Archive for the ‘Culture and Wine’ Category

May 12, 2006

Wine Flying High

I’m one of those guys that likes to get to the airport early, well before my flight. It’s a thing I have about being paranoid about missing the plane. Plus, I like airports.There’s something about watching lots of people move about in a transitional state that I find fascinating. It’s going to get easier to enjoy my early arrivals when I fly out of Sacramento. A report in USA Today notes that San Francisco-based Taste, Inc got approval to open…

May 11, 2006

Georgia Wine On My Mind

First, Georgia, the former Soviet satellite, sees Russia attempt to kill its wine industry by instituting a ban on importation of Georgian wine, and all for political reasons. Then, this headline comes out of Georgia: HAIL DESTROYS 80% OF VINEYARDS IN EASTERN GEORGIA What’s it take for a poor little Georgian winemaker to get a break? First it’s Mother Putin then Mother Nature out to get these guys. Eastern Georgia is the source of a significant percentage of the Georgian…

May 11, 2006

Wines-By-Mood

How do you know it’s time to break open the Dry Rose? When your seven day forecast looks like this. Yesterday I decided to move up my official "Rose Break Out Day" from Memorial Day to, well, yesterday. The opening salvo in my attack on defining "pleasure" was a 2004 Ravenswood Rosato. It was cool, had a darkish hue, brimmed with early raspberry aromas and flavors and the requisite acid backbone necessary to be the quaffer it was designed as….

May 9, 2006

The Demise of Mystery & Anticipation in Wine

Mystery and Anticipation. Surely these two characters are the Imps of our soul. The constant dance they do at the outer edge of our thoughts is the jig that can lead to an outer life of searching and exploration, two pastimes that can lead to trouble as well as revelation. Nevertheless, it seems these two troublemakers cause more good than bad. Mystery is that circumstance of information and events that present questions needing answers. We tend to be drawn to…

May 5, 2006

The Digital Wine Cellar

Cellar Tracker is the most popular, and probably the very best, on-line cellar tracker and community wine review site out there. It’s popularity owed to the fact that it’s simply a great system to track what you’ve got and what you’ve drunk as well as what others in the system have had to say about a particular bottle of wine. It’s no coincidence that other similar systems, seeing the success of Cellar Tracker, would pop up. One such newbie in…