Tangled Vines weaves a tangled web

Michelle Locke
Feature Stories
3 min read
In her new book, Tangled Vines, journalist Frances Dinkelspiel does something remarkable. She turns a 10-year-old crime into a spellbinder, The crime in question is the Oct. 12, 2005, fire that ripped through the Wines Central warehouse in the San Francisco Bay area, destroying 4.5 million bottles of premium wine

My Month of Malbec

W. Blake Gray
Features
4 min read
Malbec is one of my least favorite varieties. However, I spent most of December in Argentina and Antarctica, and you know what that means: My Month of Malbec. It's daunting to spend a month in a country where you dislike what everyone else drinks, and in Argentina, Malbec is more

A Bosnian wine adventure

Simon J Woolf
Feature Stories
4 min read
How do you rate your wine drinking preference? Conservative, tried-and-trusted, varied or adventurous? I've always thought of myself as pretty adventurous, until I discovered “Vins Insolites” (unusual wines), a new book by the French journalist Pierrick Bourgault. Bourgault's impressive opus catalogues 20 years of travel and research, to bring together

The Cortese Enigma

Roger Morris
Feature Stories
4 min read
Many years ago, when I was just starting to become enamored of wine, my wife came home from a trip through Italy – I had not yet been – with the name in her notebook of a lovely white wine she had tasted a couple of times while in Milan. 

Ruchè: the wine

Becky Sue Epstein
Features
6 min read
This is the second in a two-part series on Ruchè this week on Palate Press. See Joe Roberts's profile of some important Ruchè producers here. The Ruchè wine we’re drinking these days is actually a new red wine, produced in seven small towns in northern Piedmont, Italy. It was created in the late

Faces of Ruchè

Joe Roberts
Features
6 min read
Piedmont's other red grape comes onto the world market with a new, colorful cast of winemaking characters. This is the first in a two-part series on Ruchè this week on Palate Press. For lovers of obscure wine finds, the sleepy little town Italian town of Grana might be the next destination

Best of 2015: Do “hand-picked” grapes mean better wine?

Erika Szymanski
Features
6 min read
This piece by our resident wine science specialist was short-listed for the Born Digital Wine Awards in the Best Investigative/Journalistic Wine Story. Erika ended up winning in this category, but for a different technical piece, published on her own site.  Stanford linguistic professor Dr. Dan Jurafsky's recent book on The Language of Food: