• California’s changing climate: Because that’s not the way it used to be, when the rest of the world was jealous of the state’s incredible wine growing climate. Writes Jon Bonne in the San Francisco Chronicle: “It's starkly clear that the climate for wine growing in California is becoming less stable. … Whether you blame climate change or human meddling for the shifting styles of California wine, the net result is that those who want to make truly great wines will have to adapt to ever less routine vintages.” That difference has consequences not only for those who buy more expensive wines, where climate is part of the terroir, but for those of us who buy $10 wine. The weather was so perfect In California that it was easy to make quality cheap wine – just let the grapes ripen and don't get in the way. If the grapes aren’t going ripen on schedule anymore, those $10 winemakers will have to show skills they didn’t need before.
• Wine and computers? The Wine Curmudgeon is a bit of a computer geek, so I was excited to hear that someone had released a wine with the same name as Ubuntu, one of the leading Linux operating systems. The wine is Portuguese, from Niepoort,, and was issued in 2008 and 2009 when South Africa hosted the football (soccer, for those of us in U.S.) World Cup. The operating system and the wine aren’t apparently related, though, notes the OMG Ubunutu blog; they’re both named after a particular African philosophy.
• Pairing wine with kitchen appliances: Bed Bath & Beyond, which recently bought World Market, is adding wine to one of its suburban Chicago locations. It also wants to do tastings, says the Chicago Tribune. I speculated about how well that would work for Bed Bath & Beyond after the World Market acquisition, and now we’ll get a chance to find out. I wonder: When someone goes in to buy a slow cooker, are they really going to buy wine, too?
oh, I thought you had been to Napa - Ubuntu is a vegetarian ( high end) restaurant that is quite good
Posted by: Alfonso | August 29, 2012 at 08:59 AM