Archive for the ‘Terroir’ Category
What a fascinating exercise the European wine producers and European Union is embarking upon. Europe appears to be in the early phases of a complete overhaul of their wine industry, from growing to producing to marketing. Yesterday the European Union’s European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development , Mariann Fischer Boel, made a statement that served as an introduction to the coming debate and staked out a rather progressive position on what needs to be done to make European wine…
I can recall the era when the emergence of a new wine growing region, while somewhat exciting, was also met with a bit of skepticism by the wine trade and the hard core consumer. The issue was 1) can the new area producing anything of merit and is there any talent making wine in the region. It was also the case that getting out the word on wines from an emerging region was also a difficult task. The wine media…
Helen Turley, America’s most famous "consulting winemaker", is again facing a lawsuit involving a client. This doesn’t really surprise me, for a number of reasons. What is interesting however is the mindset that would allow a person to agree to Ms. Turley’s terms for her participation as a consulting winemaker: -Agree to spend a huge, top-end sum of money on both vineyard development and building a winery to Turley’s exact specifications(vineyard development I can understand…But why spend huge amounts on…
Well, it appears California bottlings walked away the big winner at the 30th Anniversary Celebration of the 1976 Tasting of Paris held in Napa Valley and London. Only the original reds tasted in 1976 and a new collection of reds from Bordeaux and Napa were compared against one another. The winners are: Ridge Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon 1971 Ridge Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon 2000 In what must be a real surprise to many, California wines took the top five spots…
It was, I believe, the great Gore Vidal who once wrote, "Every time a friend of mine succeeds a little part of me dies." It’s a pretty astute, and brave, commentary on the effects and power of envy. Some of us bloggers fancy ourselves decent writers. Some of us are mistaken, some close to the mark, other are underestimating their value completely if they think themselves only decent writers. A safe self assessment puts me somewhere between the first two…
