If you have a lot of time to spend on wine, and the holidays is the season, check out the Top 100 Wine Blogs. As to which is worth the read, it is a matter a fit. You may find a blog at the bottom of the list more suitable to your tastes than one at the top, and you know we feel that you should never deny your true self for the sake of joining the crowd.

Enjoy!

Who would have thought counterfeiters would have moved to counterfeiting wine? Just like those fancy labels that verify authenticity on clothes, label technology is being developed to enhance wine security.

According to Wine Spectator magazine, 5% of rare wines sold on the secondary market are counterfeit. That is a lot of fraud.

At $500,000 for some wine, this fraud had to hurt:

In 1988, William Koch bought a number of rare bottles of wine alleged to be Thomas Jefferson's, found in walled-up wine cellars in Paris. Koch paid $500,000 for the bottles, which he bought from German wine merchant Hardy Rodenstock through an auction at Christie's.

After lending his collection for an exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2005, Koch learned that the supposed Jefferson bottles were fakes. The engraved "T.H.J." initials on the bottles were way ahead of their alleged time, done with tools not even introduced until after Jefferson had died. [Read]

Really, the cork does not belong under your nose. There is nothing you can really learn from sniffing the cork that you cannot get from the scent in the glass. What you can get from the cork is from your sense of sight and touch. If the cork looks "bad" and/or appears crumbly, it may have compromised the wine.

Next time you are handed a cork, use your eyes to judge if it says anything about the wine you are about to drink and keep it away from your nose.

Yes, there will be a day when a cork will be a piece of antiquity, but not yet.

What do you do when you enjoy wine and dessert? Make a wine sorbet? Around here, we would suggest a nice spicy red with some dark chocolate, but...

It sounds a bit bastardized, dismissing a good glass of wine and a good dessert by combing the two, but then again there is no palette experience with wine sorbets here. Thought you might be interested in knowing wine sorbets exist (Wine Cellar Sorbet) if you want a bit of an alcohol kick to your dessert.

A rich, thick, spicy red with some clean, dark chocolate, perhaps even a raisin & nut dark...now we are talking desert.

The idea of the self-serve tasting bar is a pretty good one, even if the tastes can cost $5, $10, $50 or more. The machines have been popping up for a while.

Anecdotal: Knew a man who built a restaurant around the theme of tasting wonderful wines with these machines. After a couple of years the business has closed and the winecentric part of the business is being removed. Traditional restaurant pays the bills a bit better. Cannot image where the concept is working if it cannot work in this high-end wine consuming community. The machines were cool and the wine tasting was an educational experience, though a bit pricey.

Like Australian wines? Okay, move over a bit… do you like New Zealand wines? Well, if you are interested, you may want to try the wine from Villa Maria. They raked in the accolades at the Air New Zealand Wine Awards.

(Never heard of them? Well, New Zealand is a small country in a very remote part of the world, but they do like to sip.)

Making lemonaide (or do you prefer lemonade?) out of lemons, which is what Wend-Tyler Winery did when they were slapped by the grape glut. Not only did they do it, the did it well.

Now, with a bit of wine success under their grape growing belt, they are working on a ruby cabernet. A bit different, but if it catches on…

Ever tasted a ruby cabernet? Sounds interesting, so if there is a bottle sitting on the shelves somewhere, pick it up and give it a try.

Until hearing about this, Wend-Tyler Winery was unfamiliar around here, but it sounds good.

Some might call it an obsession, but whatever you want to call it, if you really love wine then perhaps you will want to play the new version of Winerd. Yes, a wine tasting board game.

Japan seems a bit excited about The [yellow tail] making it to Nippon, but if you want to learn something new everyday, you now know that [yellow tail] is the number one imported wine into the United States.

Yes, wine grown in Beaumont, France is illegal, and has been banned for the last 70 years. Yet, it is still being made, in the hope that it will be legalized again in the future.

Why was it banned? Politics, and politicians who used the excuse it was not good enough for their pallets.

If you have 5 minutes, listen to the story.