Wine Crush, Knowledge, and Beauty

Tweet Two favorite wine writers recently teased at the distinction between sensual wine discovery and accumulated wine knowledge. Their words fanned a flame first kindled by my earliest wine crush back in the mid eighties. Not the press and juice kind of crush. I mean the ten-year-old-kiddie-kind-of-crush; when just the thought of that special “someone” [...]

What’s Going on With the Price of Wine

Tweet I finally caught up with a replay of Rob McMillan’s Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) webinar presentation of their own 2011-2012 State of the Wine Industry report. Rob is founder of SVB’s Wine division.  His presentation was not really a state of the wine industry report since the bank and its research are only concerned with the U.S., [...]

The Wine and Food Culture Divide

Tweet I’ll admit to spending more time than it’s probably worth thinking about nuances in wine and food culture.  For example, I ponder how obvious it is that most of us Americans act with righteous self confidence buying, ordering, and cooking the foodstuffs and ingredients we prefer. We’ll ask questions freely when shopping or ordering [...]

Blind Wine Tasting Price Research Flawed

Tweet A recent piece of wine tasting research by Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in England, has produced irrelevant conclusions that can be attributed to flawed experiment design. Unfortunately with wine consumption’s increasing popularity, both The Guardian and CNET covered the blind tasting test held at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, designed [...]

Bordeaux First Growths Fund Alternative Wines

Tweet In early 2006 the Bordeaux price-value line was breached and began its transgression towards complete collapse, erasing all justification for drinking the first growths and other similarly coveted wines that sat in my cellar for decades.  Just look at the blue line to the right, representing relative fine wine price escalation compared to the [...]

Platter’s: Showcase and Reliable Guide for South African Wine

Tweet Sheltered from cooling afternoon rains by a thatched roof structure on the Zimbabwe side of its border with Zambia, I started applying context to a few days of exclusively South African wines. I, like lots of American wine drinkers, don’t pay a lot of attention to the category.  The US does not even rank [...]

Take Poll and Weigh In On Future High-End Wine Economy

Tweet Take a second, look to the right of your screen,  and share your own thoughts on what it takes for you to spend $50+ on high-end wines at retail.  With the preliminary findings report from Silicon Valley Bank’s Wine Division (see recent post Wine Sales Stink and the World is Not Flat) underscoring the massive swing in growth rates that [...]

Wine Sales Stink and The World is Not Flat

Tweet In Silicon Valley Bank’s recently released Preliminary Findings Report (you won’t get a recap of all the details here, save a few,  so click on the link and download the PDF if you are so inclined) which precedes their more exhaustive Spring 2010-2011 Annual State of the Wine Industry Report, the Bank’s opening salvo declared; [...]

A Case for Avoiding the Wine Rating Mousetrap

Tweet Leave it up to an expert on randomness and a statistician turned winemaker to make an astonishing case that wine ratings are inconsistent and unreliable.  The debate on ratings value has been legitimately extended by a couple of primary and secondary research studies presented by Robert Hodgson in the Journal of Wine Economics.  Hodgson’s work and conversations with a few high profile wine [...]

Slurping Soba for Grace and Wine for Life

Tweet It was my first time. The sounds inside the small, ancient, wooden Kyoto noodle restaurant were deafening.  The weather outside was 32C with 90% humidity.  Inside were tables of men dressed in uniform grey salaryman suits and ties, sticks snatching clumps of chilled Soba, dipping once quickly in tsuyu sauce before bowing their heads over bamboo plates and viciously sucking the living buckwheat out [...]