Apr 27, 2006
Is it OK to question the policy that drinking alcohol should be outlawed for anyone under 21 years of age? Or if you do, are you promoting inappropriate behavior? You don’t hear many people advocating that the drinking age be lowered from 21. It’s a no win argument that will lead to being painted as irresponsible and uncaring for the well being of America’s youth. But the fact is, a drinking age of 21 is simply ludicrous. Diageo, one of…
Apr 25, 2006
Darryl Roberts has been threatening it for quite some time and now it’s here. Wine X Magazine’s new website is up and running and it looks great. But it reads better. Darryl Robert’s Wine X Magazine changed the way people viewed wine simply by offering a new vocabulary for describing it. In the beginning the magazine was panned by a number of people in the business, including writers and winery-types. It got to the point where you could break down…
Apr 25, 2006
Once you realize you like wine, really like wine, you start to read about. What you are looking for in the books and magazines is clarity and confirmation of your excitement. For people like myself, who started getting into wine in the 1980s, Alexis Bespaloff was one of the writers who delivered replaced my excited confusion with clarity and confirmed for me that there really was something very special about the juice. Alex Bespaloff, one of the great American wine…
Apr 24, 2006
"Hungaricum" A term, that after nearly 20 years in the wine industry, I’d never come across. It refers to the native and now terribly obscure grapes of Hungary, a country that is just now beginning to export it’s 2000 year-old winemaking heritage to the West, and the topic of Bruce Schoenfeld’s latest article in Travel & Leisure: "Wine’s Next Frontier". Travel & Leisure Magazine isn’t The Wine Spectator. And it surely isn’t Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate. Yet it is the…
Apr 24, 2006
We are gathered here today to mark the passing of a Wine Blog. And not just any wine blog, mind you. The recently departed was among the most ambitious uses of the wineblogspace yet conceived. Carolyn Tilly’s Ultimate California Wine Blog attempted to showcase a different California winery tasting room EVERY DAY. And not just a review of decor. Carolyn trained her eye on the people, the wines, the experience, the essense of the tasting room. There was nothing quite…