Free Republic

President Trump on Saturday sought to smooth over his prickly relationship with French President Emmanuel Macron as he arrived in France for the G7 summit – telling reporters he loves French wine, hours after threatening to slap tariffs on the export. “I love French wine,” the president told reporters sitting opposite Macron for a lunch after his arrival in Biarritz. “We actually have a lot in common, Emmanuel and I,” he said. “We’ve been friends for a long time and every once in a while we go at it just a little bit, not very much, but we get along...

The Bordeaux wines will be stored on the ISS at 18 degrees Celsius for one year before being returned to earth and compared to a control sample that has been kept at the same temperature, NASA said in an explainer article. The name of the Château involved has not been released. It’s not the first time that wine has been sent to space. Château Lynch-Bages saw its 1975 vintage launched into space aboard NASA’s Discovery shuttle in 1985, returning to earth in 2015. The Bordeaux wines will be stored in a ‘Complex Microbiological System’ – or CommuBioS – according to...

Dr. Kawas and her team of doctors and professors analyzed data from a long term study conducted at the UC Irvine’s Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders. They dubbed this study the “90+ Study” which has been following people over the age of 90 since 2003. The research covered everything from daily exercise to sleep schedule to diet. As a result, the researches concluded that people who drank two glasses of wine or beer per day saw an 18% drop in their risk of early death. On the other hand, those who exercised 15-45 minutes per day only saw...

There is a lot spoken and written about the wine industry’s inability to truly connect with more consumers about what wine is all about and why there is so much to discover if only people took the time to look. But why should they? Are they ever going to change the habits of a lifetime and not just see wine for what essentially it is. An alcoholic drink to enjoy with friends or on your own. That’s where Paul Mabray start his conversations about wine. If wine is truly going to connect with its target audience it needs to really...

A grape variety still used in wine production in France today can be traced back 900 years to just one ancestral plant, scientists have discovered. With the help of an extensive genetic database of modern grapevines, researchers were able to test and compare 28 archaeological seeds from French sites dating back to the Iron Age, Roman era, and medieval period. ...a team of researchers from the UK, Denmark, France, Spain, and Germany, drew genetic connections between seeds from different archaeological sites, as well as links to modern-day grape varieties. It has long been suspected that some grape varieties grown today,...

Wine Storage Owner Pleads Guilty to Fraud © Shutterstock | Instead of storing wine for his clients, William Lamont Holder sold them and pocketed the profits.A Baltimore businessman gets jail for selling his clients' wine without their knowledge. By W. Blake Gray | Posted Thursday, 16-May-2019 Federal prison is getting another enophile.The owner of Safe Harbour Wine Storage in the Baltimore suburb of Glen Burnie pled guilty in federal court on Tuesday to selling his customers' wine and pocketing the money, and is expected to serve 18 months in federal prison. Related stories: A Beginner's Guide to Wine Fraud Worried...

Robert Parker: Farewell to the Emperor © The Wine Advocate | Robert Parker has finally hung up his tasting glass and pen.Wine's most influential writer of the past 40 years has retired. W. Blake Gray pays tribute to a legend. Posted Saturday, 18-May-2019 I come to praise Robert Parker, not to bury him, because this is not quite an obit.The most important critic in the history of the world officially retired this week, leaving yours truly as the best-known active wine writer from the Baltimore area. (Thanks Bob, and go Orioles!) Related stories: Robert Parker: The Man Becomes the Brand...

https://punchdrink.com/articles/guy-who-broke-wine-gary-vee-vaynerchuk/ It’s not until episode 58 of Wine Library TV, the wine vlog that became a sensation in the late aughts, that the show really discovers what it’s about. Up to that point, it had seemed like a corporate executive’s idea of what a wine Web series should be. Dressed in business casual, Gary Vaynerchuk, a young salesman who ran a 37,000-square-foot wine shop in Springfield, New Jersey, would face the camera, speaking in a calm, bedside manner about the emerging Bordeaux market or cult California cabernets.

An ancient concoction for eye infections seems to really work. The potion, which contains cattle bile, kills the "superbug" methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA, researchers at Britain's University of Nottingham report. In fact, it worked better than the current gold standard for MRSA infections of the flesh, the antibiotic vancomycin, an expert at Texas Tech University found. Now researchers are working to see just what's in the salve that kills germs so effectively. It started with a joint project by two wildly different departments at the University of Nottingham. Dr. Christina Lee, an Anglo-Saxon expert in the School of English,...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez livestreamed herself drinking wine and assembling IKEA furniture. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) may be in Congress now, but her Wednesday nights still consist of some pretty normal stuff. As BuzzFeed News' Vera Bergengruen pointed out on Twitter, Ocasio-Cortez spent her evening drinking wine, assembling IKEA furniture, and chatting about politics. The difference between the congresswoman and her constituents? More than 8,000 people tuned into an Instagram livestream to watch her do it. Ocasio-Cortez's livestreams often attract attention, like when she discussed the fear of bringing children into a world affected by climate change. The Washington Post even wrote...

Wine and Sex Off the Millennial Menu © Maxim | The increase of Millennials turned off wine is a growing problem for producers.Wine producers are being urged to try to seduce the younger generation to avoid a gloomy future. By W. Blake Gray | Posted Thursday, 31-Jan-2019 Just as the wine industry is discovering that many Millennials find wine boring, new plantings of grapevines are gradually turning California from 32 Flavors into a chocolate, vanilla or strawberry state.The State of the Industry presentation Wednesday at the annual Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento wasn't quite as gloomy as...

Monday was UN Holocaust Remembrance Day, when the United Nations was supposed to pay homage to victims of the Holocaust. As part of the proceedings, the Austrian and Norwegian missions to the UN hosted a well-attended event, complete with high-end food and beverages. Among the included drinks were a variety of wines.Unfortunately, someone quickly noticed that the labels on one of the brands of wine had all been defaced with a marker. The bottles were the product of the award-winning Golan Heights Winery in Israel, but someone had gone through and blacked out the name of the winery on all...

You no longer have to be judged for drinking wine from a Pringles can. An Etsy shop is selling tumblers with the Pringles logo printed on them. After a woman in Texas made headlines for getting banned from a Walmart when she was accused of riding around their parking lot on an electric shopping cart, drinking wine from a Pringles can, the idea for a cleaner wine container came about... “Great for your friends or moms that endure long trips in Walmart and need to drink wine from a Pringles can,” it reads.

When Apollo 11‘s Eagle lunar module landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had to do something hard: Wait. They were scheduled to open the door of their lunar lander and step onto the unknown surface of a completely different world. But for now, their mission ordered them to take a pause before the big event. And so Aldrin spent his time doing something unexpected, something no man had ever attempted before. Alone and overwhelmed by anticipation, he took part in the first Christian sacrament ever performed on the moon—a rite of Christian...

The opening exchanges of a landmark Supreme Court hearing offered hope and confusion in equal parts. By W. Blake Gray | Posted Thursday, 17-Jan-2019 Wine lovers had nobody to argue for them in the Supreme Court on Wednesday, and it seemed several times as if the justices wished enophiles had an advocate – or at least some attorney willing to defend a pro-wine shipping argument. The Court heard one hour of arguments in Tennessee Wine & Spirits Retailers Association vs. Blair, a case that has the potential to invalidate liquor laws across the country. It might allow people in most...

This is the TL:DR version of our coverage of tomorrow's crucial wine hearing at the US Supreme Court. (The more detailed versions are here, here and here). The stakes: The Court could possibly throw out all state liquor laws that discriminate against out-of-state businesses, potentially allowing residents in much of the US to order wine from anywhere. The case: The state of Tennessee has laws requiring liquor store owners to be residents for two years, but a quirk in the law makes it effectively 10 years. Two shop owners – the multistate chain Total Wine and a couple who moved...

According to USA Today, employees at the store in Wichita Falls had asked officers to ban the woman after she had been drinking wine from a Pringles can for several hours as she rode around on an electric cart. The incident reportedly began just after 9 a.m., when officers received a call about a suspicious person in the parking lot. Police said they were told that the woman had been riding around the parking lot since 6:30 a.m. while drinking the wine.

Thanksgiving Day is approaching and we are spending the day at our son's house with his family. Our other son and his family will be there as well. Usually I bring the wine, some whites for the Ladies and Reds, for us. For the red I usually bring a merlot based Bordeaux from my modest collection. Problem this year: Included in the festivities will be my sons father-in-law, a very likable guy and we get along great. The issue is, he prefers his Red, with a couple of ice cubes in it. I cringe at the thought of ice going...

Research shows that the harmful effects of light drinking outweigh the benefits touted by other studies ST. LOUIS — We often see studies that tell us not only is light or moderate drinking not harmful to our health, in some cases, it’s actually good for us. But new research out of Washington University’s School of Medicine suggests that daily glass of wine may not be such a good idea after all. Instead, it actually raises your risk of dying sooner. According to the study of more than 400,000 American adults, light drinkers — regardless of age — are 20 percent...

ST. LOUIS — We often see studies that tell us not only is light or moderate drinking not harmful to our health, in some cases, it’s actually good for us. But new research out of Washington University’s School of Medicine suggests that daily glass of wine may not be such a good idea after all. Instead, it actually raises your risk of dying sooner. According to the study of more than 400,000 American adults, light drinkers — regardless of age — are 20 percent more likely to suffer a premature death. “It used to seem like having one or two...