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Near the banquet hall where rulers of a Middle Bronze Age city-state and their guests feasted, a team of American and Israeli researchers broke through to a storage room holding the remains of 40 large ceramic jars. The vessels were broken, their liquid contents long since vanished — but not without a trace.

A chemical analysis of residues left in the three-foot-tall jars detected organic traces of acids that are common components of all wine, as well as ingredients popular in ancient winemaking. These included honey, mint, cinnamon bark, juniper berries and resins used as a preservative. The recipe was similar to medicinal wines used for 2,000 years in ancient Egypt and probably tasted something like retsina or other resinous Greek wines today.

So the archaeologists who have been exploring the Canaanite site, known as Tel Kabri, announced on Friday that they had found one of civilization’s oldest and largest wine cellars. The storage room held the equivalent of about 3,000 bottles of red and white wines, they said — and they suspected that this was not the palace’s only wine cellar.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/science/in-ruins-of-palace-a-wine-with-hints-of-cinnamon-and-top-notes-of-antiquity.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

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Last year, Italy exported 78 million gallons of wine to America. That’s nearly a quarter of the total wine imported by the U.S., according to the Beverage Information Group. Italy also ranks second in the world (behind France) for personal wine consumption, with each Italian consuming 13.6 gallons a year. Compare that to America, which ranks 42nd in wine consumption, with the average American drinking 3.6 gallons a year.

And yet, wine consumption in Italy is dwindling.

Five years ago Italians drank 14.5 gallons a year – and significantly less than the 15.1 gallons they drank in 2006, according to the Beverage Information Group. It’s a dramatic change from the 1970s, when Italians drank 29 gallons, according to Assoenologi, the main Italian oenologists’ association.

“This is happening in all three of the world’s major wine-producing countries: France, Italy, and Spain,” said Jancis Robinson, wine critic of the Financial Times. “Wine – so much part of tradition and the past in these countries – is seen as an old person’s or peasant’s drink, whereas heavily advertised beers, spirits, and sodas are seen as more youthful and modern.”

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– http://mag.newsweek.com/2013/11/15/vino-thanks-re-italian.html

“This chart shows the major distilleries operating in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Indiana, grouped horizontally by corporate owner, then subdivided by distillery. Each tree shows the type of whiskey made, and the various expressions of each style of whiskey or mash bill, in the case of bourbons. For instance, Basil Hayden’s is a longer-aged version of Old Grand-Dad, and both are made at the Jim Beam Distillery. Some of this is imprecise. Buffalo Trace has two bourbon mash bills, but it isn’t known which of its many brands are made from each, so this is a rough guess based on online commentary. Willett, formerly only a bottler as Kentucky Bourbon Distillers, has been distilling its own product for about a year; I include the brands that it bottles from other sources for reference. The ages are taken from published age statements if they exist; if they don’t, brands have been plotted in the general area where I would guess they belong.”

“No cocktail (and this includes the martini) gets people as worked up about methodology as the old-fashioned. And that’s probably because the two major approaches really are quite different. One is starkly minimalist, prescribing nothing more than sugar, whiskey and bitters — maybe a few teardrops’ worth of water, maybe a twist of orange or lemon to finish it off. Like Hayworth, it’s streamlined, it’s today (even if it is one of the oldest cocktails on record). It’s certainly not the old-fashioned I was taught to make at a bar in small-town Vermont in the early 1990s. There, the first time a customer ordered the drink from me, I skulked over to the manager to ask what to do. She plonked a sugar cube, a slice of orange and a cherry in a glass, dug what looked like a small nightstick out of a drawer, handed it to me as if I had any idea what to do with it and told me to add whiskey, Angostura bitters and ice. I did figure out what to do with the muddler, and that drink — the sweet and fruity, eager-to-please, raised among the grasshoppers, strictly from corn, boisterous version — instantly became my old-fashioned.”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/magazine/the-great-old-fashioned-debate.html?ref=todayspaper