Food and Beverage Blog

One of the best ways to entertain your friends for a dinner party would be to man the bar and serve out cocktails. But how exactly do you make great tasting cocktails? There are actually several tips that you need to keep in mind if you want to create cocktails that will wow all your guests.

Perhaps one of the first things you need to do is get yourself a solid bar or cocktail set. It is important that it has the necessary items you need like the shaker, the jigger, and the strainer. Other accessories might include the bottle opener, the stirring rod or the ice spoon. Make sure that your cocktail set contains everything you need to measure the ingredients properly.

Speaking of ingredients, a second important factor to making a great cocktail is by strictly following the ingredients. You need to be able to follow the instructions properly including the amount of ingredients you need to add. This will ensure that your cocktails will taste really good each and every time you mix them.

Another surefire way of having tasty cocktails is by mixing and blending them properly. Different cocktail ingredients will have different ways of mixing and blending. For instance, any drink that contains eggs or fruits need to be shaken inside a shaker instead of mixed. This will make sure that the ingredients are thoroughly blended.

Most bartenders will tell you that mixing the drink properly is one of the keys to making sure that it will taste great. Apart from that, it is also important to serve up your cocktails using chilled glasses or at least ensuring that they are served cold. This will help in adding to the taste of the cocktails. Moreover, use small glasses when serving up your drinks. The larger glasses might cause the drink to warm up so it is essential that you do something to keep it warm.

You can also use plenty of ice whenever you are still shaking the ingredients. Always add the ingredients first inside the shaker before placing the ice so that it won’t have too much time to dilute.

Of course, to make sure that your drink will taste great, it is necessary to taste it first before anything else. There are times when you might need to fine tune the taste of the cocktail that you created. Adding a little dash of this and that can do wonders to making the cocktail taste absolutely great?

If you have never made your own wine, you are going to need some simple wine making instructions to get you going.

Whether you are going to make wine from freshly pressed grapes or from a commercially prepared concentrate, the process is basically the same.

The essential elements needed for wine

Apart from grapes, you need water, sugar (some of which will come from the grapes) and yeast to make wine. Basically what happens is that the sugar and yeast react to one another and they start to ferment. The same thing happens when you brew beer or when you prepare the dough for baking bread.

A wine making recipe will tell you how much of each ingredient to add, depending on the type of grapes or grape concentrate you are using.

The wine making process

The first step in the wine making process will depend on whether you are using grapes or a concentrate. If you are using grapes then these will need to be crushed. Then you will need to activate the wine yeast in a bottle of tepid water.

Once all the ingredients have been mixed together in a suitable container, they should be left to bubble and ferment. The instructions in the recipe will specify for how long. They will also state when the wine should be racked, which entails siphoning the wine out of the fermentation bucket into a clean container, so that the sediment that has sunk to the bottom is left behind.

The racking process is quite simple, although you have to be careful not to disturb the sediment, otherwise the wine will become cloudy and you’ll have to keep on racking it.

Bottling your wine

While good instructions will explain exactly when and how to bottle your homemade wine, it isn’t always possible for them to determine exact timing. This is because conditions will be different for you and for me and for anyone else who is making and bottling their own wine. An invaluable rule of thumb is to only bottle your wine when it is really clear. When it’s in the bottle it will continue fermenting gently and the taste will continue to develop.

A final tip is fills the bottle as much as possible, because any air left between the wine and the cork can change the color of the wine.

Italy is the largest producer and exporter of wine, producing one-fifth of the world’s production and offering the greatest variety of grapes. It has some of the oldest wine regions in the world producing some top quality wines. There are more than 1 million vineyards under cultivation in Italy spanning through the country from the Alps in the north to almost within sight of Africa in the south. Grapes are grown in almost every region. The long shoreline of Italy contributes to coastal wine regions as does the mountains and foothills which provide many altitudes for grape growing.

It has been documented and authorized by Italy’s Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry that there are 350 grape varieties; however there are an additional 500 documented varieties in circulation although these have not been authorized.

The Italians are the biggest consumers of wine guzzling 59 litres per capita.

Italian wines are classified into four categories, two of these falls under the EU’ Quality Wine Produced in a Specific Region’ category and are identified as: Denominazione di Origine Controllatae (DOC) and Denominazione di Origine Controllate e Garantita (DOCG). DOC recognises a quality wine maintaining the international and national reputation of that product. The main difference between the two is that the latter has to pass a blind test.

The other two fall under the category of ‘Table Wine’. Vino da Tavola (VDT), this means the wine is simply produced in Italy, usually a basic wine for local consumption and Indicazione Geografica Tipi” (IGT) which represents wine from a specific region in Italy Italian Red Wines – Tuscany is the home of Sangiovese, a well known grape, and one the Italians are extremely proud of. Sangiovese is made traditionally, and is full of cherry fruit, earth and cedar. Another popular grape is Nebbiolo, made in the province of Cuneo, these wines are renowned for their grace and influence with a bouquet of wild mushroom, truffle, roses and tar. Other grapes include: Montepulciano, Abruzzo, Barbera, Corvina, Amarone, Nero d’Avola, Dolcetto, negroamaro, Aglianico, Sagrantino and Malvasia Nera.

Italian White Wines – The most widely planted grape in Italy is the Trebbiano which is grown throughout Italy. This wine is very easy to drink and mostly pale in colour. Another popular, widely produced grape is Pinot Grigio, which characters include crispness and cleanness. Other grapes include: Moscato, Nuragus, Tocai Friulano, Ribolla Gialla, Arneis, Malvasia Bianca, Pigato, Fiano, Garganega, Vermentino, Verdicchio and Vernaccia.

Have you visited wineries and been able to observe the activities that occur in the wine making process? Anyone who has visited many wineries and seen firsthand the many steps that occur in the process has a pretty good idea of the intricacies involved. They may not be aware that those same intricate steps in the wine making process also translate into the label that becomes affixed to the bottle holding the finished product.

The label on a bottle of wine really does tell a story about the product inside. Consumers can know many details about a wine blend, the grapes that made it, where it was made, what specific vineyard it came from, and much more simply by reading and understanding the terminology used on wine labels.

For example, a commonly seen (and required) item on wine labels is what is often called the bottler’s statement. This statement has several variations that are used. One of the more common versions reads: “Produced and bottled by…” with the winery name and city location coming after that. The term “produced” tells some very specific detail about where the wine blend was actually fermented, or made. In order for a winery to use that term it must have fermented at least 75% of the finished wine blend at the same site that is bottling the wine.

This may seem like a standard course of events to many wine consumers. In other words, don’t wineries usually ferment all their own wine? Not necessarily anymore. The wine industry has grown and evolved in many ways especially in the past 10 to 20 years. One of those changes has meant the growth of the bulk wine market, where wineries buy and sell excess wine. To give you an idea of what this might look like in the real world say a winery ferments 3,000 gallons of wine at its primary winery site. They then decide that they would like to bottle a total of 5,000 gallons of the blend that wine will go into in order to meet their wine club volume. That means they will need to purchase and blend in an additional 2,000 gallons that they would find on the bulk wine market. In this particular example their finished 5,000 gallon blend would then only have 60% that was fermented by them, so they could not use the term produced on the label.

There are many other terms used in this bottler’s statement. Each of them has its own specific definition. The intricacies that live in even one or two words on a wine label can provide the astute wine consumer with powerful wine shopping tools.