Nigerian Wine Spam?

A friend forwarded me this email, which might just be the work of Nigerian email scammers. Evidently the turmoil in the financial world — and perhaps an increased awareness of both personal finances and email scams — has forced the scammers into a new game. Either that, or this whole wine fraud thing is really [...]

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Che, Syrah?

California syrah is in a strange place these days, and it’s no secret in the trade that the wine remains a difficult item to sell. With a few exceptions, this is generally true for both spicy, vibrant syrah from California’s cooler coastal climates, as it is for the jammy, sweeter versions grown in warmer spots.
Yet [...]

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Building Community

Above: The new tools of the trade?
One of my favorite aspects about the wine, specialty cocktail and food business is that it builds communities, from casual tasting groups to communal neighborhood gardens. And this is one reason tools like blogging, twitter, Chowhound and (gasp) even Yelp are so well-suited to the food and wine world, [...]

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The Beat on the Street

We all hear it these days. You work in the trade and there’s a constant refrain of consumers trading down in their wine purchases, especially at restaurants. The silver lining is that people aren’t abandoning wine altogether, they’re just spending less. Which makes sense: Wine prices were until recently ever so inflated. When things eventually [...]

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Wine Revolutionaries

So the Fall special issue of Wine & Spirits starts shipping next week (go here for a peak), and as you might guess from the title of this post, we decided to focus the issue on some of the individuals who have instigated great change in the contemporary wine industry. Besides contributions from staff, you’ll [...]

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Drink Wine, Save Water

So after a surreal couple of days–wherein I found myself lost briefly on the back lots of Paramount studios where I was to be a guest on the Tasting Room by Tom Leykis (check out the link to the Memorial Weekend Event podcast)–I’m once again in Los Angeles, the sprawling city and twisting highways of [...]

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Book review: Real Wine, by Patrick Matthews

Real Wine was ahead of its time when it was first published in the year 2000. And by choosing to focus on a broad movement within the wine industry to return to more traditional methods of winemaking and viticulture (all valid and relevant issues today), it remains an important read for any serious and intellectually [...]

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Friday Linkfest: Greetings From Kinkyland!

Haven’t done a linkfest in a while (see previous post for my excuse), so this one’s over due. But I am managing to get it together on a Friday! And I haven’t been drinking either! So, on we go…

Naming Game
We here at the W&S west coast hq often amuse ourselves by looking out the window [...]

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Old vines, bank robbers and tasty tap water

A Friday Linkfest!
So what does “Old Vines” mean anyway? I guess it depends on your definition of “old”. Tom Wark, over at his always engaging blog Fermentation, posted today about Yalumba’s Old Vine Charter, which is an attempt (and a pretty good one if you ask me) to try and define this category.
From Yalumba’s Old [...]

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