Quote:No problem, take your time. As far as price goes, we keep on the main wine aisles. We don't venture to the case where they have the really expensive stuff. So I guess 30 and under. There are 2 wines we buy fairly often and one runs about 17 and the other runs about 10. There have been times we spend 20 on a bottle and poured two glasses, each took one sip and we both hated it. That's why we stick to the few we know we like.

We've got a local winery in st augustine. We did their tour which was pretty cool. They try to teach you a bit about wine, I learned a bunch. But, I have also forgotten a lot too. We tried to apply what we learned in trying other bottles but it's clear, they steered us wrong or we messed it up. I thought they told us that the high the alcohol content the dryer the wine would be. So we tried one that had a fairly low alcohol content and it was too dry, yet the one we like has more alcohol.. Go figure.

Hey xJAGGYx I didn't forget about you. I found some wines but I left the list in my office where I was working on it. I'll try to get it to you in the next few days.


By the way, what they told you about the ABV/dryness is somewhat true in a really general sense, but you can't ever really apply it as a rule of thumb.


When wine ferments, yeast converts sugar into alcohol. If left to it's own devices the yeast will turn all the sugar into alcohol -- giving you the strongest and driest wine possible from the grape. So it is true in that sense.


However, grapes can have vastly different amounts of sugar in them. We measure them in units called Brix. When I grow for wine I usually grow for champagne and that requires about 17 Brix of sugar. When I grow for regular table wine, they like 22-23 Brix of sugar. For a dessert wine, I'd imagine they'd ask for something like 30-32 Brix.


So as you can see, depending on the amount of sugar you start with you can break that general rule pretty easy. Using all of the 17 Brix grapes might give you around 14% ABV and a super dry wine, on the other hand, using a grape with 24 Brix and letting it ferment the first 20 will give you a stronger wine than the first one, but it will also be sweeter because there is still fermented sugar left in the wine.


That's called Residual Sugar -- and it sounds like you like wines that have a pretty high amount. A regular Cabernet might have .21 residual sugar, while moscato and ports have like 6.5 & 7.5 respectively. So you're on the extremely high end my friend. The tricky part is that your other wine, Pinot, is all over the map from very dry to very sweet and it's throwing me for a loop haha -- Anyway, hope the info helped!

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