Just in time for the holidays, we’ve assembled an anthology of these columns into a compendium of wine tips, trends and trivia that will put you on your way to wine expertise in no time.

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My inland home town has embraced this Low Country seafood dish as if it were our own … and we love to fancy it up with unexpected sauces, spices and additions.

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You can’t turn your head these days without catching sight of some new effort to build sustainability, greenness, and environmental consciousness into just about everything. As a Northern California hippie child and card carrying Sierra Club, Greenpeace, World Wildlife Federation, and Natural Resources Defense Council member, I couldn’t be happier about it. I have to chuckle though at the speed with which business has seen the opportunity to turn green practices into PR and profit (once they finally realized it was good for both).

The wine industry is on the same bandwagon, of course, with some wineries making the leap to solar power, and many striving to reduce their “carbon footprint,” or the amount of carbon they put into the environment. The latter, of course, being particularly relevant to the pressing issue of global warming.

While wineries and other businesses are working hard to figure out how to operate sustainably, consumers are being faced with choices about how they live, and perhaps more importantly, how they buy, with an eye towards reducing their impact on the environment.

This is not as easy as it sounds. For any simple product that we purchase there is a huge, complex chain of resources, actions, processes, and relationships that have brought that product to the shelf in front of us. Trying to calculate the carbon footprint of a particular bottle of wine, for instance, is a nearly impossible task.

But that didn’t stop Tyler Colman, who runs the blog Dr. Vino. Colman, a writer and professor spent some time trying to figure it out, and wrote a very interesting post about it a couple of weeks ago. Among his findings are that, depending on where you live, buying New York wine may be better for the environment that buying California wine.

I’m not sure Colman and his collaborators have taken into account ALL the complexities of what goes into wine (as some commenters on the post have noted, the impacts of whether the wine is shipped in Styrofoam or in refrigerated trucks or ships can have a huge impact on the carbon footprint) but it’s an interesting exercise nonetheless.

In the following days, Colman even offered to try to calculate the footprint of a particular bottle of French wine purchased in Berkeley, California.

If you’re at all interested in the environmental impact of your wine habit, the posts are worth checking out, if only as food for thought. The problem with all these calculations are, of course, that if we really wanted to save the environment, we’d all just grow our own grapes, make our own wine, not bottle it at all, and simply pour some out of the cask into our homemade earthenware mugs every time we wanted a drink. Sigh.

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Clean and bright, tart lime and pleasant herbs, this outstanding Sancerre is showing beautifully, young and fresh.

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What’s the matter with Sauvignon Blanc? Next to Chardonnay, it may be the most popular white grape that wine enthusiasts love to malign.

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The Rhone’s simpler wines aren’t intended for keeping, but how about the upper-tier “Villages” bottles that we’re studying this month?

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As the days grow shorter and cooler, opines writer John Juergens, we can turn our focus inward. It is a great opportunity to spend some time reflecting on life, either alone or with friends. And what better way to facilitate your ruminations than with a nice “meditative” wine?

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The European wine industry, especially the French wine industry, needs a serious shot in the arm. It has needed one for more than a decade. A few days ago, the European Union tried to give it one, but thanks to the characteristic myopia of international politics, it might as well have just taken a few hundred million dollars and flushed it down the toilet.

The EU recognized, correctly, that European wine isn’t particularly competitive (read: doesn’t sell) on the world market once you get outside of the luxury price range ($25 and above). Unfortunately, the majority of European wine made falls below this price range, which means that tens of thousands of people who make their living off of such wine as winegrowers, vineyard workers, winemakers, and winery owners are in serious financial straits.

But like the parent of a rebellious teenager who decides that their kid will settle down if they buy them a really nice sports car, the EU mistakenly seems to think that they can spend their way out of the existing crisis. Or perhaps a better analogy might be the the bozos in Washington, D.C. who think that they can fix the problems with Medicare by increasing the subsidies for prescription drugs for the elderly.

“Improving the quality of the wine we produce is a top priority if we are to fend off the challenge posed by New World wine producers,” EU Farm Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel is quoted as saying in a recent article in the International Herald Tribune.

This most certainly is true, but those improvements are not going to come from spending $750,000,000 to help farmers replace current rootstocks with newer ones, which is essentially what the EU managed to get through it’s committees for this year. The real reforms, like changing labeling laws, marketing laws, and appellation regulations are going to have to wait until next year, apparently.

Which, if you’ll permit just a slight bit of cynicism on my part, means basically forever. It’s all too easy to just throw money around because constituents always re-elect people who pay their bills. It’s hard to do the right thing and completely rethink a broken system.

Here’s hoping that the politicians actually mean what they say. What are the chances of that?

Read the full story.

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