Pope made an honorary sommelier.

Makes sense to me. I don’t think anyone can argue that the Pope is a man who has served his fair share of wine in his lifetime.

Henri Jayer, world famous maker of Pinot, dies.

Jayer shunned many technical innovations in winemaking and disliked uniformity in wines. Instead, he used only minimal interventions in the winery to avoid masking the unique flavors and aromas of each particular vineyard. Quality was paramount: In the “terribly bad year” of 1975, he rejected almost half his crop to salvage his best wine, Rolin recalled.

The son of a winegrower, Jayer quit school at age 16 to work the fields after his two older brothers left to fight in World War II. Over the years, he purchased new plots, but never cultivated more than about 17 acres, Hayat said…

Despite the enormous sums his bottles sold for, Jayer never let his reputation go to his head, according to Hayat.

“When people would start to deconstruct his wines, examining aromas and whatnot, he’d just say: ‘That’s all fine and good, but do you like it?’” Hayat recalled. “‘That’s what matters.’”

Interestingly, 17 acres is the precise size of our vineyard. I wish I could have met Mr. Jayer.

Red wine helps fight Alzhiemers.

Hey, did you know that Pinot is red?!

At the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, laboratory mice given Cabernet Sauvignon-based wine over a seven-month period experienced ‘significantly reduced Alzheimer’s Disease-type deterioration of spatial memory function’.

This was compared with control mice that were treated ‘with either a comparable amount of ethanol or water alone,’ Mount Sinai researchers said.

The study, to be published in November, infers that ‘moderate wine consumption, within the range recommended by the FDA dietary guidelines of one drink per day for women and two for men, may help reduce the relative risk for Alzheimer’s Disease.’

And finally, an article in the SF Chronicle outlines the grueling process of becoming a Master of Wine.

Morgan, who has been letting me publish his dispatches from Bordeaux the past two weeks, is a MW candidate. This article will give you a taste (horrible pun intended) of what it might be like to tackle the degree yourself.

I think I’m just going to stick to learning French…