GRAHAM’S | “QUINTA DOS MALVEDOS” 2009

(Oporto, Portugal) $58 (750ml)

When do you drink an extraordinary Single Quinta Port like this? I’d say on a cold winter afternoon, maybe with some cheese. Complex Ports are often wrongly cast as dessert wines. But while you could easily have a glass of this after dinner, the wine isn’t a prop for cake. The kaleidoscope of flavors is stunning: spices, tea, vanilla, sassafras, red fruits, pepper. An elegant plunge into the exotic. Beautifully long lines of rich flavor, not to be missed.

92 points KM

Available at Wine.com

With the advent of DNA typing for grapevines in the 1990s, zinfandel’s origins came to be known. The discovery also revealed that several other grapes were the same as zinfandel, although they carried other names. Which of the following grapes is not identical to zinfandel?

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  • A.Primitivo
  • B.Plavac Mali
  • C.Crljenak Kaštelanski
  • D.Tribidrag

Scroll down for the answer!


“No! We’ve only been growing Cab Franc here for 900 years. There is still so much to learn.”

—Mathieu Baudry, of Domaine Bernard Baudry, upon being asked if he would consider growing red grapes other than cabernet franc in Chinon (Loire Valley), France.

SCREWING AROUND

Originally called bottle-screws, corkscrews were invented between 1630 and 1675 in England, where they were used not for wine, but for beer and cider. Both sparklers required tight-fitting corks (often tied on) capable of holding in the gas. Such corks, forced deep into the necks of bottles, often proved impossible to extract without the help of some kind of tool. The first such tool took its inspiration from a gun. Manufacturing records from the 1630s describe a bullet-extracting “worm” supplied with pistols. The English manufacturers of these worms also made corkscrews. In the 1800s, with the discovery that wine matures favorably in bottles laid down on their sides, corks began to be fully driven into wine bottles for a leakproof fit. Corkscrews became indispensable.

SINGLE QUINTA

Single Quinta means “single farm” in Portuguese. It is used to refer to a specific vineyard and to a wine estate. Single Quinta Ports come from grapes grown on a single estate in a single year in the Douro Valley of Portugal.

B.DNA typing reveals that the Italian grape primitivo, and the Croatian grapes crljenak kaštelanski and tribidrag are synonyms for zinfandel. Plavac mali (also well known in Croatia) is not the same variety, but it is the offspring of zinfandel.

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