Archive for the ‘Wine Business’ Category
Listening to Alice Feiring’s interview with the late Joe Dressner, it got me thinking about a few people who I really miss. Joe is one of them. I never met Joe Dressner, the iconoclastic wine importer who never, ever held his tongue. I never missed reading anything that he wrote and to this day I am sorry I never met. He said some very nasty things about me, as well as saying some very gracious things about me. I did…
I’ve never been the guy that used alcohol, let alone wine, to self medicate, to get my drunk on or to “come down” after a particularly stressful or tough day. Even in my youth when drinking was experimental and powered by weekend, peer-induced partying I was the guy that sipped my beer or my Seven and Seven slowly. Ive always had an aversion to the feeling of being drunk. But I do like the taste and the am fascinate by…
Beginning yesterday, January 1, 2014, any wine released that will identify any American Viticultural Area (AVA) on the label located inside Sonoma County MUST also carry the words “Sonoma County” on the label. I’ve noted in a number of blog posts why this is a very bad idea. This made no difference and the “Conjunctive Labeling Law” for Sonoma County is now in force. Vintners in the Russian River Valley, Alexander Valley or Bennett Valley, for example, who see no…
No one doubts wine is a consumer product steeped in tradition…some would say made moribund by tradition. While not insulated from change (witness the new packaging, new sales channels, technological developments), the consumer product known as “wine” and the consumers’ relationship with it does not change quickly. For example, consumers remain as they have been for so long, torn between their confusion with the mysteries of wine, while truly enchanted by those same mysteries. For these reasons it is often…
I’m a fairly close observer of what we have come to call “The Wine Media”. My 20+ years observing the writing and reporting of all things wine, and any expertise I’ve accumulated as a result, is part of what I offer my clients—who hire me and keep me around in part because I’m a fairly reliable analyst of the wine media. I make a living understanding the wine media, how it works, what it wants and who reads it. Me…
