We kicked off our Boston blind tasting group’s 2011 season comparing a dozen chenin blancs mostly from the Loire Valley. A fascination with blind tasting connects all the way back with my earliest attempts to learn about wine twenty five years ago. There is no easier way for for me to identify the unique characteristics […]
Top Three Wines: Monbousquet, Raquillet, & Mullineux
Top wines this month bring together strange bedfellows including a Southern Hemisphere syrah from the long ignored vineyards in South Africa’s Swartland Cape Winelands outpost, a brilliant Burgundy from the stepchild Côte Chalonnaise village of Mercurey, and Bordeaux from a refocused producer working right bank Saint-Émilion vineyards. Each one of these wines represents strong value in […]
Wine, Google, & Zagat
Google plays a centerpiece role with wine enthusiasts searching the web for quality wine content. Google is not always efficient though, since wine sites figuring neatly into the search engine’s algorithms are too often commercial content aggregation sites. It’s predictable and annoying. These sites are more suited to sell you a wine than tell you what […]
Monbousquet 2000: Right (Bank) Hook to Selling Bordeaux
When you turn Bordeaux seller like me, a once covetous disposition for hoarding claret evaporates like morning dew in an afternoon sun. Selling first growths for ten times original investments at $1,000+ per bottle can be disorienting. A plethora of exciting alternatives to rock your palate and backfill the cellar are sympathetic enough to this profitable culling and can […]
Burgundy Value Not Oxymoron in Mercurey
The region’s wines are monuments to fine drinking at their pinnacle but inconsistent, expensive, and hardIy easy to understand with intricate layers of sub regions, villages, vineyard divisions, and winemakers. So not buying or drinking Burgundy with any regularity, the fact that Mercurey was a pre-phylloxera, top Burgundy production village before sinking in popularity and […]
Ignoring California Wines: Is Anybody Listening?
Last week Steve Heimoff published a post called “California Needs To Be Careful It Doesn’t Price Itself Out Of The Market.” I become confused when I read things like this because the fact of the matter is California violated my personal quality to price ratio (QPR) tolerance more than a decade ago. For me, California […]
Grace Connects Wine & Winemaker
I do not know Angela Osborne personally but we have had a few email exchanges and I have tried her A Tribute to Grace Grenache from the Santa Barbara Highlands Vineyard. The wine literally shook my senses and turns out to be unlike any other US made Grenache I have ever tasted. The 2008 vintage example is […]
What’s Going on With the Price of Wine
I finally caught up with a replay of Rob McMillan’s Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) webinar presentation of their own 2011-2012 State of the Wine Industry report. Rob is founder of SVB’s Wine division. His presentation was not really a state of the wine industry report since the bank and its research are only concerned with the U.S., west […]
Cork Drive Features Sustainability Beyond the Vineyard
There are plenty campaigns and initiatives advocating sustainability in the vineyard. What about at the other end of the wine chain? We recycle glass bottles, but what about cork? Wine closures make up 70% of the entire cork market, so a focus by wine drinkers on recycling and replanting cork trees could have a significant […]
Top Three Wines of August: Northern and Southern Italy
This month’s top three wines are neither ordinary nor expensive. They are celebrations of authentic wine making and candidates for greater honor than simply top wines of the month. The wines made by Sicily’s emergent superstar Arianna Occhipinti are recipients of mounting natural winemaking acclaim, sought out by in-the-know fans of deliciously authentic wines. The Schiopetto is […]
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