Apr 26, 2012
You could spend your entire trip to Napa Valley doing nothing but eating and drinking. It's a good plan. The food is tasty here and the wine delicious and copious. And we make it easy for you to do nothing but eat and drink. So have at it. However, there really is more here than food and wine. You could go golfing between sips and bites. For those inclined to spoil a good walk, the Napa area provides some pretty…
Mar 5, 2012
Another twitter-driven HASHTAG(Wine) day is upcoming. This one will focus not a varietal wine (a la #cabernet or #PinotNoir), but rather on a region. Specifically the Central Coast AVA in California. The official hashtag for the day is #CCWineDay. The day set aside for this celebration of all things wine and Central Coast is Thursday, March 15th. I'll make a point of drinking a "Central Coast" wine on March 15 and probably even using the #CCWineDay hashtag in order to…
Feb 16, 2012
I love Pinot Noir events primarily because I love Pinot Noir. There is something about the Pinot producer too that sets them apart from other winemakers. There is an arrogance I like. Maybe it comes from them working with one of the more difficult grapes to control. Maybe it's because there seems to be an additional air of intellectualism behind the grape. It's often more subtle and it takes a keener vocabulary and sharper set of senses to really wrap…
Dec 20, 2011
I don't like the idea of taking issue with Jamie Goode. He's smarter than me. He's a better writer than me. And he's better looking than me. But on this issue of "Authentic Wine", the topic of his latest book, Jamie gets it wrong. In fact, it's the very premise of his and Sam Harrop's "Authentic Wine: Toward Natural and Sustainable Winemaking" that can't be justified. In their introduction they write: "Wine is now at a metaphorical fork in the…
Dec 5, 2011
It's one thing to publish a Top 10 or Top 100 list of your favorite individual wines of the year. My hat is off to those who can determine such detailed conclusions. It's another thing to list one's Top 10 Wine Types of the year. This is merely a matter of determining what category of wines most pleased during the year. I prefer this later approach as it relieves me from having to mention individual wines and it's a far…