Wine Spectator November 15, 2019

Visit WineSpectator.com/111519 to find links to all the following resources. FREE RESOURCES FOR ALL OUR WINESPECTATOR.COM READERS NEW YORK WINE EXPERIENCE Join us Oct. 17–19 for this year’s great lineup of tastings and seminars. Our full coverage of the event will bring the world’s best winemakers and chefs to you with photos, articles and videos. GLOSSARY OF WINE TERMS Unfamiliar with a word on a label or in a tasting note? Check our glossary. WINE CHALLENGE From the basics of tasting to trivia about your favorite grapes, regions and styles, test your knowledge of all things wine by taking our quizzes. Every two weeks, we post a new set of questions. WINE SPECTATOR VIDEO Watch all our informative wine tips, winemaker interviews and tastings on your desktop, laptop, tablet or phone. Tune in each week…

If you love California Cabernet Sauvignon, then clear some space in your cellar for the 2016 vintage. Rating a classic 98 points on our 100-point scale, it’s a benchmark year of stunning wines that will drink well in their youth and develop gracefully for decades. Senior editor James Molesworth, our lead taster on the cate-gory, reviewed more than 300 2016s in official blind tastings during the past year and rated nearly 250 wines as outstanding or classic on the Wine Spectator 100-point scale. He also re-viewed almost 300 Cabernets from other vintages, where he found additional terrific bottles. (You’ll find tasting notes for the top Cabs beginning on page 60, and a complete list of scores and prices for all wines reviewed beginning on page 73.) Napa Valley, the epicenter of California…

Perfect Petit My wife and I decided on a Sunday lunch at the Rye Street Tavern in Baltimore to find a pairing for a grilled mahi sandwich and a crab Cobb salad. I was drawn to the 2016 Michael Shaps Petit Manseng. Like most folks with a modest understanding of wine, I was intrigued. Although I’d heard of the varietal, I was not familiar with a single bottling. Very chuffed with my selection I spent the afternoon ferreting out more information about this grape. Fast forward one week and my wife hands me the Sept. 30 issue of Wine Spectator. There on the last page is none other than the very same 2016 Michael Shaps Petit Manseng, but this time paired with gnudi (A Perfect Match). It’s these chance connections that always…

When Salma Assaf found ancient rubble under her house in the Israeli town of Mi’ilya, she didn’t realize it would lead to a remarkable discovery in wine history. A team of archaeologists soon uncovered the largest-yet-found Crusader winery, possibly a hub of winemaking in the northern part of the Kingdom of Jerusalem during the 12th and 13th centuries. “Before this, we didn’t know almost anything about this kind of industrial agriculture,” said lead archaeologist Rabei Khamisy, of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology, University of Haifa. “And now we just know more and more.” The two 129-square-foot treading floors Khamisy and his team unearthed are three times the size of the next-largest Crusader-era winery yet found. The excavation has also yielded a second, larger room in the complex dating to the Roman…

As of Aug. 1, Florida residents can or-der and receive wine from out-of-state retailers through common carriers. That’s big news for consumers looking to order wine from beyond the borders of the Sunshine State. More than 540 million gallons of wine, beer and spirits were sold in Florida in 2018, according to Impact Databank, a sister publication of Wine Spectator. The third most populous state in the U.S. is now the most populous to allow direct-to-consumer retailer shipping from out of state. The Florida Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco (ABT) issued a ruling allowing the practice in response to Indiana retailer Kahn’s Fine Wine and Spirits, which filed a request for clarification on the regulation in May 2018. After appeals by several local wholesaler and distributor associations, the ABT released…

The spotted lanternfly, an invasive species of insect, is devastating Pennsylvania’s fledgling wine industry and spreading into neighboring states. The lanternfly, also known as SLF or Lycorma delicatula, travels in packs, sucks the sap out of vines using its proboscis and leaves behind sticky waste that coats the plant, disrupting photosynthesis and attracting mold. Native to southern China, the SLF was identified in a backyard in Berks County, Penn., in 2014 and has since spread through 14 Pennsylvania counties. Isolated infestations have been found in Virginia, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. There have been sightings in New York’s Finger Lakes as well. “We first found them in our vineyard in 2014,” says Richard Blair, owner of Setter Ridge Vineyards in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. “We didn’t know what they were. In 2015 we knew…