At a new, small California winery, an ethnically diverse pair are making low production Cabernet Sauvignon. Very, very good Cabernet, that is.

For those of you who are playing along at home, I’m going to introduce this article with a bit of background, because it’s several months in the making.  Also, if I don’t start out with some preliminaries, it’s going to confuse the hell out of me.

Also, since we’re going to end up connecting Oaxaca (that’s in Mexico), Napa Valley, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, Opus One, Mario Bazán Cellars, and ethnic diversity, we need to make sure we’re all on the same page before we start.

Bear with me, you’re probably smarter than I am, ok?  Here’s the recap:

• During a recent Twitter Taste Live event featuring St. Supery wines, I railed a bit on my overall disappointment with Napa Valley Sauvignon Blanc.  This led to a challenge of sorts from Opus One winemaker and friend-of-the-Dude Michael Silacci, who dared me to compare Napa SB wines like Toquade against their counterparts from France or New Zealand, or at least to try Toquade.
• During a recent jaunt to the Left Coast for the American Wine Bloggers Conference, I did just that (tried Toquade, I mean, not just jaunted), along with some other great Napa wines (more on that in a few minutes) when I visited Michael for dinner (he didn’t pour any Opus, by the way… jerk…!).
• In the meantime, I’d opened up a fairly sizeable barrique of worms when I highlighted the fact that there is an incredible lack of ethnic diversity in winery ownership and in winemaking in general, and discussed with you fine readers the value of writing about very small-production wines (like Toquade).

Right… that’s Twitter, TasteLive, Napa Valley SB, Opus One, the Wine Bloggers Conference, Toquade, ethnic diversity in winemaking, and my coverage of small-production wines.  Crystal clear, right?

Anyway… at that same dinner with Michael, I was introduced to another (very) small-production wine.  A red this time, from a winery owned by a Mexican-born immigrant who employs a young African-American female winemaker.

In other words, I’d hit the serendipity synchronicity jackpot.  Which means that this is the one chance I may have to piss off everybody in a single post… I cannot screw this up!

[ Editor’s note: for those who are humorless, the preceding statement is a joke; in fact, those who are humorless are probably reading the wrong blog and should leave immediately for the sake of preserving their own sanity. ]

Background setup complete – now, let’s get talking about the wine…

Read the rest of this stuff »

I love writing about wine.  And I often encourage people who love wine to blog about it, since it’s so easy to set-up a blog, and it’s such a great way to record your thoughts, feelings, and observations as you travel your own personal ‘wine journey’.

Sometimes, when a wine lover that I know gets a bit more serious about their quest for wine knowledge and for wine blogging, I get asked questions about how they can monetize their blog, and what type of money the can expect to bring in via their blog.  The conversation usually goes something like this:

Them: So… what kind of money are you making on 1WineDude.com?

Me: Not much.

Them: Really? Like, how much is not much?

Me: Like, almost nothing.

Them: Really?

Me: Really.

Them: Oh.

[ insert awkward silence and disappointment ]

For reasons that I find difficult to comprehend, some people tend to think that wine blogging can become a source of direct income. If you’re one of those people, I’ve got some bad news for you.

You’d better be passionate about wine if you want to blog about it, because monetary reward is not really going to be part of the pay-off for you. 

Simply put, you aren’t going to make any serious money from wine blogging…

Read the rest of this stuff »

It’s often said that imitation is flattery in its most sincere form.

Imitation is also a way of making a quick buck, and in the case of wine has sometimes been used to dupe even the world’s most influential palates and wine writers.

Counterfeiting, in the U.S. alone, is about a $200 billion a year business, and it’s been estimated by Wine Spectator (yeah, yeah, I know…) that 5% of old/rare wine sold on the “secondary market” is fake.  Faking a wine isn’t necessarily easy, but somewhat ironically the job gets a bit easier for those trying to fake rare, older wines – simply because most people haven’t had them, so there are few barometers to judge how they should or shouldn’t taste.  In some cases, as detailed in Benjamin Wallace’s The Billionaire’s Vinegar, the rock stars of the wine tasting world may in fact have based their tasting notes of older, rarer wines on fakes.  Examining a bottle to determine if it’s a fake can be a time-consuming and difficult process.

The reason I’m telling you all of this?

I think I recently just may have had my first faked wine…

Read the rest of this stuff »

Here we go again.

I don’t know why wine writing icons feel compelled lately to disparage wine bloggers as a whole, but it seems that the venerable Anthony dias Blue is joining Robert Parker in painting all wine bloggers with an overly broad and negative brush. As in the case of Parker’s blogger diatribe, by casting aspersions on wine bloggers with such a broad brush, Blue undermines his own (otherwise very compelling) argument and credibility.

Blue’s attack comes in the July 2009 issue of Tasting Panel in a piece titled “…And Who Regulates the Bloggers?” Blue starts by coming to defense of Robert Parker with respect to the recent brouhaha that Tyler’s article drummed up on his Dr. Vino wine blog. You might recall that Tyler uncovered what appeared to be very inconsistent behavior by some of Parker’s staff, behavior that didn’t seem to line up at all with Parker’s published code of ethics. This event generated quite a bit of discussion on the Internet, and even prompted Janis Robinson to (finally) detail her own ethics code with regards to samples and reviews.

Strangely, he cites “barbarian bloggers” instead of simply referencing Tyler’s Dr. Vino blog. I don’t recall anyone but Tyler breaking the Parker story, so I’m confused as to why Blue would use a broad and disparaging term to describe bloggers a group.

Things get much worse…

Read the rest of this stuff »