Archive for the ‘Culture and Wine’ Category

May 2, 2006

Hospice of Sonoma: Pinot Noir, Brice Jones and the way things work

You see a lot of events in Wine Country that seem utterly the same. The reason they seem that way is because they probably are. But, before we get our panties in a bunch about sameness, it’s important to realize that some formats for celebrations and events just work. And they work well. The Charitable Wine Auction is a perfect example. It works like this: 1. There is an organization that needs to raise funds to operate2. One or two…

May 2, 2006

I Can’t Help Myself

To quote a friend: "It’s a bit like watching a Civil War Re-enactment. You know who’s going to win." I can’t help myself. The whole fiasco with the celebration tasting (it’s not longer a competition) of the 1976 Paris Tasting is so weird, juicy and fun I just have to offer an update. A quick recap: In 1976 Steve Spurrier held a tasting between CA and French wines. The judges tasted the wines blind. CA wines came out on top….

May 1, 2006

Immigrants & Wine

Millions of people have taken to the streets today, left their place of work, and raised their voices in support of the notion that all immigrants are and have been a fundamental building block of the greatness and identity of the United States. I wanted to write about the impact of immigrants, documented and undocumented, to the California wine industry. Instead, I think I’ll point my reader to a post that I wrote for Wine Sediments that deals with this…

Apr 28, 2006

The Wine Lover’s Media Feast

It should be clear to anyone who has paid close attention to the wine media over the past decade that the amount of good, entertaining and useful information available to consumers and the trade has exploded in quantity. Interestingly, it is on the Internet, not the print media, where the vast majority of that exploding information is coming from. This makes the evolution of the wine media different in no way from the rest of the media. There is a…

Apr 27, 2006

Fixing Winemaking Mistakes Is The Fun Of It

The "Wine Pod People" (just looking at that phrase gives you the willies, doesn’t it) got some GREAT publicity today when the San Francisco Chronicle published a fine story about their unique home winemaking system: The Wine Pod. We caught wind of the Wine Pod back in February and were very taken with the idea of having such a compact, integrated system for making wine in our home. (I’m still working on the wife..she hasn’t relented…yet.) The anecdotal evidence that…