number apart from fructose and glucose, which are six-carbon sugars. During fermentation, the yeasts will transform most of the fructose and glucose into alcohol, leaving the other sugars of different carbon structures relatively untouched. Those sugars will be present in the finished wine, even if it is vinified “dry,” though usually at levels that we find undetectable (sorry, for those of you with a sweet tooth).
Which insects likely play a crucial role in transmitting fermentation yeasts to grapes?
Wasps
Research form the University of Florence has shown that saccharomyces cerevisias, the yeasts largely responsible for wine fermentation, overwinters in the guts of wasp queens, who pass it on to her larvae when feeding them. Those wasps, when mature, also carry the yeast and can in turn impart yeast cells (which are not airborne, and thus require a proxy to move them) into grapes when they bite grape skins while on the vine, thus potentially playing a crucial role in wine fermentation.
Sherlock Holmes cracks part of the case in "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange" by noticing the details of what wine-related object?
All of the above
In "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange" the famous detective notices that a half-drunk bottle of high-quality wine was opened using the short corkscrew a multiplex knife rather than a much longer corkscrew found in a nearby drawer, thus ruining the long cork (a sign of the wine's potential high quality). One of three wine glasses at the crime scene also has a large amount of sediment in it, leading Holmes to surmise that there were actually less then three perpetrators drinking at the scene.
The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was a popular radio show in the 1930s and 1940s. What wine company sponsored the show?
Petri Wine
Escalon, California based Petri Wine sponsored The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes from 1939 to 1946, after which it was replaced by the (probably decidedly less tasty) Kreml Hair Tonic for Men. The show was quite popular in its time, even being broadcasted overseas through the Armed Forces Radio Service during World War II.
What wine might have been the favorite of Sherlock Holmes?
Port
There is very little mention of the famous detective's drinking habits in the Sherlock Holmes canon. While he does enjoy a glass of Toakaji in "His Last Bow," Holmes might have had more Port than anything else. He drinks glasses of Port in three stories, "The Gloria Scott," "The Sign of Four," and "The Adventure of the Creeping Man," a total which may make Port Holmes' most often-sipped wine.
