Germany’s wine styles can be difficult to understand. This is due partly to the fact that you can’t automatically tell how a German wine will taste by reading its style on the label. Unlike French wine styles, which are based on terroir, or Italian wine styles, which focus on geographical zones and specific blends of grape varieties, German wine styles are based on grape ripeness. Add in the long style names – how do you pronounce Trockenbeerenauslese, anyway? – and it’s easy to see why many wine drinkers stop trying to learn more about German wines.

CHEFS AND OTHER WINE PROFESSIONALS REVEAL THEIR FAVORITE PAIRINGS Locating wineries that offer wine and food pairings, especially in their tasting rooms, is not easy. But when you light on such an establishment, you are in for a treat. My first such discovery was when I was casually wine tasting with a friend a few years ago and stumbled on J Winery.

You know how they say you can’t really understand the ins and outs of winemaking until you’ve walked a mile in an underground cellar, surrounded by 3000 gallon holding tanks and palettes of oak barrels - what, you’ve never heard this? Well, it’s true, because no matter how much you read about the winemaking process, or hear winemakers talk about their craft during barrel-tasting weekend, you cannot appreciate the art and science that is winemaking until you’ve experienced it firsthand. This is why, come end-of-summer, so many devoted wine geeks sign up to work crush at a winery. And this is why I ended up at a certain small-scale winery one recent Friday morning.

Something about August makes summer’s days feel numbered, though here in California the hot weather often lasts all through October. The combination of the back-to-school buzz and department stores’ jump-start on fall fashions gives you the sense that summer is already a thing of the past. And while I’m a big fan of autumn’s allure, there’s also much to be said for enjoying the radiance and candor of a summer day. And what better way to complement the delicious spirit of waning summer than with a picnic and a cold bottle of Vinho Verde?

By nature, my mind has always rebelled against being force-fed facts like a goose whose ultimate destiny is foie gras. But comes a time.....Comes a time when you need to prove you know the difference between your Charmat, Crémant and Charente...your Brouilly, Rully and brouillis...your Guyot, Grolleau and Grillo. And evidently, for me, the time was now.

Remember Peabody’s Improbable History from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show? That dorky kid, Sherman, who’d probably be an internet billionaire today, would do whatever Mr. Peabody, the dog, told him to and off they’d go, visiting Attila the Hun or the Spanish Inquisition in the Wayback Machine. They’d screw history up but manage to get it all back together eventually and the whole result was some fine campy humor that delighted my juvenile mind.

The Rhone Report: About Rhone and Rhone-Style Wines and Winemakers is part of an ongoing series. Of the grape varieties traditionally grown in France’s Rhone Valley, most American wine drinkers know only a few. But some of the lesser known Rhone varietals are beginning to get deserved attention from a number of California’s most interesting wineries.

This may be a good time to take a step back from discussing the specific wines of Italy and discuss some of the terms that others and I have been bandying about in these articles. More importantly, this discussion will be useful when trying to read the label on a bottle of Italian wine that you may be contemplating either buying or drinking. Specifically, I would like to address the Italian wine laws that create classifications for wines based upon geographical location.

IntoWine recently sat down with Charles Gill, CEO of WineMetrics, to discuss what is an impressive feat to anyone who loves wine, analytics, or both. WineMetrics has assembled an enormous and comprehensive database aggregating the wine lists ofrom restaurants across the US. The resulting data is useful to restaurants and of course wine distributors and producers looking for outlets to sell their wines. To the pedestrian wine drinker, the findings are simply fascinating. WineMetrics has compiled extensive data detailing the wines that occupy wine lists in restaurants across the nation, from the Olive Garden in Dayton, Ohio to the local French bistro in Lower Manhattan. Acquiring this data must have been a laborious process. How did you go about it? Much of it is acquired by our distributor clients but a great many restaurants feature their wine lists on their websites, which we utilize. Often we just contact the account and ask for it. What surprised you as you started assessing the data?

As with most things in life, collaboration is the key to success. In the world of wine, collaboration is evident between winemakers and growers, winemakers and coopers and so forth. Yet when the critical stage of blending a wine happens, many winemakers go it alone. Blending various wines means that different clones, different toast levels of barrels, and grapes from different vineyards, must be taken into account in order to produce a stand-out wine.