Archive for the ‘Rating Wine’ Category
It’s nearly time again for what now appears to be an annual celebration of unsubstantiated and unsupported claims and assertions about wine. It’s time again to denigrate 99% of the world’s wine and winemakers. Of course, I’m talking about the coming RAW WINE FAIR, a celebration of “natural” wine taking place in London on May 19 and 20. On the cusp of this important occasion, I think it appropriate to examine some of the claims that are being made about…
Culture. It is a combination of many things including facts, fictions, legends and landscapes. Take my own Napa Valley. Valley culture is built on the facts of great wealth being produced here by old hands and newcomers to the winemaking industry that is largely sustained by a foundation of working poor Mexicans. The fiction that anyone can enter and be a part of this good and expensive life simply by moving to this region is a part of the Valley’s…
Let me describe a perfect example of an ethical lapse where it comes to critiquing a wine for a readership: If I, as a publicist that represents wineries, were to engage in the practice. This is my annual post in which I inform fellow publicists and wine producers that I do not and never have reviewed wines and that all the wines that show up at my front door do in fact get drunk, but they don’t get written about…and…
In the wake of the sale of a stake in Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate to Singapore investors, the word on the street is that Robert Parker Jr.’s and The Wine Advocate’s influence (and usefulness) has declined considerably. What I’m reading from a variety of sources, many of them quite practiced and astute sources, is that Robert Parker’s decline is due to the fact that he and his Wine Advocate have outlived their usefulness; that American wine drinkers have matured to…
How do you go about measuring and comparing wines and wineries based on the quality of the wine(s) Can it even be done in a reliably convincing method? To the latter question I’ve always answered, “Yes-sort of”. It’s the first question that takes some good reasoning. In an interview with The Shout, Treasury Wine Estates CEO David Dearle offered one means of measuring something like quality that is at the very least interesting and even a bit convincing. “Size matters,…
