Blend your own wine, or copy a famous one ...

Today the wine-calender I got for Christmas pointed me to the Fusebox, which is kit that allows you to make your own blend of 6 (high quality ???) Napa Valley mono-cepage bottles in order to either create your own personal favorite or try to mimic one of the great but unaffordable famous wines like Chateau Petrus or whatever.

Their promotion video is nice to watch, but apparently the manual has been removed from their website (probably because it harmed their sales too much: this is where the real value is of course, the bare wines you can buy in any local wine store)

Unfortunately they do not ship outside US thus I will have to find an alternative if I ever want to try something like that myself (or if someone can bring it I'd be very grateful :-))

More Lebanese wine ...

On the 2nd evening in Beirut there was party sponsored by the seminar organization in a hip restaurant/bar (The Library) where we got some nice food, but unfortunately the wine wasn't too good and the entertainment was a bit too loud to allow easy talking.

We drank a Reserve de Couvent 2007 from Ksara Winery. Even though this wine won at least two silver medals this year I am afraid we drank it somewhat too young.

It anyhow contained too much acids and too little taninnes to really be enjoyed with the steak that was server for dinner.

Luckily the next day we had more luck as we went for dinner in The Exchange next to the hotel where we drank the delicious 2003 (sic!) Chateau Kefraya made by Kefraya winery. The acidity and tannins are in perfect balance with this wooded wine with a lot of alcohol (14.5%) that really came close to some not so cheap bordeaux wines that I drank a while ago.

This 2003 vintage was much better than the 2005 one we drank two days earlier. On the winelist they also posted a prestigious Le Comte de M by Kefraya which is the topwine, but as it was 3 times the price I did not select it.

Lebanese wine ...

For work I am currently in Beirut, Lebanon and of course we had to try the local food specialities with one of our hosts. Luckily for me this person had no problem with drinking alcohol (which is not evident in the Middle East) and thus asked whether we would like to try some of the Lebanese wines ... of course I could not resist.

He negotiated with the waiter about which bottle of wine (in arabic thus I didn't understand a word about what they were saying) and the ended up choosing a bottle of red Chateau Kefraya.

During dinner we also go some explanation about the geography of Lebanon (I did not know they had mountains upto 3700m high where you can even go skiing) and the famous Beqaa Valley.

After listening to all this (and enjoying the nice wine) I concluded that the climate of the valley, separated from the Mediterranean sea by some mountains and separated from the dessert by some other mountains make it somewhat comparable to Napa Valley in California)

The prohibition ended 76 years ago ...

According to this article the U.S. prohibition law was (finally) repealed after 13 years of hard times for the nascent US Wine industry.

Both articles mention interesting ways on how the wine industry did actually (partially) survive:

• legal production for personal use only (50 gallon per family per year, that is about 190l, which is about 250 bottles ... not sure we consume that much in a year)
• selling to church for use during ceremonies
• selling of bricks of concentrated grapes with a warning that should prevent people from accidentally making wine ... (cfr. article in Time Magazine)

I just love the ingenuity with which people always succeed in bypassing the law to make money ...