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Winemaker Interviews
Inside the Wines and Mind of Bellwether’s Kris Matthewson
"I think you need to be able to see what you're doing in winemaking way ahead of when it actually happens." Kris Matthewson -
Winemaker interviews
Drew Baker of Old Westminster Winery Showing Maryland's Wine Promise
"What I love about Maryland is its diverse geology and microclimates. It's often referred to as America in miniature." Drew Baker on making wine in Maryland -
Grape Collective Publishing
Chilean Wine Event Of The Year Rocks New York City
Grape Collective, in partnership with The Clare and Chilean sommelier Jonathan Charnay, put on a Chilean wine extravaganza. The event celebrated the launch of our book Chile: Conversations with...
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Winemaker Interviews
Bonaccorsi: Etna's First-And-Always
ValCerasa was one of the first wines to be imported from Mount Etna to the United States and for good reason.
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Winemaker Interviews
Garbinada Wind and Llicorella Soil Make Mas d’en Gil Stand out from The Crowd in Priorat
"When people think of Mas d’en Gil, they look at us as a reference, a specific style that people are looking for, and we would like to keep the flame. But in the meantime, we are not afraid to...
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Column
Sauvignon Blanc That’s Profound? Sancerre ‘Expresses What Is Important’
"There’s something special about Sancerre. It has a confidence and depth that seem wise, even as it retains that lemon-lime, acidic, mineral-rich crispness that defines good Sauvignon...
Latest News
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Column
"Winemakers and their barrels. Get them started on the subject and it’s hard to get them to stop. For good reason. In influencing the taste and style of wine, the choice of oak barrels is like painters having additional colors." Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher
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Wine news
Eric Asimov in the New York Times notes that every few years an article bubbles up with claims that expensive wines are really no better than cheap ones. "J.K. Rowling has sold a lot more books than Saul Bellow, and given the choice, most people would probably prefer to read Ms. Rowling. But does that lead to the conclusion that Nobel-winning authors like Mr. Bellow are for suckers?"
Bon Appetit explores carbonic maceration. "But with carbonic maceration, a winemaker skips stemming and crushing and instead puts full bunches of grapes into steel fermentation tanks that are sealed and filled with carbon dioxide, creating an anaerobic atmosphere without any oxygen."
Andrew Chalk writing on Go-Wine visits Côtes de Bordeaux. "The Côtes de Bordeaux is a group of five Bordeaux AOPs who have joined together to jointly market themselves to the world. They are Blaye, Cadillac, Castillon, Francs, and Sainte-Foy."
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Wine news
Jancis Robinson writes, "The New Zealand Cellar wine bar and wine shop is no cellar. It is very much above ground, in Pop Brixton, a colourful site almost under the local railway line."
The Washington Post reports on cheap Spanish rosé is being passed off as French. "France’s consumer fraud authority confirmed July 9 that over the past two years, unscrupulous wine merchants have passed off as many as 70,000 hectoliters — the equivalent of 10 million bottles — of cheap Spanish wine as more-expensive French rosé."
The Guardian on why concrete vessels are back in vogue. "By the 1980s, concrete was itself starting to look dated. Stainless steel vats, with whizzy temperature controls, available in all manner of sizes, were the kit to have, making a style of lively, fruit-driven wine that proved hugely popular."
Decanter Andrew Jefford meets the Burgundy and Châteauneuf specialist Mounir Saouma. “When I arrived in Burgundy, I tried to guess how people made wine in the past. I have no knowledge; I have no pretension. I’m patient. I like to observe.” In particular, he noted the super-cleanness of modern juices, pneumatically pressed followed by settling and racking; he noticed the great attention paid to reductive handling … and he noticed the premox problems the region had with white wines."
Inc evaluates Walmart's $11 wine. "This Red Blend had a remarkable depth of texture. It was like meeting a crass Wall Street banker and hearing him talk intelligently about global warming. Or at least the collected works of Britney Spears."
The Drinks Business reports that Head of the world’s largest cork producer, Antonio Amorim, says that his company will have achieved the total eradication of TCA across the billions of corks it produces by 2020.
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Winemaker Interviews
"I think you need to be able to see what you're doing in winemaking way ahead of when it actually happens." Kris Matthewson
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Winemaker interviews
"What I love about Maryland is its diverse geology and microclimates. It's often referred to as America in miniature." Drew Baker on making wine in Maryland
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Winemaker Interviews
ValCerasa was one of the first wines to be imported from Mount Etna to the United States and for good reason.
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Wine news
Handmaid's Tale wine is cancelled due to social media criticism reports The Hollywood Reporter. "Earlier on Tuesday, People revealed that MGM and wine seller Lot18 was releasing a collection of wines inspired by the Hulu show — two reds in tribute to Elisabeth Moss and Alexis Bledel‘s characters, Offred and Ofglen, and a white wine for Yvonne Strahovski‘s Serena Joy."
Bon Appetit on making wine with Yoda or Danilo Marcucci. "Marcucci refers to himself as “a simple Umbrian man,” but in the world of natural wine, he is a master. He has 13 vintages under his belt. He’s a consultant for nearly a dozen wineries scattered across the country—from outside Rome to Trento in the Alps."
CNBC on how a mother and son sold $1 million in wine condoms. "A joke about an unfinished bottle of wine, some plastic wrap and a rubber band led to over $1 million in sales for the Texas mother-son duo behind Wine Condoms."
The Drinks Business reports that British wine writer Steven Spurrier is to release England’s first crémant in November, using wines from his estate in Dorset."Speaking to the drinks business last week, Spurrier said that the decision to make a less fizzy English sparkling from his property in the southwest of England, called Bride Valley, was in fact driven by adversity."
Punch on one of America's top 10 wine lists. "Perlman’s minor superpower is that he’s managed to created a wine program that’s wonderfully eclectic without suffering from mission creep. Rarely do you encounter a wine list that feels so in sync with its restaurant—and that’s saying something, given Vincent’s menu, which is perhaps best summed up as “wanderlust-y.”
Seven Fifty Daily on the emergence of non-vinifera wines. "Hybrid grapes don’t get much love."
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Wine news
The Washington Post says our taste in wine at restaurants is changing. “In that environment the chef is making the decisions on what he or she will offer, and you choose from a small menu, not the wide range of selections that might be on a traditional menu,” Greene says. “That has opened up the field for sommeliers. It’s not that somms know better, but they can fashion a great wine experience with all these resources available.”
The New York Times on a wine stopper that does double duty. "There are wine stoppers galore out there, and no lack of cutters to make short work of the foil that covers a wine bottle’s cork. "
In Decanter Andrew Jefford reviews professor Alex Maltman’s recently published book, Vineyards, Rocks, & Soils. "No student of wine should be without this book; every wine writer and sommelier should read it, several times."
Jancis Robinson asks how green is Napa Valley? "Williams puts it in typically forceful fashion. 'All of Napa Valley's great wines – the Inglenooks of the 1940s and all the wines that did so well in the famous 1976 Judgment of Paris tasting – were made from dry-farmed vines. Irrigation was only introduced to the valley in 1976 but today 95 per cent of our vineyards are irrigated. It's horse shit to say it's impossible to dry farm in Napa Valley."
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Winemaker Interviews
"When people think of Mas d’en Gil, they look at us as a reference, a specific style that people are looking for, and we would like to keep the flame. But in the meantime, we are not afraid to make changes." -Antón Lorenzo
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Column
"There’s something special about Sancerre. It has a confidence and depth that seem wise, even as it retains that lemon-lime, acidic, mineral-rich crispness that defines good Sauvignon Blanc." Dorothy J. Gaiter
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Winemaker interviews
Fall Creek Vineyards: Showing Texas' Wine Potential
Fall Creek Vineyards was the first winery in the Texas Hill Country region to open in 1975. Their original oenologist was the famed André Tchelistcheff. Grape Collective talks to Director of...
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Feature
BDX: Falling in Love again? Part 4 – Why Hipsters Hate Bordeaux
"The biggest mistake most of the hipster somms make is their assumption that fruity wine aromas are fake and obscure the non-fruity authentic taste of wine. For them it only becomes apparent...
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Winemaker Interviews
History in a bottle: ArmosA
Cantina ArmosA is located in the town of Sicili, belonging to the Province of Ragusa, in the southeast corner of the island. ArmosA has a great sense of their region's history disregarding fleeting...
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Feature
Charles Bieler and the Growth of American Rosé
How Charles Bieler went from driving a pink Cadillac hawking a then unkown rosé to spawning the rosé revolution and co-owning the largest brand of American rosé.
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