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Who's in the Video
Dana Cowin is the editor in chief of Food and Wine magazine.  Previously, Ms. Cowin served as the executive editor of Mademoiselle, the managing editor of HG Magazine, and associate editor of Vogue. A recent guest judge[…]

Cowin talks about green wines and vintage Italian grapes.

Topic: Wine Trends on the Horizon

Dana Cowin: The wine trend that I am really interested in seeing play out is the green wine trend. So everybody got very attached to local food easily. We got attached to organic food very easily. No in viticulture there of course are the parallel challenges you want your grape wines tended without too much intervention. There are a lot of winemakers who have been making organic wine or wine from organic grapes for a long time and they are finally going to start marketing that. Is that going to work? I don’t know. I am interested in seeing how that plays out because I think there is a huge opportunity that’s real and there is the opportunity as marketing. Unless those things come together must be terrible wine. The other trends, that I am really interested in --- I am interested in the better whites. So we are short ---- such bad reputation. It has been over oak in America for so long and now we have pulled back. So you can actually get a really short wine that’s made in America and of course in France always been possible, but the other whites that have come on the scene they have so much flavor and I think that it is so light and refreshing and people sort of rejected them because they know if they are going to be drinking the wine they should drink red, but I just want to be a white wine star. So I really love white wines, a great Gewurztraminer, a great Viognier, a great Alberino, a great Moscato. I am really interested in that. I am interested in ---- not just me there is a swelling of interest in the Boutique Champagnes. So champagne has been dominated by the really Big Browns which are fantastic, but now there are these little small houses doing incredible boutique champagnes and they are not coming to the state. It used to be that they just make it enough, they did was only the expert, but now you can see these phenomenal champagne list in restaurants and in wine stores, interested in that. I am interested in reds that are not Californic house. So I am interested in the local global varietals if that makes any sense. So I am interested in Melback. I am interested in the Greek grapes that I use names I absolutely cannot pronounce. I am interested in having them. I mean I could but I am not going to try. I am interested in those, the introductions of the Greek wines because Greek wine and food is such a huge trend and I am glad because its very healthy, very fresh cooking and great in the wines have come along with that. So there is so the wine world because of the global interest in higher quality in geek terms they have reduced yields which means that they are not producing wines that are as may be copier, but they are better concentrated, they are better taking care of vineyard people say wine is really made in the vineyard which means they care more about their grapes and so there is a lot of great great wine around the world.

Topic: Vintage Italian Grapes

Dana Cowin: Well. We have often ---- we have known a lot about the wines from Tuscany, Chianti where --- they are great, sense of it is great, but the truth is there are wines in the south of Italy like Campania, Sardinia, Sicily and those wines had not come into the States before and so I encourage everyone to go look for it Sardinian wines and have some Fragula wired added which is always has Jewish to me Fragula but its not. It’s Sardinian pasta and the wines of Campania and not just get stuck on the wines of Tuscany.

Recorded on: 3/7/08


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