Is it just me, or are cupcakes (or more precisely cupcake sellers) everywhere? Cupcakes are suddenly everybody’s favorite dessert and every baker wannabe is trying to sell them. And if a budding entrepreneur is not selling them directly, they’re trying to brand a product with the name to take advantage of the uptrend.

It all started with Sex & the City and NYC’s Magnolia Bakery. As Sex & the City’s rabid fans tried to be more like Carrie and the girls and Magnolia gained exposure on tv and in the movies, it started a gourmet cupcake feeding frenzy.

Cupcake Wine Cont'd

Tags: california central coast, Cupcake Vineyards, dolores jane umbridge, harry potter and the order of the phoenix, magnolia bakery, New York City, Sex & the City, Twitter, Wine

 
It’s HOT! In fact, climatologists predict that 2010 will be the hottest year on record worldwide, due in large part to El Nino, the tropical climate pattern that warms the Pacific every five to seven years. But, that didn’t stop the folks at the Finger Lakes Wine Festival this weekend in Watkins Glen, NY. In fact the Finger Lakes are doing very well in the heat. Winemakers in the region are enjoying advanced ripening in the vineyards this year, compared to the wet, challenging season of 2009. More time on the vine in hot, dry weather may give winemakers a chance to quiet a few more critics of Finger Lakes red wine. But, it’s doing great things for Riesling.

Summer Wine Festival Round-up Cont'd

Tags: chateau ste michelle, finger lakes wine, finger lakes wine festival, global warming, music, New York, Reisling, Seattle, sweet wines, watkins glen international, watkins glen ny, Wine Tasting, winemaking

Forget about wine cellar equipment for their McMansions, the super rich have an underground wine vault 100ft under the Wiltshire countryside in Southern England. Formerly Eastlays mine, a source of honey-colored Bath stone, it is now Octavian Vaults’s Corsham Cellars, the place where the rich and famous hoard their most precious bottles of Petrus, Lafite or Latour. It’s like a bank storing liquid gold and run by one of the world’s relatively few specialist wine storage companies. Octavian Vaults is the only place you can get a “Certificate of Pristine Storage”.

The Wine Cellars at Corsham Cont'd

Tags: Bordeaux, Bordeaux Wine, corsham, precious bottles, provenance, security measures, southern england, storage companies, storage conditions, Wiltshire, Wine, Wine Cellar, wine cellar equipment, wine cellars, wine storage, wine storage facility, wine vault

On top of the immensity of the Olympic Winter Games, it appears the Canadians are planning an after party of equally biblical proportions. Thanks to Andre Saint-Jacques, owner of the Bearfoot Bistro and its extravagant underground wine cellar of more than 20,000 bottles (a perennial winner of the Wine Spectator’s Award of Excellence), the Champagne will flow freely for gold medal winners. And to make things even more thrilling, the Champagne bottles will be ceremoniously decapitated by Saint-Jacques himself – the Guinness World Record holder for most Champagne bottles sabred in a single minute (21).

Opening a Champagne bottle with a sword or saber by hitting the lip of the bottle (its weak point) with the blade, thereby severing the collar from the neck is called “Sabrage” and dates back to the Napoleonic Era. Napoleon was quite the lover of Champagne and is credited with saying, “Champagne! In victory one deserves it; in defeat one needs it.” Saint-Jacques, also an effusive lover of the bubbly is Canada’s No. 1 importer of Moet & Chandon.
Winter Games 2010, Sabrage and Salmanazars Continued

Tags: Andre Saint-Jacques, Bearfoot Bistro, biblical kings, biblical proportions, Canada, Champagne, champagne bottle, champagne bottles, gold medal winners, gold medalists, guinness world record, guinness world record holder, jeroboam, jeroboams, large-format wine bottles, magnums, Moet and Chandon, Moët et Chandon, Napoleon, Napoleon Bonaparte, olympic games, olympic medalists, olympic winter games, sabrage, salmanazar, Whistler B.C., Wine Cellar, wine spectator, Wine Spectator's Award of Excellence, winter games 2010

Bordeaux wine lovers may credit the 1855 Exposition Universelle de Paris and Emperor Napoleon III’s “Official Classification” with putting Bordeaux wine on the map. But, it turns out that his grandmother the Empress Josephine, first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte may have ignited French passion for the wine.

Prior to Josephine raising the status of Bordeaux to an elixer fit for nobility, it was seen as an inferior product suitable only for the English who had been stubborn lovers of claret, or red Bordeaux wine, for four centuries. At the time of the French Revolution, Burgundy and Champagne reigned supreme, in fact, not a single bottle of Bordeaux is known to have been kept in the wine cellars of King Louis XVI. Empress Josephine's Wine Cellar Continued

Tags: Bordeaux, Bordeaux Wine, Burgundy, Cape Town, celebrated hostess, Champagne, Château Laville Haut-Brion, Chateaux de Malmaison, Cyprus, Emperor Napoleon III, Empress Josephine, exposition universelle de paris, France, French Revolution, french wine, Germany, great drinker, Greece, Hungary, Italy, king louis xvi, Margaux, Martinique, medoc wine, Napoleon Bonaparte, Paris, Portugal, premiers cru, red bordeaux wine, saint helena, social historians, South Africa, south african wines, South Atlantic island, Spain, sweet wines, Wine Cellar, wine cellars, wine lovers

At least since the Middle Ages. Due to warmer temperatures, a few British wineries have revived a red winemaking tradition which died around 600 years ago. Wine critcs’ opinions about the wine have been mixed, but some seem convinced that the finest red wines may in the future come from north of the English channel if this warming trend continues.

With soils similar to Champagne and an edgier climate, England is already producing world-class sparkling wines like Nyetimber (which recently won the  International Wine & Spirit Competition Denbies Trophy for the Best Worldwide Sparkling Wine for the 3rd time), Ridgeview and Camel Valley. But, red wine is a different story.

English Winemaking Continued

Tags: Camel Valley, Champagne, english vineyards, english wine, english winemakers, IWSC, Nyetimber, Oenoview system, red wine, Ridgeview, satellite imagery

I don’t know if they still do, but at one time the Chinese called America Gum Shan, the mountain of gold, a symbol of opportunity and the chance to get rich. Today, the Chinese have found another symbol of opportunity whose very name beckons the ambitious. In French Lafite means small hill, in Chinese it is very similar to the word lai-fat or “come get rich.”

It is this association with wealth and opportunity that has made Chateau Lafite-Rothschild and it’s second wine Carruades de Lafite the currency of choice for negotiating Chinese business deals. Which bottle you get depends on who you are and what is “requested”. In China, anything with Lafite in the name sells be it Bordeaux or Burgundy. As such, both wines are becoming literal mountains of gold for owners of bordeaux futures.
Chateau Lafite-Rothschild and Bordeaux Futures Continued

Tags: asian wine market, bordeaux futures, Bordeaux Index, Bordeaux Wine, Carruades de Lafite, Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, economic crisis, Gary Boom, Liv-Ex 100, Robert Parker, wine price, wine sales

Chateau D’Arche, a Grand Cru Classe producer of Sauternes (dessert or sweet wine of Bordeaux) has started bottling its La Perle d’Arche wine in 100ml test-tube shaped bottles aimed at young drinkers in nightclubs. On the whole this seems to be a good idea since Sauternes is not well known outside the wine community, not to mention that french wine sales are on the decline so they’ve got to do something to shake things up.

But what’s troubling is their marketing, once again targeting women. Managing director Jerome Cosson told decanter.com: Sauternes Targets Nightclubs and Women Continued

Tags: Bordeaux Wine, calories in wine, Chateau D'Arche, dessert wine, French Wine Research Center, low calorie wine, sauternes, So Light, sweet wine, women

The public is going to choose wines for top London restaurant L’Anima using Twitter. I hope they like Yellowtail or anything else with a critter label. Maybe Fat Bastard: 

Even worse: 

Tags: American Idol, Fat Bastard, L'Anima, Twitter, wine list, Yellowtail Shiraz

As more and more wineries go green, they are increasingly turning to plastic (PET) to bottle their wine. Boisset, the second-largest producer of Beaujolais Nouveau is a recent convert. But many premium winemakers refuse to jump on the Carbon Neutrality bandwagon even though they are often the worst offenders when it comes to using big, heavy glass bottles that require lots of energy to make and transport. Carbon Neutrality, Plastic and Long-term Wine Storage Continued

Tags: Carbon Neutral Wine, green wine, maderization, Plastic Wine Bottles, Portavin, wine oxidation