Rarely do wine enthusiasts have a summertime page-turner. There was Sideways, of course, the Pinot-drenched novel by Rex Pickett that became a blockbuster movie, but that hit bookstores nearly ten years ago. Over the past decade, many writers have tried to replicate the success of Sideways with wine-inspired fiction. But
“Happy the man who has been able to learn the causes of things.” Virgil, Georgics (c. 29 BC), II, 490 I have tasted slate. It was on a glittering fall day in 2010, high above the Mosel River in the Juffer Sonnenuhr vineyard. My guide: a representative from Riesling producer Schloss
Robert was a visitor to the Napa Valley who was so interested in the region’s wine that he wrote about it in detail. And no, his last name wasn’t Parker. Long before the rise of modern wine writing, Robert Louis Stevenson brought a connoisseur’s eye to California’s nascent wine industry
Oregon's relative lack of Chardonnay is downright weird. And in Portland, rare and weird is good. So you know where this is going. Some of the most exciting wines being made in Oregon today are Chardonnays. These are not your grandma's butter bombs; they're taut, lean wines with terrific mouthfeel.
The streets of old Europe can be hauntingly quiet. In small villages, one can walk along cobbled corridors in the middle of a weekday afternoon and hear nothing but the breeze. The streets are lined with stone buildings, some of them homes, some of them businesses. Trousers hang to dry
This past weekend in Sonoma County, California, 17 vintners gathered for a wine tasting they dubbed “The 7 Percent Solution.” As the organizers explained, “roughly 93 percent of Northern California vineyard acreage is planted to eight major grape varietals. The remaining 7 percent is home to numerous lesser-known varietals, [which]
At this point, its reasonably common knowledge that terroir isn’t all about soil. Studies since the 1970’s have told us that wine from grapes grown on different soil types in different locations don’t necessary taste different. Nouveau chic wine critics – Steve Heimoff, Eric Asimov, W. Blake Gray, among others
In the old days, Alice Feiring knew exactly what she needed to do to launch her natural wine newsletter – find a publisher willing to give her an advance. But the old days are gone, and publishers are worrying about other things, like staying in business. So Feiring, perhaps the