Understanding Wine Means Knowing The Place In The Glass!!

This wine education website IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION and will be content-ready in early to mid-2008. We will offer irreverent tasting notes, provocative articles, and, most importantly, video investigations of the world's wine regions and of controversial cutting-edge wine topics.

If you are serious about wine, or have a deep-rooted curiosity about wine, or are a wine professional looking for something unusual and provocative, placeintheglass.com is the website for you!

This website is not sponsored or financially supported in any way by the wine industry. We are completely independent, to preserve our credibility and to avoid any appearance of conflicts of interest. We do not sell advertising for the same reasons. We also do not sell wine---only how you can know what to buy and how each wine is unique. In this way, consumers as well as wine professionals can count on our opinion to be trustworthy and in no way the product of financial conflicts of interest.

PlaceInTheGlass.com will be, starting in late 2008, supported solely by donations and, subsequently, probably in 2009, by membership subscriptions.

Critical tasting terms used at placeintheglass.com:

• Complexity means secondary or tertiary layers of flavors on the palate and nose.
• Length means a tendency to linger on the palate after the wine is swallowed or spit.
• Concentration means richness of texture and of fruitiness, especially at mid-palate.
• Balance means proper relative proportions of tannin, alcohol, acidity, and fruitiness.

A 'great' wine therefore expresses its unique place of origin and its unique vintage with layers of complexity, intense concentration, perfect balance, and lingering flavors.

Although a place of origin is defined by local climate, by local soils, and by local winemaking traditions. Such traditions of course develop over considerable periods of time and reflect local conditions, such as the cool climate where Champagne is made, or the warm climate where Port is made.

At placeintheglass.com, we believe that all wine education should be rooted in this philosophy, thereby making critics' 100-point-scale ratings completely irrelevant to an understanding of wine or to the proper selection of wine, as a consumer, or as a member of the trade.

Contact us at conde@placeintheglass.com to schedule provocative private power-point-based wine tastings. We also arrange special guided tours of major wine-making regions throughout the world, featuring private barrel tastings with winemakers. We also make frequent presentations to vineyard owners and winermakers, to compare different winemaking regions which produce similar wines in similar growing conditions.