In the world of marketing and sales, it's always good when you can keep things simple. Of course, this can be quite a challenge for an industry like the wine industry, where realities of place, grapes, vintages, styles, and terroir add up as so many variables to take into account—enough
Has this ever happened to you? It’s Friday evening, the end of a long, hard week. That morning you’d grabbed some meat from the freezer to thaw for dinner—let’s say bone-in chicken breasts. On the way home from work, you picked up some broccoli, a ripe red bell pepper, some
A blue-white stillness, frozen many times over. The soft sweeping and pattering of branches bowing against the ice, as a giant bison scratches against the trunk of a conifer tree. Somewhere, far off, the ice can be heard cracking; struggling to retain its dominance against the disruption of moving, warm
One of the most controversial topics about Californian wine—and thus, one of the most widely discussed by wine lovers—is how much Napa Cab has changed over the years, or whether it has truly been altered. Every time I go to Napa and Sonoma with a group of wine writers, we
In Italy, we have a proverb: never change a formula that works. Vinitaly is the most important annual international wine and spirits exhibition in the world; this year there were 4,164 exhibitors from 120 countries, and 140,000 visitors. Vinitaly’s original formula—a combination professional exhibition and popular festival—has always worked, for
This is my third year writing about wine iPhone apps for Palate Press and VinTank. You would have thought last year’s version would have been the hardest when we analyzed over 450 apps for 20 key factors. In fact, it was the apocalyptic remnants of the category we saw this
Thankfully, the Pew Research Center has more important things to do than to figure out what the public thinks about wine writers. I fear that if they undertook the task, they would find that many people view wine writing with some degree of scorn. And some of it would be
Caution: this article may ruin your wine-tasting plans for Mother’s Day. The renowned wine scientist, writer, and taster Emile Peynaud remarks, towards the end of his book on The Taste of Wine, that “thanks to the astonishing diversity of wine styles, one can always be sure of finding one (or