Alice Feiring and Credibility Have Parted Company
Ahh, Alice. It’s been a few years since Alice Feiring and I first met at the Healdsburg Wine Library where she read from her book, The Battle for Wine and Love: or How I Saved the World from Parkerization. Though I walked away from our encounter convinced she was misguided and hypocritical in her criticism...
Natural Wine and Cowardly Wineries
Natural Wine Remy Charest has a wonderful piece on Natural Wine over at Palate Press. A must read for some much needed balance on the issue of what is and is not “natural”. My take: Making a wine without sulfur is crazy if you want consistency in your product. I’m not speaking of vintage to...
Cooking Keller’s Under Pressure Pt. 2 – Hen Egg
First off, my apologies for the issues with email updates, RSS and the site these past few days. My old host, mediatemple, was hacked and malware was injected into my blog. I’m now happily at Page.ly and thanks to Josh Strebel’s tireless customer service efforts I’m back up and clear of bugs. Soft-Boiled Hen Egg...
Keller’s Under Pressure, With Pinot Pt.1
I believe pinot can pair with anything. So many styles – light to heavy – and so many aromas – gamey to floral – make it endlessly adaptable. In this upcoming blog series I’m going to put my belief to the test. Can pinot pair with poached egg and asparagus? How about calf heart? Compressed...
The Perfect Cheese For Pinot Noir
Matos St. George cheese. But I repeat myself. Matos only makes one cheese, so that’s like saying Petrus Merlot blend. Semi-firm, nutty, creamy, heaven. And getting to Matos Cheese Factory is as much of an experience as eating it. Words don’t do it justice. The long driveway past the vines and the cows. The alarm...
Green Wine Journalism: Flacid, Alarmist, Inane.
John Williams of Frog’s Leap was recently profiled in the Atlantic, a relatively respected journal of our times. John is a fantastic winemaker, and he lives his green ethos like no one else in Napa, and perhaps in the entire industry. Yet even he finds himself getting annoyed by the questions from Atlantic environmental-advocate-cum-journalist Mark...
Winegrowing and Baseball – Rotobase
Wine and baseball are intertwined in the best of ways. Both the growing season and the playing season overlap almost perfectly. Pitchers and catchers report in February, foreshadowing the beginning of spring training. In the vineyard we prune and train our vines in February in anticipation of spring. Play begins in earnest in April, and...
Charlie Palmer Pigs & Pinot – Customer Service EPIC FAIL
Charlie Palmer’s annual Pigs & Pinot event is a well regarded and, if this year is any indication, well attended event. Which is why it is both surprising and completely unacceptable to receive the following email: Dear Candace, We are very sad to bring this news to you today. Demand for Pigs & Pinot this...
Climate Change and Wine Growing: One Farmer’s Opinion
A couple items in the news and the on the blogs prompted this post. First was the recent discussion by Jeff over at Good Grape about Tom Johnson’s (author of Louisville Juice) contention that wine bloggers don’t link to each other. One of the reasons for this, Jeff says, is because of the dearth of...
W. Blake Gray On Why Amazon Really Quit Wine
Some very important reporting from W. Blake Gray.
For the impatient, the reason is: taxes.
Read the whole post.
