American Winery Blog

Yesterday I drove from Seattle to Mission, British Columbia, a town north of Sumas, WA - only about fifteen minutes from the U.S. border. Meeting up with my Canadian father who “immigrated” to Canada about ten years ago, it has been a few years since I have been up there and I thought it prudent to find out what our neighbors to the north are up to in the wine trade.

Dinner was prepared…a penne pasta with vodka sauce was the main course, and my uncle presented a few “Canadian” wines. During the casual chatter, hysterical laughter and other ramblings, I found myself compelled to investigate the wine a little further.

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If you are reading this and you haven’t been over to Adopt A Grape’s site to check out their video of dowsing for water, what are you waiting for?

After watching that video I thought I would do a little bit of research on the topic, here’s a brief list of what I found.

1. Numerous experiments seeking to explain the phenomenon have shown that the success rate for dowsers is roughly the same as pure chance.
2. Those who have been trained to look for surface clues like specific plants or geological features have a much higher success rate.
3. In most regions, even the desert, it is difficult to drill and not find water.
4. Not many, both dowsers and skeptics, agree on a number of “necessities” in the formula for a successful dowse including (but not limited to) shoes worn, whether materials used do or do not have an affect, or the instrument used.

An interesting phenomenon for sure but not something I would ever say is verifiable by double-blind testing or scientific tests.

In my house, we drink wine pretty much everyday with our main meal. We enjoy wine with food and think everyone should too! But what about all those empty wine bottles? Of course we take them to the

recycling center. Still, there’s a lot of energy consumption and waste in the cycle and it bothers me. I love the purity of a wine bottle. It’s hard to imagine an elegant, handcrafted wine preserved in any other container. Or is it?

The Tetra Pak is on my radar as alternative packaging for wine. Used widely in Europe and some in the States, there’s a perception that wine packaged in this type of container is of a lower quality. The industry could benefit from blind tasting panels to give consumers better insights. Personally, I’ve been very satisfied with the wine I’ve tried in this packaged form, but is it a better environmental choice?

Reading Cradle to Cradle: Rethinking the Way We Make Things (William McDonough & Michael Braungart, North Point Press 2002) makes me think about the entire cycle of the wine bottle. I’m a wine maker and I have a lot of misgivings about the waste related to everything that goes into the manufacturing of the “product” (This includes corks, capsules and the ultimate non-renewable resource, water!). Establishing a local market for wine that could enable the return and reuse of wine bottles at the source is a radical and unwieldy proposal, but we may see this kind of enterprise emerge as consumers press for better solutions to ease their own contribution to the waste cycle.

New studies are routinely published either promoting additional health benefits of alcoholic beverages like wine, or contradicting exactly what we last heard about such benefits. One of the benefits from wine that we regularly hear about is antioxidants. Antioxidants are those beautiful molecules that prevent potentially harmful oxidation reactions from producing free radicals. These free radicals can lead to damage to otherwise healthy human cells. One popular player in the field is the Açai (Ah-sigh-ee) berry, which is found deep in the mysterious Amazon jungle, home of such famous characters as Mowgli and George.

I first ran into this product, MonaVie, on a food blog which regretfully I can no longer recall. Since then I have craved this delicious looking, purple liquid. Normally my desires for purple liquid are satiated by berries of the “vitis vinifera” variety, which leads me to my question. If this juice is so healthy on so many accounts then where is the flood of an even more powerful beverage, acai wine?

Think about it. Acai, source of antioxidants, amino acids, vitamins, and phytonutrients could be combined with the pleasing power of wine, source of potential hangovers. Ladies and gentleman, have we discovered the perfect combination of pleasure and health? I dare say we have.