May 23, 2006
In case no one saw it, Mark Fisher (pictured on the left and demonstrating the reason God gave us two hands) of Uncorked writing for WineSediments Wine Blog on the Well Fed Network posted a fascinating piece on the organizing of the of the upcoming 30th Anniversary celebration of the the Great Paris Tasting of 1976. The controversy is over how the European judges and the American judges will be tasting the wines as they compare French and American wines…
May 23, 2006
Marketers, like myself, get a lot of the blame for taking the authenticity out of wine and lowering the beverage to just one more product to be foisted upon the public with exaggerated claims and pretty pictures. There’s a lot of truth to that kind of accusation. However, the winemakers and grape growers in Mendocino have rightly determined that more marketing is just what the doctor ordered. The growers and winemakers of Mendocino County, located about 70 miles north of…
May 22, 2006
DON’T FORGET TO TAKE THE FERMENTATION READER SURVEY ============================================================ It appears that both Maryland and Vermont have followed Washington State’s lead and passed laws that allow wineries outside the state to sell directly to retailers and restaurants in VT and MD. This is a huge step that confirms the states’ acknowledgment that wine wholesalers are not necessary tools for getting wine to market but rather one tool that CAN be used to get the wine to market. In the case…
May 22, 2006
DON’T FORGET TO TAKE THE FERMENTATION READER SURVEY ============================================================ Working at and for Winebid.com in the late 1990s was exciting on a number of different levels. It was the DotCom boom so you felt like you were changing the way the wine world worked buy creating an online market for rare wine. And it worked. Thousands of people bought and sold rare and not-so-rare wines at Winebid. The other part of the excitement had not so much to do with…
May 17, 2006
I don’t think I can agree with Mike Dunne more than I do. In his frank fashion, Dunne, the longstanding wine writer for the Sacramento Bee, takes to task the wine industry’s associations for not getting behind an effort to name Zinfandel the "historic wine of California." Some of you will recall that not too long ago California State Senator Carole Migden pushed a proposal to name Zinfandel the Official State Grape. Well, this didn’t go over to well with…