Test your wine knowledge with quiz questions from our expert.
The Santa Maria Valley American Viticulture Area became the third AVA established in the United States in what year?
1981
Santa Maria Valley was declared the third AVA in the U.S. in 1981. It was originally comprised of just over 97 thousand acres in Southern San Luis Obispo and Northern Santa Barbara counties, with borders that were originally based on area roads.
The first wineries in the Pacific Northwest were located in what U.S. state?
Idaho
According to Constellation Wines U.S. Applications Chemist (and former University of Idaho professor) John Thorngate, Idaho was the site of the first official wineries in the Pacific Northwest. That U.S. state had a thriving wine industry dating back to the mid 1800s, until it was stymied by Prohibition in the early 1900s.
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.
