Who We Are

Noblegrapewines.com is the most recent creative project from Nancy, John, and Robert  Romano, along with our father A. Lawrence Romano (Larry). Together we are continuing in the tradition of introducing quality, limited production wines to the American market-place, begun by our father over 50 years ago.  From 1963 to 1988, Larry was the proprietor of the A.L. Romano Wine Company, a San Francisco based distributor & importer of fine French, German, Italian and California wines.  Among his many accomplishments in the industry, Larry Romano is known for introducing Robert Mondavi wines in California, being the first to import premium Italian wines to the USA and helping to create the Vichon brand. In the future, Noblegrapewines.com will expand its wine portfolio, increasing the number of available limited-production wines from Italy and Israel and introduce wines from other wine producing countries.

Using Noblegrapewines.com

Throughout the centuries, certain ideas about drinking wine were established as guidelines to help wine enthusiasts get the most from any given bottle of wine.  This was achieved by understanding that certain wines taste better than others with specific foods and subsequently approaching wine as you would approach food, in terms of complexity and intensity of flavor. Personal preference, however, is more important than any rule - the rules themselves being little more than taste preferences. 
 
If rules inhibit your enjoyment of wine, then the rules should be discarded. As you learn about wines by tasting them, you will develop your own palate, and thus create your own personal guidelines. No rules about wine fall into the realm of etiquette, they merely indicate and direct us to the most pleasing combinations of food and drink. What tastes right to your palate is likely to please another’s.

The art of selecting wine and food is very subjective – and the key is balance. Select a wine in which the intensity of flavor does not overpower the food, and the food does not overpower the wine. The browse feature here at Noblegrapewines.com can be used as a general guide for selecting wines that suit your palate and/or your table, as you develop your own experience. It is based on the continuum that exists in wine (just like the one that exists in food). This continuum is divided into degrees of “body” of flavor ranging from ‘Sparkling’ to ‘Full-bodied Red’, relating the diverse intensities of flavor wine can exhibit - the variation of flavor intensity expressed by the body of every wine comes from the wine’s contact with the skins of the (noble) grapes during the wine making process. Understanding this continuum allows us to pair the right wines with the right foods and helps to maximize a harmony of flavors while taking into account the subjectivity of personal palates.

The Oxford Companion to Wine explains accordingly:

Body:   Tasting term for the perceived ‘weight’ – the sensation of fullness, resulting from density of viscosity – of a wine on the palate.  Wines at either end of the scale are described as full-bodied and light-bodied .
 
Next to water, alcohol is the major constituent of wines.  It has a much higher viscosity than water and is the major component responsible fore the sensation of fullness, or body, as a wine is rinsed around the mouth.  alcoholic strength is therefore clearly an important factor: the more potent a wine the more full bodied it is usually said to be.

The dissolved solids in a wine, its extract, can also contribute significantly to body, although sweet wines are not necessarily full bodied (ASTI, for example, being sweet but very light bodied, thanks to its low alcohol content).

Contrary to popular conception, glycerol makes only a very minor contribution to density, viscosity and therefore to body (although it does have a slight effect on apparent sweetness).

Body is not related to wine quality, balance being more important in a wine, whether it is full or light bodied.

Enjoy

We encourage you to try as many of the wines offered here as possible, discover your favorites, and hopefully, you will enjoy them as much as we do!