did you know II

• To prevent a sparkling wine from foaming out of the glass, pour an ounce,

which will settle quickly. Pouring the remainder of the serving into this starter
will not foam as much.

•  Old wine almost never turns to vinegar. It spoils by oxidation.
•  In 1999 Merlot was the "hot" varietal, but 50 years earlier in 1949, the "darlingof the California wine industry" was Muscatel.
• A 1889 newspaper that described the Napa Valley crop as the finest of its kind grown in the U.S., was referring to hops.
•  Wine has so many organic chemical compounds it is considered more complex than blood serum.
•  170 years - the average age of a French oak tree harvested for use in wine
  barrels.
•  Portugal has 1/3 of the world's cork forests and supplies about 90% of the cork
  used in the U.S.
•  Beaujolais Nouveau cannot be legally released until the third Thursday of every November. In 2003 the date is Nov. 20th.
•  20 million acres are planted to grapes worldwide?
• Worldwide wine grapes as a crop rank #1 in number of acres planted.
•  30 million gallons of wine were lost in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
•  There are 10,000 varieties of wine grapes worldwide.
•  The 19th century American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, mentions wine more than 300 times in his works.