The Sauternes Dilemma

Roger Morris
Feature Stories
6 min read
Sauternes has a problem. And the fact that Sauternes’ problem is not unique among businesses in a constantly changing world, nor even unique among wine regions, doesn’t make the difficulty any less painful. Nor has the problem just raised its head, as it’s been growing for some time now. It’s
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Exploring Minerality

Elisabetta Tosi
Features
4 min read
Minerality = [SS + A + CC] - [E + T] - [O²] (Those interested in figuring out what this odd formula means should keep on reading.) Funny how things happen. Until the 1990s, the term minerality didn’t appear in the most acclaimed guides, not even the Oxford Companion to
biserno-vineyards

Discoveries: Giant Cabs Back in Balance

Becky Sue Epstein
Feature Stories
3 min read
Whether you tend to open a luxury wine for weekday meal or for a once-a-year celebration, I think you’ll be much happier now with the recent vintages of high-end cabernet sauvignon-based wines and Bordeaux-style blends from Napa – and from some exalted wineries in Italy, too, for that matter. It

Roero Arneis is Italy’s overlooked great white wine

W. Blake Gray
Features
5 min read
Seashells are the key to Roero Arneis. Seashells and sand. To understand this underappreciated Italian white wine, you have to think about sitting on a beach – 100 kilometers from the sea. Roero is just across the Tanaro River from Barolo, but by such small geographic differences fortunes are made,

The vexed question of winery tasting fees

Simon J Woolf
Feature Stories
3 min read
Perhaps it should be listed under "First world problems", but the issue of how much wineries charge for a tasting is alive and well, as I learned firsthand last weekend. It is, of course, partly cultural. Wineries in most European countries, unlike their American counterparts, have tended historically not to

Addressing Recent Issues Concerning Website Security

David Honig
Wine Reviews
1 min read
Readers, We would like to address some recent issues that came up concerning the security of PalatePress.com. First, a huge thanks goes out to those who e-mailed us right away, and informed us of issues (editors@palatepress.com). Recently, the site was hacked, and all traffic that came from search engine crawlers

Cariñena Campaign

Michelle Locke
Features
5 min read
Unusual winter rains turned the Cariñena vineyards in northeastern Spain into a technicolor swirl this spring, the variegated soils glowing red, yellow, orange under windswept skies. It was a moment of glory for a region which can get overlooked in the busy category of Spanish wine. After all, many consumers