You’ve got to appreciate a guy who gets into the wine business after writing an academic paper on Oscar Wilde’s own review of a wine book. The "Guy" is Richard Elia, publisher of Quarterly Review of Wine, the only prose oriented wine magazine published in America. The wine book that so interested Wilde that he would be forced to mock it and which later let to Elia’s own article was George Saintsbury’s ‘Notes on a Cellar Book". (It should be…

David Shaw died. Shaw was a man of many talents. He is best known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning media critic for the LA Times. In 2002 Shaw began writing his "Mattters of Taste" column for the Times. It was always a must read column often devoted to the eccentricities of the wine world and wine lovers and the place of wine in American culture. Shaw’s style of wine writing strayed wildly from the most common type of wine prose you…

The notion of "creativity" is bound to winemaking. Winemakers and wine lovers alike tend to think of wine and its making as an art, of a sort. In the world of wine writing, creativity is not often the first motivation. More often, wine writing is about reporting or education. To approach wine and food writing as a creative act aimed to delivering inspiring or captivating prose and ideas is simply rare. In fact, I don’t think a writer or publication…

Boy, THIS is what makes it so easy to blog on a daily basis. Hugh Johnson, one of the greatest wine writers to ever walk this planet, has stumbled into a quagmire by proposing that "Imperial hegemony lives in Washington and the dictator of taste in Baltimore…Taste in the past was largely a matter of harmless fashion. In American hands it feels more like a moral crusade." Johnson, the author of the groundbreaking "Vintage: A History of Wine" and "World…

Wanna be a "wine writer" read by thousands of people? Think you’ve got a bit of the wordsmithy in you? have a passion for wine? GrapeRadio Wants YOU! Brian Clark, one of the hosts of the podcast "GRAPERADIO" informs me they are looking for a few good writers to help them create a newsletter that will go out via email to their listeners ever other month. GrapeRadio has become one of the more popular and successful podcasts out there due…