Mountain View
1WineDude
Minor Miracles: Tasting With the Madeira Wine Institute in Philadelphia
“If you’re looking for the worst place in the world to make wine, Madeira would be a candidate.”. Thus spoke Rui Falcão, during a recent tasting/masterclass for the media in Philadelphia, hosted by the Madeira Wine Institute.
Back Through Tuscan Time: An Arcanum Retrospective in Italy
It takes some serious moxy to pour your super-Tuscan red, sans hesitation, alongside legends Le Macchiole Paleo, Ornellaia, and Sassicai. Now, you might expect that kind of moxy from the Italians, but in this case it came from Frenchman veteran vigneron Pierre Seillan who, along with winemaker Lawrence Cronin and vineyard manager Michele Pezzicoli, produces the Cabernet Franc-dominated Arcanum at Tuscany’s Tenuta di Arceno (I visited as part of a media jaunt).
Are White Wines Getting Unfair Treatment by Wine Critics?
My and colleague friend Jeff Siegel published details by PhD Suneal Chaudhary, who analyzed over 64,000 wine scores, dating to the `70s, from “major wine magazines.” The study’s aim was to ascertain if red wines routinely receive higher point score reviews than white wines (other styles were presumably ignored).
Has the Biodynamic Wine Tasting Calendar Been Debunked?
A couple of years ago, I undertook a rather statistically-irrelevant and thoroughly un-scientific study regarding the Biodynamic tasting calendar (based on the lunar-cycle farming techniques espoused by Rudolf Steiner). This study had a single participant (me) who knew next to nothing about this calendar, who downloaded one of those mobile apps that tells you what type of day it is on the BioD calendar. I then tasted through wine samples pretty much every day, as usual, and noted whether or not any given wine seemed to taste really good or really nasty, and what biodynamic calendar day type it happened to be.
The Myth and WInemaking Magic Behind Concha y Toro's Best Red Wine
Ostensibly, the Chilean wine powerhouse Concha y Toro is a budget-minded wine lover’s dream. With five major facilities across the county, and twenty million cases produced annually, they have pretty much nailed the market for tasty, accessible, varietally-correct, clean wines that are priced well within the means of the average wine drinker.
Is This Italy's Best Sagrantino? Tasting with Filippo Antonelli
It’s a wet, chilly, grey Winter morning in San Marco, a locality that sits just outside of Italy’s Montefalco. And I’ve had to wait in the damp cold for a short bit, because Filippo Antonelli is late for our appointment at his family’s winery (hey, welcome to Umbria, right?). And that’s pretty much the only slightly-negative thing that you’ll read about Antonelli over the next few minutes… but let’s set the stage with a little bit more detail before we get into the effusive wine recommendations…
Catching Up With Montefalco's Most Popular Red: Perticaia
The name Perticaia is familiar to lovers of big Italian reds, but its meaning – “plow” in the local dialect – likely isn’t as well-known. It is, however, an apt description of how Azienda Agraria Perticaia has forced its way through to the top of the critical food chain when it comes to Montefalco Sagrantino wines.
In the Shadow of the Gods: Tasting Sicily’s Diodoros Nero d’Avola
It’s not often that you get to drink wine made from a vineyard that is farmed in an actual historical tourist attraction. But that’s how we roll when I am touring Sicily on a media trip to catch up on what’s new and exciting in the local wine scene in Italy’s largest island (lucky me)! And while it’s always my pleasure to visit, taste in, and talk about Sicily, I figured that Italy could use the extra love these days in the time of a global pandemic, when it’s a lot more difficult for us to actually get there and see, feel, and taste for ourselves in person.
Austrian Delights: The Wines of Thermenregion
I was recently a media guest for the 2019 Austrian Wine Summit, during which I was lucky enough to participate in a tour “along the Danube,” visiting and tasting through Austria’s classic wine producing regions. It was pretty much as awesome as that sentence makes it sound!
An Introduction to the Modern Israeli Wine Scene
Israel’s winemaking history surpasses its history of regional conflict, both in terms of longevity and in interest. There is evidence here of winemaking and (particularly along the Mediterranean coast) wine export dating back at least five thousand years. About seven hundred years of Muslim Ottoman influence slowed things down, and by the 1880s a wave of Zionist immigrants, focused on farming, renewed and rejuvenated the region’s wine industry. Investment from the Rothschilds in France helped to modernize the industry here, and another wave, starting in about 2008, focused the fine wine scene mostly on Mediterranean grape varieties, and saw the development of more modernized marketing approaches.
Gigondas: Southern Rhône's Wine "Layer Cake"
Smack up against the Dentelles de Montmirail mountain range sits Gigondas, a former ancient Roman soldier retirement home area, and Southern Rhône cru that, technically, contains more woodlands than vineyards. And that’s after a killer frost in the 1960s wiped out a good portion of olive tree plantings, ushering in a shift towards more vine plantings. All in all, Gigondas is about one third the size of its more famous, direct-competitor cousin, Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
How the Southern Rhône's Cairanne Is Playing the Winegrowing "Long Game"
No one could accuse the Southern Rhône cru Cairanne of rushing into things. For much of its history, Cairanne seems to have been metaphysically hiding from the fine wine world behind its own rocky outcrops. While technically part of the Côtes du Rhône designation since 1953, it took Cairanne 87 years to reach cru AOC status, the aim that originally brought together several of its local growers to establish a regional Cave Coopérative back in 1929.
How Alsace's Grand Cru Schlossberg Wine Stand the Test of Time
When you’re within spitting distance of Kayserberg (quite literally the cutest town in France, an honor it was officially awarded in 2017), amid the picturesque shadows of a castle that dates back to the fourteenth Century (and in which harvests were celebrated), and regularly run into ruins from the early 700s AD, you might justifiably consider yourself in a sort of Western European daydream-like fantasy land. Just add fairies and elves!
When Wine Comes With a Sense of History (Tasting at Oregon's Plaisance Ranch)
The third Joe Ginet is a bit of a torch-bearer. He and wife Suzi preside over Plaisance Ranch, a former dairy farm, now turned organic beef cattle ranch, which also happens to be a twenty-acre vine nursery (now with over twenty varieties). And, since 1999, it’s been a a vineyard as well, in keeping with the tradition of his father Joe and grandfather Joe. It’s grandad Joe who lived quite a life, the kind that the grandkids and beyond would definitely be talking about in Oregon's Rogue Valley and beyond.
Stu Smith Showcases the "Courage of Convictions" in Smith Madrone's Recent Napa Releases
Stu Smith, one of the masterminds behind Napa Valley’s well-regarded Smith-Madrone, is smart, verbose, and opinionated – all of which are a wine writer’s dream, and all of which were on typically intriguing display when I (and a handful of fellow wine media and critics) recently tasted through some of the the Smith-Madrone releases with Stu via Zoom meeting.
Long-Haired Hippy Good Guy Winemaking (Spicewood Vineyards Recent Releases)
“It only took me… eleven years!” remarked Ron Yates, owner of the family-run Spicewood Vineyards, which produces about three thousand cases from about forty acres in the about-as-unlikely-as-they-come-at-first-but-upon-further-review-kind-of-inevitable fine wine region of Texas Hill Country.
Sonoma's Rodney Strong Shakes Things Up With Its Rowen Wine Debut
The word rowen – which is of Middle English ancestry, from an Old Northern French variant of regain, and almost certainly will have your phone’s auto-correct annoyingly trying to change it to rower – almost literally means to make hay.
A Sonoma County Wine Power Couple: Bibiana González Rave and Jeff Pisoni
You've Gotta love the modern wine business. Despite our penchant for socialization being tampered down by the (entirely reasonable) shelter-in-place orders (courtesy of our current global pandemic), we always manage to find a way to not have to always drink alone!
1WineDude
194+
Posts
92K+
Views
a.k.a. Joe Roberts. Dad, wine-writer-guy, wine critic, wine competition judge, author, bassist, free-thinker, & occasional hiney-shaker. Opening up highly-pressurized cans of whoop-a** on the wine industry since 2007. Joe is a Certified Specialist of Wine, and the author of Wine Taster’s Guide: Drink and Learn with 30 Wine Tastings.
It’s essential to note our commitment to transparency:
Our Terms of Use acknowledge that our services may not always be error-free, and our Community Standards emphasize our discretion in enforcing policies. As a platform hosting over 100,000 pieces of content published daily, we cannot pre-vet content, but we strive to foster a dynamic environment for free expression and robust discourse through safety guardrails of human and AI moderation.