You’ll fall in love with Arniston Bay’s new sparkling Rosé: this blush pink wine with its romantic overtones is ideal for adding some fizz to a series of social situations. Regardless of the reason for celebration, this bubbly is the drink of choice when toasting a memorable occasion.

Win, win, win!

Tickled Pink essentially means to be delighted and Arniston Bay is offering you the opportunity to be delighted and win with the new Arniston Bay Sparkling Rosé.

All you have to do is to visit iafrica and tell us what tickles you pink and the three most original entries will win a case of the new Arniston Bay Sparkline Rosé.

Created by winemaker Abraham de Villiers, this non-vintage Charmat Rosé is a delicate ensemble of forest berry, rose petal, violets, white cherry and peach aromas on the nose, zesty tropical fruit flavours and a tingle of fresh, crisp bubbles on the palate.

De Villiers said: “This is a great value sparkler which adds an extra dimension to the Arniston Bay portfolio. This pretty pink sparkler shows a deliciously fruity palate with notes of red berry fruits, and is superb when served as an aperitif, ripe fruit, seafood linguine or spicy Thai curry.”

The launch of the Arniston Bay sparkling Rosé follows on the recent success of the Arniston Bay sparkling Brut, and further enhances the range of easy-drinking wines in the extensive Arniston Bay portfolio.

The new addition to the range satisfies a number of consumer occasions and needs, and fits in with the style and image of the popular lifestyle brand.

*Competition Closes: 30th September 2009 winners will be notified by telephone and email.

A taste for Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay or a liking for Merlot or Shiraz can indicate more than just a preference in wines. It could also reveal personality traits.

New research showed that drinkers who preferred a sweet taste in wine were more likely to be impulsive while those who chose dry varieties had greater openness.

According to the Australian researchers, participants with a sweet taste preference were significantly higher in impulsiveness than their dry preference counterparts.

Researcher for Sheffield Hallam University added that apart from impulsiveness and openness, no other personality trait was significantly different between the two groups.

“There is some support for the notion that sweet preference develops early in humans and thus could drive the development of impulsiveness,” said the researchers

They tested the wine preference of 45 people from Sheffield in South Yorkshire and divided them into two groups — those who liked sweet or dry wine.

Each group was also given personality tests to evaluate their impulsiveness, empathy, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The researchers said there is some evidence that a preference for sweet tastes fluctuates throughout life. It seems to be heightened during childhood and then declines in late adolescence.

Source: Reuters

Congratulations to Kate Handley.

Kate Handley

Kate is the lucky Facebook fan of the month and has won an Arniston Bay wine hamper.

Become a Facebook Fan of Arniston Bay and stand a chance to win wine hampers: Arniston Bay Facebook Page

The type of alcoholic drink you consume may have an impact on your desire for food, suggests an Australian study.

A recent study by Dr. Anna Kokavec, a research psychologist, found that the additional nutritional content of various alcoholic beverages influence the body’s reaction to alcohol.

Kokavec said that DHEAS and cortisol, commonly known as a stress hormone, influence appetite, adding: “We need a sufficient release of cortisol to make us feel hungry.”

She found that cortisol levels went down in participants after the consumption of alcohol, and decreased their appetite despite having fasted for half a day.

But DHEAS levels varied depending on what type of alcohol was consumed.

The DHEAS levels initially took a dip for those who took beer before going up, resulting in an eventual increase in hunger.

Kokavec said: “Beer completely confuses the system.”

Consumption of red wine was also observed to have led to an increased appetite.

But, unlike beer and red wine, white wine completely switched off the HPA axis, indicating hunger remained low.

Source: thaindian.com

America’s fastest growing varietal ; Chardonnay, considered a low maintenance grape, is grown in a multitude of climates and produces high yields. But what should we know about this renowned white wine?

Chardonnay is probably one of the most renowned white wines, followed by its cousins, Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling, Gewürztraminer , Pinot Grigio, Semillon Viognier and Chenin Blanc. Serve these wines in glasses that have a smaller bowl that tapers in at the top. This will help concentrate their more subtle aromas.

Served at a cool 9-10 °C, Chardonnay features quite a separate range of impressive flavours, from its expected buttered, oak overtones to fresh, fruity flavours of apple, pear, citrus and melon. Chardonnay that has undergone malolactic fermentation will yield diacetyl, giving it a big buttery taste. The Chardonnay is then transferred to oak barrels where it will develop that signature oak flavour. These wines will pair excellently with pork, seafood, and chicken dishes that also have heavy cream or buttery bases. Lovers of Italian food will be glad to note that Chardonnay goes very well with Pasta carbonara, alla vongole, lobster, crab or scallops.

The more citrus, unoaked Chardonnay is stored in steel containers which impart the more citrus, fruity flavours. This version of Chardonnay goes better with lighter meals, smaller dinners or appetizers. Think Caesar salad, omeletes and quiches, ham and bacon.

Unoaked Chardonnay goes especially well with grilled or roasted salmon. These are merely suggestions for pairing some foods with Chardonnay. Although the often quoted rule of thumb is “red wine with red meat, white wine with fish or fowl,” a better rule is “A good paring is when the food and wine do not overshadow each other”.

Arniston Bay has produced excellent Chardonnays and this cultivar also forms part of some the most successful, and delightful, Arniston Bay white blends. Like the extremely popular Arniston Bay Chenin Blanc Chardonnay.

The Chenin Blanc gives the wine a more “South African taste” and the chardonnay provides the balance and versatility. This wine has pineapple and ripe melon flavours on the nose followed by a limy , full middle palate and finishing in crisp freshness.

Source: examiner.com

As the title reads, this Wine Tourism Handbook is South Africa’s Ultimate Guide to the Cape Winelands full of useful and practical information you can use to visit wine regions, cellar doors and restaurants with the help of  maps and contact details for the wineries and more.

First thing the book does for someone like me who has been to South Africa before is it transports you instantly to the beautiful Cape Winelands region where small mountains adore as the backdrop for most of the vineyards and make them look picture perfect.

For a first time visitor, the book is an excellent companion and a complete guide to help understand the South African wines. It includes the history, the grape varietals grown, the environmental issues involved. It helps you understand the labels, wine styles and all the regions, Districts and Wards.

It also gives useful advice on the cellars where one can taste wines, tips on wining and dining and various wineland activities to help you make the trip well rounded. It does not purport to be exhaustive but is extremely practical for a first time tourist or even repeat visitors. For someone who is not much into wine, it might even convert them into wine lovers and value-add to their trip. It is truly a practical 101 type or course book on South Africa as a wine destinations.

Although the information on accommodation is too abridged, it does highlight specific wineries to visit due to their significance-historic or otherwise as also several places for stay because of their special charm. It does list the basics for a tourist though.

The Guide has been organized to help you traverse the various wine routes and not according to the regions. It starts with taking you through the Coastal routes-starting naturally with Constantia, Darling, Durbanville, Franschhoek, Paarl, Somerset West, Stellenbosch, Swartland, Tulbagh and Wellington. The accompanying maps are very clear and give specific location of the wineries in these Districts and Wards.

From there it takes you to the inland wine routes starting with Breederkloof, Klein Karoo, Northern Cape, Olifants River, Robertson and the capital of co-operative wineries- Worcester. Mountain Routes include trips to Aguilhas & Elim, Elgin & Bot River and walker Bay.

The book is in full colour and art paper with lots of pictures that make a very conducive reading. Perhaps for financial reasons, it is full of sponsored winery ads. Before it takes you to various wine cellars where tasting is possible, it helps a first time taster learn the basics of tasting sitting on your armchair in the privacy of your home.

Read Subhash Arora’s review: indianwineacademy.com

Pop into your local bottle shop and you’re overwhelmed with options. Red or white? Rosé or sparkling? Domestic or imported? And nowadays: traditional or eco-friendly?

Although our minds tend to wander to organic farming and sulfite-free winemaking when thinking about eco-friendly wine, it’s actually the transportation of the product that produces the largest carbon footprint. Wine writer and researcher Tyler Coleman recently collaborated with Pablo Paster, a sustainability metrics engineer, on a study measuring the varying factors at play within the wine industry. The results, published in the Journal of Wine, confirmed it. “The transportation and packaging elements in a lot of cases actually end up being the most influential in terms of the quantity of CO2 emissions,” said Coleman.

As with produce and other comestibles, Coleman supports “locavorism.” But not everyone has the joy of residing in wine country — and therein lies the reason why packaging plays an integral role in how the wine industry takes its toll on the planet. Fortunately, innovations in the world of packaging are breaking new ground, all in the spirit of promoting environmental integrity.

This wine pouch weighs about 20 times less than glass bottles. These pouches have an 80% lower carbon footprint and 90% less landfill waste compared with glass.

Source: thisisbrandx.com

Consumption, most analysts agree, has not been affected by the recession. If anything, Americans are drinking more wine than ever. But they are drinking cheaper wine and spending less money on it.

Another thing we might notice is fewer of those enormously heavy bottles so often used to convey that you have picked up (or tried to pick up) a wine of great status. Aside from the environmental cost of producing, shipping and disposing of these sorts of bottles, they are also more expensive. Will we see in the next few years a return to more sensible and less expensive bottles? We can only hope that the recession will add such benefits to the too-obvious consequences.

Apart from lighter bottles some producers are moving towards more eco-friendly packaging. Arniston Bay was the pioneers in creating the pouch.

This wine pouch weighs about 20 times less than glass bottles. And since the wine is made and packaged in South Africa and then shipped around the globe, the weight of the package makes a big difference to the eco-impact.

These pouches have an 80% lower carbon footprint and 90% less landfill waste compared with glass.

It seems that consumers are really taken by this value and eco-friendly wines. According to a recent Nielson Report,  Arniston Bay is the 5th fastest growing wine brand in the UK.

Sources:

thepour.blogs.nytimes.com And jlduran.blogspot.com

I came across this interesting article regarding a dispute about the age old ‘spoon in the champagne bottle’ trick.

It’s an old wives’ tale that dangling a silver spoon down the neck of a champagne bottle will preserve the bubble.

Or is it?

Some people swear by it while others think it’s a load of tosh. So, although we had never (knowingly) left a bottle of bubbly unfinished, a group of curious MCC quaffers decided to see if this was true.

A case of sparkling wine later and we set about designing the experiment.

It involved:

• -Opening two bottles.
• -Pouring a standard glass from each and photographing the wine in the glass.
• -Drinking the wine and recording our impressions – this was a terribly important step and one we had to repeat often.

• -Returning the bottles to the fridge, one with a spoon in it and one without.
• -As the bottles cooled down over the next few hours, recording the temperature in the bottle before repeating the process until the bottles were empty.

Of course, at each photograph-and-taste stage we also needed to open a control bottle afresh – just so that we had a comparison of course.

The experiment was repeated with many bottles over several weekends. It was a struggle, but we’ll do anything for science.

Once we had exhausted the crate (and a few extra bottles bought in), we scanned and digitally processed the photographs and then (i) counted the bubbles in each glass and (ii) measured the size of all the bubbles. All we can say here is thank heavens for software!

From the data, we could plot a bubble size distribution graph. This sounds impressive, but it is actually just a histogram with bubble size (diameter) along the bottom and the number of bubbles on the vertical axis .

There were two very interesting results that we found when we did this.

Firstly, the shape of the curve did not change and was a characteristic of the wine that we used and it didn’t change, regardless of how flat the wine was.

Secondly, and for this experiment, more importantly, the number of bubbles was higher when the spoon had been dangled in the glass when compared to bottles with no spoon.

This let us conclude that indeed, hanging a metal spoon down the neck of the bottle DOES preserve the bubbles!

Sure a cork or champagne stopper is better, but of you have lost the cork, or your partner has not had the foresight to give you a champagne stopper, a spoon will save at least some of the sparkle.

So now we have an answer, and like all good scientists, we need to explain it.

What we think is happening is that the spoon is acting as a radiator and when it hangs in the bottle, the air inside the neck of the bottle cools faster than the air inside a bottle without the spoon. Because we had measured the temperature drop inside each bottle we could confirm this.

Now, colder air is denser than warmer air, so the bottle with the spoon gets a ‘cold plug‘ on top of the wine sooner than the bottle without the spoon. The weight of this colder denser air means that less gas can escape so the bubbles are preserved. In addition, cold bubbly keeps more of its carbon dioxide in solution than warm.

Do you have any theories on the spoon and champagne theory? Let me know.

Source: gotravel24.com

A new product called the Wine Doggy Bag has been introduced in the US.

The doggy bag is thought to have started out because patrons literally wanted to take home their leftovers for the dog. A combination of increased portion size served by restaurants, the cost of dining out, and the dismal economy have encouraged more people to avail themselves of the opportunity to take home their leftovers. This over time turned into what we now know as the doggy bag where diners take home food that they enjoyed, couldn’t finish and look forward to eating the next day.

It is surprising that with more people drinking wine today that there has not been the same demand for taking home the unused wine. I have noticed in BYOB restaurants that patrons frequently leave the restaurant with wine bottles (whether new or leftover wine would be hard to determine).

A combination of the economy, the changing state laws, and the popularity of wine have created an opportunity for an entrepreneurial company, Wine Doggy Bag to help all of us wine lovers to savor our last drop of wine. Now, according to Wine Doggy Bag it is now legal in all 50 states to take home your unfinished wine from a restaurant with certain restrictions depending on the state.

Wine Doggy Bag has created bags just for this purpose. These one time use bags are made in both 750 mL and 1.5L sizes for the purpose of sealing wine up (in order to meet some state requirements)

I think it is legal in SA to take home wine from a restaurant. Do you think a wine doggy bag will work in SA?

Source: corksavvy.com

the company of wine peopleTM and Percy Fox & Co have agreed that Percy Fox & Co will become the exclusive UK distributor for leading South African brand, Arniston Bay. The agreement will take effect from Monday 10th August and will also include the Welmoed, Kumkani and Versus brand portfolios.

These brands will provide a powerful new South African dimension to the Percy Fox & Co portfolio that already includes Blossom Hill, the UK’s No 1 wine brand, Piat d’Or, the No 2 brand in the French category, the Chilean wines from Santa Carolina and leading Champagnes Heidsieck & Co Monopole and Pommery from Vranken Pommery Monopole.

Percy Fox & Co and the company of wine peopleTM have great ambitions for the next stage of development for Arniston Bay in the UK.  It is already a strong brand with true momentum, recording MAT volume growth of 41% (July 09 Nielsen) in the buoyant South African wine market, currently the fastest growing category in the UK.  The partnership aims to drive growth by developing consumer engagement and extending distribution channels in both the on and off-trade.

Barney Davis, brand and business development manager for the company of wine peopleTM, will continue his role and work closely with the team at Percy Fox & Co.

Hermann Böhmer, CEO of the company of wine peopleTM, commented on the agreement: “We believe that in Percy Fox & Co we have found a like-minded partner that brings significant extra reach and influence in the UK market. Their extensive experience of building brands in the UK, together with their focus on the consumer and customer, mean that Percy Fox & Co is ideally positioned to build on the strong momentum Arniston Bay has developed over the last twelve to eighteen months in partnership with Ehrmanns, while their reach allows us to develop our other brands such as Welmoed and Kumkani.”

Simon Lawson, Percy Fox & Co director & general manager commented on the agreement: “We are delighted to announce this partnership. We believe the strength and potential of Arniston Bay makes it an ideal fit with the existing high performance Percy Fox & Co portfolio. It has natural synergy with our current wineries, and we are looking forward to working with the company of wine peopleTM to drive the brand forward.  Arniston Bay already occupies an enviable position as the fifth fastest growing brand in the UK off-trade, and we believe that Percy Fox has the resources and expertise to build on this momentum and realise the brand’s full possibility in the UK”.

A recent study shows that British wine drinkers are shifting in colour as they turn to the competitors of red.

Over the first trimester of 2009, red wine lost six points, being the favourite drink of 72 percent of wine drinkers, whereas the number was 78 only three months before. The share of red wine in the wine consumption of wine consumers decreased in the same period from 44 percent to 40 percent.

The obvious offset of this trend is the rising rates of competitors ‘white ‘and’ pink ‘. The consumption of white wine in the United Kingdom rose in three months from 40 to 43 percent, while rose climbed 16 percent to 18 percent.

White wines are in a winner’s mood. Within this category, the success of Pinot Grigio suggests that the Italian version of a French grape has been on the right market at the right time; in return, it boosted the performance of all white wines ! In October 2008, 47 percent of wine consumers mentioned they had emptied at least one bottle of Pinot Grigio over the trimester ; in April 2009, the figure has already risen to 54 percent. Thus, this variety is now sharing the number two position of the British hit parade of white grape varieties with Sauvignon Blanc at , after the still inaccessible Chardonnay.

Some say the shift is a matter of season, others point at a structural shift towards lighter wine styles. Other studies in the United Kingdom suggest that a growing number of consumers go for red wines during ‘formal occasions’, and prefer to keep their light and crispy white wine sip for more’ casual ‘settings.

Source: winealley.com

The No. 1 wine trend for 2009 is trading down. The theory is that, given the failing state of the economy, you, the consumer, are expected to still buy wine but spend less money per bottle, thus trading down your aspirations.

It all seems a bit condescending, coming as it does from retailers, restaurateurs and wineries who conveniently encouraged us to trade up for the last decade, but in these troubled economic times – well, you get the picture: Cheap is in and Value is King.

While many wine drinkers will simply drink less, and likely less expensive wine, the goal should always be to drink better value wines. With a little luck, by the time the slump, downturn, slowdown and/or recession comes to an end, you will have become a more resilient, smarter, savvy wine drinker able to withstand any economic setback. Perhaps more important, when things get better you will be a much better judge of price and quality the next time prices escalate.

The point is that once you learn how to uncover value and enjoy drinking quality, value-for-money wines, you will become a much more confident and sophisticated wine buyer in the years to come.

Source: windsorstar.com

Next time you are browsing down the wine isle at your local supplier, take a closer look at the shapes of the bottles. Bottle shapes are all about tradition and many wine producing areas in Europe have developed unique shapes that are still being used for wines that originated in those regions. Let’s take a look at the 5 most common shapes:

A – This is the “Bordeaux” style bottle and is usually dark green for dry red wine and lighter green for white wines. Sweeter wines will mostly be in a clear bottle to show off its colour. This bottle is known for its straight sides and tall shoulders and is by far the most frequently used shape. Wines associated with this shape bottle include Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin Blanc and Semillon.

B – The “Burgundy” bottle is slightly fatter with gently sloping shoulders and is generally used for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir (sometimes even Shiraz). This bottle suits both red and white wine alike and has a dark green colour.

C – I am sure you will recognize this one as the “Champagne” bottle. This type of bottle also has sloping shoulders, but much thicker glass and a pronounced punt (the dent at the bottom of the bottle). All these features make this bottle much stronger than the rest, as it is designed to withstand a pressure of up to 3 times that of the inside of a normal bottle of wine. The Champagne bottle is used for all sparkling wines.

D – Commonly used for Riesling and Gewürztraminer, the “Alsace” or “Hoch” bottle is slightly more slender than normal bottles and ranges from green to brown in colour (with mostly green being used in South Africa). The wine in these bottles can range from dry, to off-dry, to sweet.

E – Being winter in South Africa at the moment, some of you might recognise this shape. It’s the bottle used for fortified wines. Most fortified wines (such as Port, Sherry and Muscadel) are packaged in these sturdy bottles, but sometimes with a shorter, fatter body. Quite often you will find that these bottles have a bulge in their neck – this is supposedly to catch any sediment when the wine is being decanted. Many of these bottles will be sealed with a cork stopper and not the normal long cork.

So next time you are doing a blind tasting, you might be able to narrow the wines down just by looking at the shape of the bottle!

Source: SA Wine Advocate