Jean-Marc Brignot Redefines Jura Winemaking

You can sideline focusing on Jura’s Vin Jaune and Savagnin, Poulsard, and Trousseau if Jean-Marc Brignot’s Vinibrato wines move beyond their tiny production cult status stage.  Think Gamay from Beaujolais, and Pinot Noir from Burgundy instead. There was a time in French history that Burgundy and Jura were joined at the hips.  Only 72 miles [...]

2009 Pinot Noir Blind Tasting

Blind tasting seventeen different examples of 2009 pinot noir in one sitting was repeated evidence, inside twenty five years of steady reminders, that side-by-side peer group blind tasting is the most legitimate format to learn about wine and your personal palate.  In Robert Dwyer’s opening paragraphs of his detailed Wellesley Wine Press tasting note post on [...]

Pleiades XX, Thackrey, & Local Three: Authentic Collision

Some wine is described to be authentic. I have been meaning to build a working definition of authenticity for my own clarification and finally managed to squash a prolonged streak of procrastination after discovering ($25 ****) Sean Thackrey’s Pleiades XX on Atlanta’s Local Three Kitchen & Bar wine list. This adjective that has blossomed into standard wine enthusiast fodder, bandied throughout critical wine [...]

2011 Wine Highlights Part 1: Wine & Restaurants

While the best wine and food might still appear on my table over the next couple of weeks, 2011 is quickly shutting down like newly bottled Bordeaux and I catch myself reminiscing over the year that was in wine and food. These musings must not be mistaken for a quintessential nor ultimate reminiscence of global [...]

5 Reasons Winery Mailing Lists Fail Consumers

Winery mailing lists live at the crossroads of privileged access and blind consumerism.  High demand, limited release, and cult wines combined with unnavigable distribution challenges to spawn a “mailing list” culture that left some wineries with powerful sets of marketing and distribution crutches. At its most functional, direct to consumer marketing makes it easier for [...]

Top Three Wines: Monbousquet, Raquillet, & Mullineux

Top wines this month bring together strange bedfellows including a Southern Hemisphere syrah from the long ignored vineyards in South Africa’s Swartland Cape Winelands outpost, a brilliant Burgundy from the stepchild Côte Chalonnaise village of Mercurey, and Bordeaux from a refocused producer working right bank Saint-Émilion vineyards. Each one of these wines represents strong value in [...]

Burgundy Value Not Oxymoron in Mercurey

The region’s wines are monuments to fine drinking at their pinnacle but inconsistent, expensive, and hardIy easy to understand with intricate layers of sub regions, villages, vineyard divisions, and winemakers.  So not buying or drinking Burgundy with any regularity, the fact that Mercurey was a pre-phylloxera, top Burgundy production village before sinking in popularity and [...]

High Quality $30 Oregon Pinot & Raymond Usseglio Deal

I guess I’m thankful Tower Wine & Spirits is located in my new “transitional” Atlanta neighborhood near where Piedmont meets Cheshire Bridge. While I live in Boston, I have been spending a lot of time working in Atlanta and it made sense to skip the hotel scene and just get an apartment.  With lots of open evenings [...]

Top Three Wines of May: Loire Valley and Niagara, Ontario

May’s “Top Three Wines” headline does not contain a typo.  The reference to Ontario, Canada is purposeful. As a matter of fact, southern Ontario’s wine region (41°-44°) finds itself in a close latitudinal relationship with the Loire Valley (46°-47°), home turf for May’s other top wines.  A couple of this month’s finishers are certain discoveries, [...]

Special Wine Alert: 2008 Brewer-Clifton Santa Rita Hills Pinot Noir

Tonight, a couple of colleagues and I hosted dinner at Sushi Den in Denver for Chris Mygatt, President of Coldwell Banker Residential in Colorado.  Chris was a great dinner companion, and shared some  of the really progressive activities he has been orchestrating in concert with the 1100 Colorado Coldwell agents.  It is possible to get [...]

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