Case For Tasting Bordeaux, Barolo, and California Syrah

Tweet Tasting wine in peer groups always feels clinically informative, digging around for distinguishing nuances against identical backgrounds of grape variety, vintage, or appellation. It trains my palate and sharpens a vocabulary of descriptors. Tasting a potpourri of unrelated wines from completely different vintages, continents, countries, and varieties can be as discerning in different ways. [...]

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 [...]

Top Three Wines of January: Spain and Bordeaux

Tweet Anointing three top January wines cast a cloudy challenge on WineZag’s monthly ritual.  The first thirty-one days of this new year provided ample opportunity to taste a surfeit of over-the-top wines that unavoidably skew the aggregate three bottle price skyward, approaching $450. Plaguing fact of wine enthusiasm: Great wine can be expensive and detours are [...]

2008 Bordeaux Vintage Tasting

Tweet The Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux just rolled across America on a four city press and trade tour with more than one hundred different Chateau owners, representatives, and wines representing and promoting the 2008 vintage from thirteen different appellations.  Normally, for fun, context, and some learning I’ll pour two different vintages of the [...]

Top Three Wines of November

Tweet The “Top Three Wines” of November includes one remarkable New World Mourvedre from California’s Central Coast sandwiched in between two Old World Bordeaux and Rioja showcase wines.  I was unfamiliar with the claret from Saint-Estephe and the Rhone Ranger from Paso Robles until tasting them last month; both excellent new discoveries.  Unfortunately, the oddball [...]

US Wine Labels and Hong Kong Wine Auctions: Tale of Two Wine Worlds

Tweet While the US domestic wine industry continues its painful recessionary adjustments in response to the $50-plus wine category implosion and the consolidation of its distribution channels, the picture looks very different in Asia where this year’s Sotheby’s and Christie’s Hong Kong wine auction sales will outstrip their own combined New York and London volumes. [...]

Questioning the Sensibility of Bordeaux’s New Found Irrelevance

Tweet Eric Asimov helped me feel old, out of the loop,  and crusty today simply because I prefer Bordeaux.  Please do not crucify me en masse, and allow me to cling to a hard earned 51-year-old point of view that many of the world’s finest wines are products of Bordeaux as you join me on a [...]

Wired for 1990 Chateau Latour

Tweet In the event you birthed a child in 1990,  got married that year, or are secure in your belief that spending slightly under $700  a bottle can represent a really fine wine deal, then you will want to make sure you check out Wired for Wine at 10:00am on Monday, May 3.  They will [...]

Bordeaux Matchmaking

Tweet via bordeauxmatchmaking.com Here is an interesting event coming to Boston this Friday night, November 20. A couple of French ladies matching your interests with suitable and affordable french Bordeaux and like minded new friends. A multi city tour with soirees Boredelaise style in Boston, Chicago, NY, and Miami. Certainly an unusual one-of-a-kind format. Check [...]

15 Wines in Simple Format Unlock Path To Wine Apprecation

Tweet Hosting less experienced wine drinkers to easily replicated and structured tasting formats appeals to my ritual instincts for making wine more accessible to more people.  On the one hand, it’s a refreshing personal break from the usual “club” and a way to strip away the bravado and bias brought to tasting tables by hardened wine aficionados.  On the other hand, it is a chance for [...]

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