Apr 4, 2011
Anyone who has visited Las Vegas recently will recognize it as a Circus of Hip and Dazzle with sin, excess and hope holding court in its three rings. It's not so different from Napa Valley. I recently had a chance to revisit Vegas after a long hiatus. I used to regularly go to Vegas to play poker at the Mirage (once the center of the poker world that has not been replaced by the Bellagio). My most recent trip was…
Mar 23, 2011
Ben Ratliff is the Jazz Critic for the New York Times. If you look at his self-written bio at the Times he serves up what I've always thought would be a thrilling approach to wine criticism: "Music criticism can be both reporting and conjuring. It’s not just opinion. It’s not just an answer to the question of what something sounded like and who played it. It can also address what music might mean with its abstract gestures and tonal masses…
Mar 1, 2011
The tagline for this blog has, from its beginning, been: "A Blog Set Inside The World of Wine Public Relations—Where The Media, The Culture And I Mingle" It's that "culture" part that has always really had my interest. So, I was fascinated to find Google Ngrams, a beta program that allows the user to search the frequency of use of words, over time, in more than 5.2 million books that Google has scanned. These books reach back to before 1800….
Feb 4, 2011
Seeing that this year's 30-second Super Bowl ads cost $2.8 million – $3 million a pop got me thinking about the prospects for wine were it to find a way to expose itself to the hordes gathered to celebrate…whatever it is the Super Bowl celebrates. I quickly determined to my own satisfaction that the Super Bowl probably isn't the best venue to launch a generic wine campaign. However, there's no reason to think that a Non-Superbowl, generic TV campaign for…
Jan 31, 2011
What's the difference between Wine Country and New York City? The question isn't a set up for punchline. After spending a bit of time in New York again for the Vino 2011 Conference, I've been thinking about this question. Clearly there are many difference between, say, Napa Valley or Sonoma Valley and New York City. But I'm not thinking the key difference between New York City and Wine Country is the number of good Jewish delis, the number of taxis…