Word: wined
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...their all-night parties, theancient Greeks played a game called Kottabos, which involved flinging the residue from the bottom of their cups of wine at a target. Kottabos was probably the first drinking game to get really, really big--supposedly even Socrates played. Today young philosophers still like to mix booze and projectiles. Only now they call it beer pong...
...wine was harvested back in 1995 and first fermented slowly in small oak barrels, instead of the more commonly used stainless-steel vats. This gives it tremendous depth of character and toasty brioche notes, yet the fruit is surprisingly fresh and youthful - a flavor oxymoron that has become Krug's signature style...
Although the wine's taste is a revelation, the price also reflects the character of its production: it's 100% Pinot Noir, made from a single harvest from a single tiny vineyard. Most champagnes are traditionally blends of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier grapes harvested from different vineyards (there are over 270,000 individual plots in Champagne) in different years...
Recently, the terroir concept - that a wine should express the specific soil, microclimate and cultural traditions that produced it - has become more widespread in the Champagne region. In exceptionally good years, some houses are now producing vintage wines profiling a single year's harvest, or single-vineyard wines made from a particularly outstanding parcel. But not without controversy: at the Champagne Information Bureau's annual tasting in London in March, some winemakers wrote off the single-vintage mono-parcel champagnes as a ploy to market novelties as luxuries...
...That doesn't impress locals. "Many of these vineyard owners are committed to production and investment plans spanning 20 or 30 years," says a member of the regional wine sector, who asked not to be named due to the "vivid tension" the situation has created. "These aren't operations that can change strategy or cut production overnight...