May 15, 2006
As I was driving up Highway 280 from San Jose back to Glen Ellen after visiting my mother I heard something on the radio that was arresting. It was a radio commercial for a wine that mocked rap music in an attempt to present and market the wine. The commercial went something like this: To make it these days you need a rap star to endorse your product. No rap star would return our calls. So, we’ll do it ourselves….
May 9, 2006
TEN THINGS…We Know About The Glossy Wine Magazines The glossy wine magazines often come in for a lot of criticism by those in the wine industry and those who make wine an important part of their lives. Some is deserved, some is not. 1. They don’t give good reviews to wines just because they are advertisers 2. Advertising is dominated by the huge brands 3. Good reviews from the glossies sell wine 4. They are written and designed to appeal…
May 4, 2006
Wine writers from the Dayton Daily News, MSNBC, The New York Times, the Akron Beacon… …and now, USA Today, the American newspaper with the largest circulation (not counting the National Enquirer), will be producing a wine blog. USA Today’s food and wine writer Jerry Shriver announced today that he will be writing a wine blog beginning May 12. According to Jerry, he will produce daily entries that focus on reviewing wines that cost $15 or less and are generally available…
Apr 28, 2006
It should be clear to anyone who has paid close attention to the wine media over the past decade that the amount of good, entertaining and useful information available to consumers and the trade has exploded in quantity. Interestingly, it is on the Internet, not the print media, where the vast majority of that exploding information is coming from. This makes the evolution of the wine media different in no way from the rest of the media. There is a…
Apr 25, 2006
Darryl Roberts has been threatening it for quite some time and now it’s here. Wine X Magazine’s new website is up and running and it looks great. But it reads better. Darryl Robert’s Wine X Magazine changed the way people viewed wine simply by offering a new vocabulary for describing it. In the beginning the magazine was panned by a number of people in the business, including writers and winery-types. It got to the point where you could break down…