Wine of the Month with Steve Staples

Properly paired, the right wine completes a dish like the last line of a song. Steve Staples knows this. He has spent twenty-five years teaching wine appreciation classes, operating on the assumption that enjoying wine should be fun, simple, and never, ever, serious.


Chardonnay

Chardonnay

April 2012. To oak or not to oak.

The relationship between wine and the wooden barrel goes back as far as the first century A.D. During the Greek and Roman eras the most commonly used storage and shipment vessel for wine was the clay amphora. But because of the fragile nature of these clay vessels, wooden casks became the accepted substitute and the craft of cooperage evolved.

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Que Syrah, Syrah!

March 2012. Take Syrah, or Shiraz, for a spin in the wine glass.

The Syrah grape is one of the oldest wine grapes known to have been cultivated in the Rhône Valley of France, though the origin of the varietal is cloudy. Once believed to have been brought back from the Persian City of Shiraz by the crusaders, genetic testing shows the grape to be indigenous to France.

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