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Top 10 Wine And Chocolate Matches
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
“Want to seduce someone this Valentine’s Day?” asks Natalie MacLean, author of Red, White and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass. “Just share a glass of wine (or three) with your sweetheart.”
“Wine is liquid sensuality: Its heady bouquet stimulates the appetite and its velvet caress soothes that desire,” she observes. “What other drink is described as both ‘voluptuous’ and ‘muscular’? And when you pair wine with the mouth-coating luxury of chocolate, the combination is impossible to resist.”
The creamy flavors of chocolate go best with sweet, full-bodied, high-alcohol wines, MacLean notes. She suggests wines to complement 50 chocolate dishes in her online matching tool at www.nataliemaclean.com/matcher. Just click on “desserts” to find pairings for chocolate mud pie to chocolate cheesecake.
Natalie’s top 10 wine and chocolate matches:
1. Dark Chocolate and Banyuls, France
2. Chocolate-Covered Biscotti and Recioto Della Valpolicella, Italy
3. Chocolate-Orange Cake and Liqueur Muscat, Australia
4. Chocolate with Nuts and Tawny Port, Portugal
5. Milk Chocolate and Tokaji, Hungary
6. Bittersweet Chocolate and Amarone, Italy
7. Chocolate-Dipped Fruit and Icewine, Canada
8. Chocolate Ganache Truffles and Sauternes, France
9. Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake and Framboise, California
10. Chocolate Hearts with Cream Filling and Cream Sherry, Spain
Technorati Tags: Chocolate, Valentines, Wine
Read more...Cancer Fighting Agent Found In Beer
Thursday, January 24, 2008
I knew there was a reason for me drinking beer. Short article from the United Press International about a German study. Read more below. ** Note ** Feed readers my have to visit the site to read the article.
Technorati Tags: Beer, Cancer Read more...
Brix Scale Calculations
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
In beer making you usually hear of Original Gravities being 1.0 something and some winemakers will do the same. More common in winemaking is the Brix Scale. So, what is the Brix scale and why should I know it. Basically, it measures the sugar content of your juice and knowing that you can get an idea of how much alcohol your wine will produce. Here are a couple of definitions:
A system of measurement, given in degrees, of the amount of sugar present in grape juice. Similar systems are used in different countries, eg. the Balling, Baumé and Oechsle scales, all providing sugar content measurements that can be used to approximate the final alcohol content of wine being produced. See also must weight.
Another definition from Onlineconversion.com
Balling: The name of a density scale for measuring sugar content in water base solutions. Since grape juice is primarily sugar and water, the balling scale was used for a quick and easy "sugar analysis" of juice. The Balling scale contained a slight inaccuracy however, and it was corrected by Dr Brix. Today the Brix scale is in actual use, but the terms Balling and Brix often are used interchangeably.
The Balling (Brix) scale is simplicity itself: Each degree is equivalent to 1 percent of sugar in the juice. For example, grape juice which measures 15.5 degrees on the Balling or Brix scale contains about 15.5% sugar.
Now that you know the Brix of your juice, you can easily fiqure out how much alcohol your juice will make by using this formula:
Brix count x .575
So if your brix count is 23, take 23 x .575, which equals 13.23. Your wine should be slightly over 13% alcohol content whenever it is done fermenting.
Related articles:
Using Your Hydrometer - Part 1
Using Your Hydrometer - Part 2
Technorati Tags: Beer, Ale, Wine, Sugar, Testing, Hydrometer Read more...
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