Jun 23, 2006
Is Wine.com necessary? I mean to ask, does the Internet really need Wine.com the wine store? Apparently someone thinks so. It appears that Wine.com will receive another $12 Million in venture funding, a seventh visit to that trough that has been filled with upwards of $200 Million over the past 8 years or so. In addition, it appears Wine.com is getting yet another CEO. And in all this time, after all this money, after all the fine leaders of the…
Jun 21, 2006
What a fascinating exercise the European wine producers and European Union is embarking upon. Europe appears to be in the early phases of a complete overhaul of their wine industry, from growing to producing to marketing. Yesterday the European Union’s European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development , Mariann Fischer Boel, made a statement that served as an introduction to the coming debate and staked out a rather progressive position on what needs to be done to make European wine…
Jun 19, 2006
Maybe wine IS God’s gift to man. Every year seems to bring new discoveries of how wine is good for us. The latest discovery, and one of the more intriguing, is one which iidentifies red wine as helping to induce sleep due to the high amounts of melatonin, a hormone that is produced in our bodies and that helps regulate our internal "body clock", which tells us when to sleep. Italian researches now tell us that some grapes they tested,…
Jun 14, 2006
Well, it is official. The trend toward cute labels has reached a climax. Here is a wine column out of Arizona that reviews and gives scores not only to the wines, but also to the wine labels that qualify as cute. There is something in me that creates something of an aversion to cute labels but I can’t quite lay my finger on the source of that dismissive attitude. By the way…Why not FIVE emus?
Jun 12, 2006
It’s not unprecedented but it is unusual. Robert Parker’s agreement to write a weekly column for Business Week Magazine is a fairly rare even for the most powerful wine critic on the planet. Since beginning publishing his Wine Advocate newsletter he has taken up very few gigs outside that venue. He wrote fleetingly for both Wine Enthusiast Magazine and for Food & Wine Magazine. But most of his efforts have gone into his newsletter. So bringing on Parker to write…