Archive for the ‘Wine Media’ Category
Once you realize you like wine, really like wine, you start to read about. What you are looking for in the books and magazines is clarity and confirmation of your excitement. For people like myself, who started getting into wine in the 1980s, Alexis Bespaloff was one of the writers who delivered replaced my excited confusion with clarity and confirmed for me that there really was something very special about the juice. Alex Bespaloff, one of the great American wine…
"Hungaricum" A term, that after nearly 20 years in the wine industry, I’d never come across. It refers to the native and now terribly obscure grapes of Hungary, a country that is just now beginning to export it’s 2000 year-old winemaking heritage to the West, and the topic of Bruce Schoenfeld’s latest article in Travel & Leisure: "Wine’s Next Frontier". Travel & Leisure Magazine isn’t The Wine Spectator. And it surely isn’t Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate. Yet it is the…
Ambition is the mother of success. But ambition, combined with experience, is the mother AND father of success. Ambition and experience are the watch words that underlie a new website devoted to covering the world of California wine. California Wine Web is the child of Jim Gordon. Gordon has been working the journalistic fields of the California wine industry for a very long time. His new website appears to be the culmination of this experience and a particular ambition to…
I’m a sucker for bomb throwers. That’s probably why I really liked reading Mike Steinberger’s article on Slate today entitled, "White Lies: Why Sauvignon Blanc is Overrated""Simply put, the grape (Sauvignon Blanc) is a dud, producing chirpy little wines wholly devoid of complexity and depth, the very qualities that make wine interesting and worth savoring. For years, this offensively inoffensive grape has escaped criticism while chardonnay and merlot have been scorned. The free ride ends here." Of course he’s wrong…
Wine lovers tend to get their capsules in a bunch when it comes to the issue of rating wine. In particular it is the issue of a 100 point score, a perfect score, that generates lots of controversy…and not a lot of scrambling to get their hands on the wine. I thought it might be fun to take a look at another industry that places a similar type of emphasis on ratings: Video Games. We are talking about a billion…
