megmaker's Profile

We had the luxury of space, so designed for 42" margins around our island. I'm glad we did; the extra 6" makes it much easier to pass by each other while cooking, and, as Joel noted above, provides more generous space for open dishwasher and oven doors.

Love Zweigelt. It's an enormously food-friendly wine, given its good acidity, light body, and supple tannins. Austrian reds are a vastly overlooked category, I think. Readers would do well to take note.

The pendant lighting's a nice touch, especially for a wine loving household. Technically, these are not precisely "wine jugs," but instead are a wine aging vessel called a demijohn, or "bonbonne" in French. A winemaker might use these if she wishes to avoid oak effects, as with delicate white wines or reds in which she wants to keep the flavor focused on the fruit. The reduced-oxygen (reductive) élevage brought about by aging in glass also introduces interesting flavor components to the resulting wine.

Mary, thanks for the terrific article, and for raising awareness of this important issue. For the good of the order, I work for Bonny Doon Vineyard, and we're proud of our full-disclosure ingredient labeling. I encourage wine drinkers to A) educate themselves about wine additives and then B) request full ingredient labeling from wineries. There are hundreds of approved wine additives, and while many may be vegan or vegetarian, they may not be the kind of thing one might want to ingest anyway. Alice Feiring has a good list on her blog -- see http://www.alicefeiring.com/blog/2010/11/-approved-wine-additives.html. Mary's recommendation to seek out so-called natural wines is an excellent one. Cheers!