On occasion Roger Dial of Appellation America shoots off an e-mail to their mailing list. They are very often very interesting missives. Todays was particularly enlightening and held one particular statement of great importance and foresight. In general, Roger is arguing that understanding what makes America’s appellations, and the wines that come from them, unique is of critical importance to the American wine culture. But the very last paragraph of his communique reads like this: The fact that so much…
I like to think of myself as a bit of a connoisseur of wine ratings and reviews. I’ve been observing them fairly closely now for almost two decades. And, I’ve been using them to help sell wine for clients. So, I’m always interested when I see a new rating system come before me, particularly one that offers added context to the wine. The Good Taste Report is a blog I came across recently. Its owner is out of Texas and…
Yes, it’s true. Napa Valley’s Screaming Eagle winery has been sold. It is, perhaps the most iconic of California’s Cult Wineries and likely the inspiration for a number of new Napa Winery owners who both wanted the kind of prestige that this operation brought its owner and who also eyed the kind of cash it generated. Think about it: 500 cases of wine annually. $300 per bottle. That’s $1.8 Million. That’s some inspiration. There was a time, however, when Screaming…
It has been a while since talk of wine as an investment has come up on my radar. In the late 1990s and early 00s, particularly during the Internet Bubble, there was a good deal of stirring among many about wine not only as an investment but as a way to make a quick buck. Today I came across an article at the Wales.co.uk in which the fine art of wine collecting as an investment and the factors that go…
Maybe it’s my natural aversion to things "cute", but it does appear we have a candidate for the most overused term in wine for 2006: "Critter Wine". Are we tired of this yet? Not the "critter wines", clearly, but the term? ACNielsen tells us that that according to their sales figures 18% of new table wine brands released over the past year that achieved sales of $20,000 or more in 2005 had "critters" on the label. The sales of these…
