Wine news March 5, 2018

The New Yorker asks can wine transform China's countryside?  "When I asked her how life was here, she used an old peasant phrase I heard often in Ningxia, kao tian chi fan—to rely on the sky for food."

The Daily Beast reports that Jon Bon Jovi is trying to transform the wine world. “This is not a vanity project,” Jon Bon Jovi tells me almost as soon as we sit down to taste his new rosé wine Diving into Hampton Water, which he created with his son Jesse Bongiovi and French winemaker Gérard Bertrand."

The Chicago Tribune reports that guzzling wine is bad. "I suggest getting into the habit of pouring yourself (and your guests) just enough to be able to smell and taste the wine."

The Independent profiles La Cité du Vin in Bordeaux. "The few wine museums I have visited around the world have never quite fired the imagination. "

The Washington Post on the big Napa Valley charity auction Premiere Napa Valley. "Business as usual meant the annual Premiere Napa Valley auction in St. Helena on Feb. 24. The auction raised $4.1 million for the Napa Valley Vintners Association, featuring barrel lots mostly from 2016, which wine blogger Alder Yarrow dubbed “the rock star vintage.” 

On JancisRobinson.com St-Émilion calms down. "Of all the Bordeaux appellations, St-Émilion has been the most aggressively modernised – by which I don't mean improved but, to borrow a modern phrase, sexed up."

Seven Fifty Daily on how to eliminate fake wine. "These aspects of the technology are what sparked Downey’s attention and got her thinking about a blockchain ledger that could focus on wine bottle authenticity and provenance."