Diet and Wine Appreciation

You are what you eat, so your diet can affect your perception of wine, or at least certain components of it. For example, if spicy food is regular part of your daily diet, it could hamper your identification of spice in wine, as well as numb your palate to other complexity. In fact your taste buds could be so burned out that your appreciation of subtle spices and other elements will never be realized. The alternate could happen if you regularly eat a bland diet. Your sensitivity to strong flavours and components could be extremely intense. A fatty diet might rob you of your appreciation of body in wine and a highly acidic diet could obscure balance. Palate training and conditioning can certainly help alleviate these potential problems.

Biodynamic Wine Growing

When it comes to food and drink, we’re all familiar with the concept of organic products. Creating these using only natural ingredients, no man-made fungicides, pesticides and other chemicals is the key. This is also important in winemaking. Many organic producers are going further with “biodynamic” wine growing. This adds a spiritual element to the agricultural process utilizing the stars and cycles of the moon to perform certain tasks in the vineyard. Sounding “hippy-like”, North American native peoples have been practicing biodynamics for growing crops for hundreds of years with great results. Wine producers who now practice biodynamics in the vineyard swear by it in their finished wines.

New Wave Winemakers

For the most part, the winemaker of today is a far cry from what was the norm years ago. More and more are young, talented, environmentally conscious, savvy people with a finger on the pulse of what younger consumers are looking for in wine. This is very prevalent in the New World. However, many, traditional, Old World producers, who were stuck in the past, are turning over the reins of production to their children and other younger folks realizing that they are the future. Even more interesting in all of this is the fact that many of these new wave winemakers are women. And why not? They potentially make better tasters than men and, I believe, have a better handle on how to best market their creations.