People, for good or ill, have for thousands of years turning to alcoholic beverages to enhance their celebrations and to comfort them in sorrowful or frightening times. An as the 21st century unfolds, with its high-speed, high-tech, and climatically changing future, the need of the soothing effects of alcohol does not seem likely to decrease any time soon.
Wine, of course, is the alcoholic beverage with the most mystical past, from its days when the god of wine Bacchus, in the time of the ancient Greeks, first presented it to Icarius and Erigone as payment for their hospitality, to its history in the Judaic and Christian liturgical rites. Wine is the most intriguing of all alcohols, and its proper cultivation, aging, and storage have been the topic of discussion for millennia.
The Chemistry Of Fermentation
Because the chemistry of the ingredients in wine, and their interactions with each other, are so sensitive to light and temperature, wine and its storage is a subject of intensive study even today. As the medieval Christian monks learned to their dismay, the amount of time for which wine was allowed to ferment had a direct effect of the results they got from their attempts at wine and storage.
Wine which had not been allowed to ferment properly in its barrel would often, when sealed in bottles, continue to ferment until the pressure from the gasses which built up from the fermentation process was too much for the glass bottles to contain. The bottles would often simply explode into dozens of fragments, injuring and scarring any monks, priests, or other bystanders who were unfortunate enough to be near.
The California Wineries
Both the passage of time, and more enlightened scientific understanding, however, made wine and its storage a much less treacherous undertaking. Wine and storage [http://www.winestoragerating.com/Articles/Wine_Storage_Racks.php], in fact, have become so mainstream that in the Napa-Sonoma area of northern California, there are now many wineries owned by wealthy individuals and families.
They have taken on the tasks of both the making wine and its storage, and are producing, in the constant sunshine, warm days, and cool nights of the Golden State, some of the world’s best Chablis and Pinot Noir. And they have introduced state of the art wine and storage techniques to ensure that not one drop of elixir produced by all those warm days and cool quiet nights is ever less than its best. oregon wine tours