BLOGGERVIEW #16Who: Jeff LefevereBlog: The Good Grape: A Wine ManifestoWhere: http://www.goodgrape.com Jeff Lefevere’s Blog, The Good Grape: A Wine Manifesto, is one of the GO TO sources of wine insight on the Internet. This is a man capable of taking complex technological, cultural and commercial ideas and interests and synthesizing them into something coherent and new and useful. That’s hard work. The blog itself is beautiful to look at, which explains why he was awarded "Best Wine Blog Graphics" in…

I’ve never gotten overly concerned about the acquisitions and mergers in the wine industry that seem to have increased in pace over the past decade and that have inspired some deal of angst among others. I think the reason is that I’m not much of a nostalgian (word?). Also, I see new and interesting and committed wineries popping up like weeds across the country, a great number of which have quality and authenticity at their core. However, for those of…

Nick Frey at the the Sonoma County Wine Grape Commission is reporting that 1) Pinot Noir plantings are set to overtake Cabernet Sauvignon plantings in the County, 2) that the price of a ton of Sonoma County Pinot Noir has overtaken a ton of Sonoma County Cabernet Sauvignon and 3) that poor Merlot has seen its price drop to a "dismal" $1550 per ton. Regarding 1: I’m surprised it took this longRegarding 2: Behold the natural migration of money toward…

Even more depressing than finding one’s self embracing Kierkegaard’s aesthetic life of jumping from transitory experience to transitory experience in an attempt to stave off a life of boredom, is the somewhat similar strategy of dealing with the boredom of life by pretending that self-medication with wine is actually the act of connoisseurship. Every now and then you meet a person who at first glance appears to have all the signs of being a genuinely curious wine person who simply…

Ok. Get this! A new website. Users buy "stock" in particular vintages of wine. Wines in your portfolio are valued based on various prices for the wine across the Internet. It’s a game. Whoever has the highest current increase in cellar value wins. A friend of mine related to me his encounter with a person who is apparently building this website.They are serious about it, probably because it’s not too hard to program and it hasn’t been done yet. This…