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Spain is the country with the largest cultivated areas of ​​wine grapes in Europe. It is best known for its robust red wines, but in recent years it has been producing a large number of different wines and high quality grape varieties. The territory is very vast and characterized by different climates depending on the area: To the north west (Galicia, Basque Country) the climate is cool; in the north east/central regions (Rioja, Navarra, Aragon, Castile and Leon, Catalonia) the climate is temperate; in the central south (Castile - La Mancha, Andalucia, Valencia, Extremadura) the climate is warm. Among the best known...

Despite the name, coconuts are not nuts, but fruits. Their aroma, however, is unique and dissimilar to both fruit and nuts.  The coconut is the seed of a tropical plant native to the Indian Ocean and has been spread across the globe over the centuries by explorers. In fact, it seems that the coconut was named by 16th century Portuguese explorers who brought the fruit back from travels in the Indies and then on to the Americas. The word seems to derive from “coco”, meaning grinning monkey face, because of the coconut's shape and the three black spots on its surface. Today, most people know the coconut...

The way a wine's bouquet changes as it ages is one of most fascinating aspects of enology. Over time, a wine may develop a surprising and pleasant bouquet of aromas, or it may lose its “personality” and take a turn for the worse. There are many chemical reactions that occur in a wine during its evolution over the years, but the oxidation process is the only one that greatly affects the wine's aromas.  Oxidation of the wine's aromatic chemical compounds happens over time to all wines: red, white, sparkling, sweet, fortified, and others. Oxidation is due to the leak of air through the pores of...

Everyone knows Weizen beer and many appreciate its unique and unmistakable bouquet. However, not everyone knows what these aromas are due to! Weizen, (wheat in German), is a high fermentation, wheat-based beer that was created in Munich in 1500. The "Purity Edict" issued at that time prohibited breweries from using malts other than barley and for almost 300 years the Bavarian royal family was the only one to have the right to produce wheat-based beers. For this reason, the circulation of beer was limited to the noble class and the clergy. Only from the end of the 1800s did production rights extend...

Last week we looked at flower aromas in white wines and now we're going to look at flower aromas in red wines. As previously stated, when trying to decipher what floral aromas you sense in a wine's bouquet you can use a first rule of thumb which seems to apply in many cases: generally speaking, you can find white and yellow flowers in white wines and red and purple flowers in red wines. But if you want to go further with your olfactory analysis, you need to be able to identify some basic flowers. Red wines always surprise us with the breadth of their bouquet and the intensity of their aromas. Unlike white...