Archive for the ‘Wine Media’ Category
It's been said by some that a large majority of my articles here over the past 8 years have been derogatory or critical in nature. Maybe they have. But the fact is, I get my greatest pleasure when I can point readers to something brilliant, unique or important. Today we have something brilliant: ARTISANAL, RELUCTANT BRANDING PIONEER, DIES AT 474 Jen Doll penned this piece of culinary/semantic commentary/satire for Atlantic Wire, the on-line presence of the great "The Atlantic" magazine….
Almost all of my wine tasting education has been practical. That is to say, what I know about evaluating wine and how I evaluate wine has resulted from tasting wine a lot. Beyond that, my inquiries into the practice of wine tasting and evaluating wine has been done on a philosophical and aesthetic level. That is to say, I've done a good deal of reading and thinking about the epistemology of wine or what it means to embrace a "position"…
Writer and author James Conaway helped me get my first job in the wine industry. It was his 1990 expose of the Napa wine industry, "Napa", that I wrote a review of and put in my portfolio to show potential employers that I could write decently. I don't owe James a percentage of my wages earned since 1990, but I do owe him my gratitude for writing a fascinating and illuminating book that I could sink my teeth into as…
It's entirely absurd that I spent the past 8 months blissfully unaware of Chris Kassel's blog, "Intoxicology Report". It is by far the best new wine blog I've come across in many, many months. Kassel is a long time wine writer and sommelier. He knows wine. But that's not the thing. The thing is just how well Chris writes and how entertaining his writing is in the blog format. Two recent examples: In Defense of the Wine Snob"So, put on…
Sometimes, when you open old boxes, you find something pretty remarkable. I had the chance to pull some old boxes that held materials from my first years and days in the wine PR business. One of things I found was literally an exercise that my first employer asked me to undertake. The task was to write a series of story pitches aimed at wine writers. However, I was allowed to use no more than two sentences to write these story…
