It's Wine time with Bruce

For this lesson, I wanted to try a foreign wine and pair it to with food. I visited the Vintage Cellars where I get my weekly wine tasting and great wine recommendationsThe recommended wine ( although different from the DNT lesson 1 recommendations) is PSÂGOT, Cabernet Sauvignon from Jerusalem, Israel. Bottle (750ml), Price:  $28.39 After my first pour, I noticed a very dark red color. I then swirled and sniffed the wine a couple times before tasting the wine. The wine was dry and had some fruity smell and taste that I associated to cherries and blackberries. The wine was tannic and aggressive, although not as aggressive as the other cabernet sauvignon I usually taste. It had some earthy feel to it that made me think of the calcareous and desert like soil of Israel. After two hours, the wine had more pleasant aromas to senses. I could smell more floral  scents and the acidic-tannic flavor faded away a bit. This could be due to the fact that the wine had aged( oxidized) or I had

 For Saint Patrick's Day (3/16/2024), I toured the local Eastern Divide Brewery. Saint Patricks' Day with classmates  It was great to see all the steps that go into making a beer product, and I was glad I could draw some similarities between winemaking and brewing.  The first step in brewing is "crushing," where the grains are crushed. Similarly, in winemaking, the grapes are crushed to free the juice in the grapes. In beer making, though, the grain is crushed to extract sugars in the form of starch.  Fig. 1 The inside of the vessel that mixes the crushed grains and hot water. The next step is called Lautering (mash conversion). Although in winemaking, the sugars are extracted by squeezing the juice out of the grapes, during the beer-mashing process, the milled grist is mixed with hot water to extract the starch in a sugar solution. A similarity I learned is that the time the mash is allowed to be in contact with water plays a significant role in the final product fla