Game to get learn French Wine AOCs ...

This afternoon I  bumped into a great game that can really help to learn about French AOCs and where the different cities in this AOC are located on a French map.

Apparently there are plenty of games that go for much more detail for different wine regions like this game about Champagne or this one about Beaujolais.

I wish there were games like this for wine regions around the world that would really be fun to play and learn in the mean time.

Modern science making wines less typical ??

Although many people in the wine trade are doing their best to make clean and natural wines it is sometimes good that science comes to the rescue and gives winemakers the tools to do what they want to do: make wines that are fun to drink.

It was Wim Van Leuven (La Buena Vida) who mentioned, in a masterclass on Spanish wines in the wine course I am doing this year, that not everything is as natural as it seems though. In quite some cases there are quite some manipulations done by the winemaker in order to make wines that can please people.

Searching for "Produits Oenologique" in Google brings up a whole slew of products that can help in turning basically any grapejuice into a more or less decent wine, and in the process of doing so it is very well possible to give certain characteristics to this wine for which a winemaker that does not use these kind of tools may need to go through a lot of trouble.

What to think of products that promote themselves with sentences like "Yeast for fresh white wines, showing complexity and elegance with strong revelation of citrus notes like grapefruit. Produces wines of an intense freshness and great aromatic sharpness" or "Instantaneously dissolving (IDP) ellagic and proanthocyanidic tannin preparation based on grape tanins.
> To refresh white and rosé wine (against oxydation, atypical aging, light reduction).
> To bring volume and length.
> To help eliminate reductive odours." ?

Seemingly the grape quality/variety is not that important anymore if products like the above exist to make any grape smell like grapefruit and other products reduce the typical reductive odours that are so typical of certain wines (Syrah from the the northern Rhone comes to mind).

Having said all of the above it is of course clear that I also like my wines fresh and juicy and full-bodied and in most cases I may not even want to know how this result was obtained ...

Started using Vivino

Since I read about the iOS/Android app Vivino I have started using it a few weeks ago. Since then I scanned about 54 wines and I must say that I am impressed by the hitrate of this app as it usually finds the correct wine on the first try.

I would also like to congratulate the team behind it as they are keeping a close eye on things that fail their scanning engine: two times (A very old Australian Syrah and a unknown French wine ) the wine was unknown by the database but the day after it was actually recognized properly and I got informed with a mail that they had updates their database based on my scan. Nice service :)
Just found a great (French) comic that explains the vinification of red wine. While not containing anything new it is actually great to see how the IFV is trying to educate more and more people.