Wine, Year One

Hello everybody and welcome to the Four Daughters wine blog.  My name is Justin Osborne, and I am your winemaker at Four Daughters Vineyard and Winery.  This is the first of what we hope will be a weekly blog which covers our perspective on wines, the winemaking process, wine in general, food, what's going on at the winery, and maybe a little philosphy thrown in for good measure.  I thought I'd take a break from adding an additional 5 acres onto our vineyard to get this blog off the ground.

So I'm guessing you are all reading this because you all kinda like wine.  You are certainly not the first.  Traces of rice and honey "wine" have been found on chinese artifacts dating back 9,000 years.  Today rice wine would be known commonly as sake, and honey wine as mead.  Traces of acid from vinifera grapes has been found in Iranian jars dating back 7,500 years.  What is interesting about this is that there are many different types of grapes and all the traditional grapes whose names you know are most likely vinifera. Examples would be your merlots, cabernets, and chardonnays.  So chances are this wine they were drinking long long ago might not have been that bad. 

Now you can either choose to believe the so called "archaeologists" and "scientists" about where and wine wine came from or you can believe the Greeks.  They believe that this dude http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus gave wine to the people as a gift. The Greeks seem to always be in a good mood, so maybe it's better emotionally to believe the same as they do.  If you actually get to the first sentence of the wikipedia link, you will see that in addition to being the god of all things wine, Dionysus was also the god of ritual madness and ecstasy.  Two interesting things, not too unrelated to wine, unfortunately and fortunately (in that order).  Anyway, we hope to be serving up lots of ritual madness and ecstasy at Four Daughters.  If we ever run out of either I will let you know.  I actually have the story of Dionysus on a beach towel.  I was in Greece a few years back, on my way to the beach, and forgot a towel.  So I bought one from a street vendor for 5 euros.  It looked good in the shop, but the second you took it outside, that thing was see through.  I probably would have had more drying capacity with a roll of T.P. 

Thanks to the both of you who read the whole blog to this point (my mom was probably one of the two).  Some intersting topics I'll be covering in the very near future...

The mediterranean diet - Why do people in these regions stay active into thier 90s?  Why don't our doctors encourage us to eat like they do?

Grapes - What makes them the fruit of choice for making wine?

Wine through the ages - The role of wine throughout history.

Vineyard info - Currently under construction.  Our vineyard will have several cool features, including a few things you will not see anywhere else in Minnesota.  We also have some very experimental top secret stuff we're working on.

New equipment - The time is coming where we will be pulling the trigger on some very cool, very nice wine tanks and equipment.  We might, MIGHT, be getting a specialized tank for making that beautiful beverage the french do not want us to call Champagne.

STAY TUNED!!!!!