Blog — wine culture

If you've spent any time around wine enthusiasts, you've heard the word terroir. It gets thrown around at tastings, written on wine labels, and used to justify why a bottle from one hillside costs three times as much as one from the valley below. But what does it actually mean? The short answer is that terroir is the complete natural environment where a grape is grown. The long answer is a lot more interesting. The Literal Translation Terroir comes from the French word terre, meaning earth or land. But in the wine world it means much more than just the...

If you've been paying attention to the wine world over the last decade, you've probably noticed orange wine showing up on natural wine lists, at trendy restaurants, and in the Instagram feeds. But what exactly is skin contact wine, and why does it taste so different from everything else in the glass? Here's everything you need to know. What is Skin Contact Wine? Skin contact wine, commonly called orange wine, is made by fermenting white grapes with their skins left on. That might sound simple, but it's a fundamental departure from how most white wine is made. In conventional white...