Archive for the ‘Wine Business’ Category

Aug 29, 2005

Vintage-Smintage: Does it Matter?

How are wine drinkers affected by lowering the required amount of grapes that must be from a single vintage in order to put the year on the bottle? Answer: Not at all. Currently U.S. winemakers are required have 95% of the grapes coming from a single vintage in order to put a vintage on the label. The Wine Institute, a lobbying organization of California wineries, is urging the federal government to lower that requirement to 85%. Currently the law in…

Aug 23, 2005

What Wine Tasting Type are You?

I spent a good part of Sunday standing behind the Astrale e Terra table at the Family Winemakers of California Annual tasting pouring a mountain grown Cabernet blend and Syrah for anyone who wanted to taste it. And that was a lot of people. I’ve done this sort of thing before, many times, on behalf of numerous wineries. You have the opportunity to observe people pretty closely under these conditions. Specifically, you have a chance to distinguish the variety of…

Aug 22, 2005

Wine Smog?

California’s Central Valley wineries (mainly California’s REALLY BIG wineries) are being asked to adopt pollution control measures that will reduce the amount of ethanol that is released into the air. The concern is that the measures necessary to reduce immission will compromise quality. So, it appears there will be put in place regulations that allow wineries to "buy their way out of" the regulations being proposed by reducing emmission of smog producing elements from other sources as well as paying…

Aug 17, 2005

Marking the Beginning of the End of a Wine Trend?

What will it take to get California winemakers to concentrate on producing balanced wines with lover alcohol, higher acidity and just a tad less extraction? In other words, wines of substance that have at least the chance to reflect their place of origin and give drinkers an opportunity to have more than two glasses with a meal without getting drunk. This was the substance of a conversation I had with a client the other day after they called to inform…

Aug 15, 2005

America’s Wine Trendsetters

Unlike Alder over at Vinography, I like lists. Of course Alder is correct—list such as "The Most Powerful People in Wine", "The Best Movies of All Time", "The Top Ten Roses" or "The Top Wines of the Year" are indeed  "reductive, simple, and trite, and don’t acknowledge the complexity of the world we live in at all." Yet these shortcomings don’t overshadow the benefit of such lists: They are provocative and make us think. Alder’s examination of Decanter Magazine’s List…