May 9, 2006
TEN THINGS…We Know About The Glossy Wine Magazines The glossy wine magazines often come in for a lot of criticism by those in the wine industry and those who make wine an important part of their lives. Some is deserved, some is not. 1. They don’t give good reviews to wines just because they are advertisers 2. Advertising is dominated by the huge brands 3. Good reviews from the glossies sell wine 4. They are written and designed to appeal…
May 8, 2006
I think I’ve finally concluded that in the Old World (Europe) "Terroir" is really "tradition". The European wines from different appellations, large and small, that you drink tend to have a consistent and particular characteristic not because the climate and soil from that appellation force upon the wine a particular character, but because there are a set of traditional winemaking and grape growing techniques in an area that lead the wines in a particular direction. Those traditions relate to how…
May 8, 2006
Despite the occassional rant about Americans drinking more and more high alcohol, sweet tasting wines, I do believe the American wine consumer is becoming more sophisticated in its taste for wine. Maybe we are just becoming more experimental. Maybe as a people we are embracing the notion of variety. Perhaps the best evidence of our growing sophistication is our steady embrace of German Riesling. According to Wines of German, a trade organization responsible for promoting the wines of German in…
May 5, 2006
Cellar Tracker is the most popular, and probably the very best, on-line cellar tracker and community wine review site out there. It’s popularity owed to the fact that it’s simply a great system to track what you’ve got and what you’ve drunk as well as what others in the system have had to say about a particular bottle of wine. It’s no coincidence that other similar systems, seeing the success of Cellar Tracker, would pop up. One such newbie in…
May 4, 2006
Andy Beckstoffer is a pretty astute guy. Andy is one of the largest growers in Napa Valley and maybe the most respected. And it was Andy who last year initiated an inter-industry discussion on the affects of long hangtime and hyper ripeness on the vines and on wines. This is a touch subject for a number or of reasons. Over the past decade or so vintners have been asking growers to let the fruit hang on the vine much longer…