Premiere Napa Valley – the annual auction event in which Napa Valley Vintners members create small-quantity, one-of-a-kind wine lots that are then bid on by wine industry/retailer types – is, basically, a total zoo. And I love that it’s a zoo. It’s my kind of wine geek’s zoo: equal parts social event, fund-raiser, total chaos,…
Category: wine industry events
2009 Bordeaux To Wine World: “Surprise! We’re Overpriced!” (Thoughts From The Union des Grand Crus NYC Tasting)
This is how I imagine many top-tier Bordeaux Chateaux owners end their day: They put down their small glasses of aged Sauturnes (which have been chilled by Winter fairies blowing ice crystals at them), and are lifted out of their easy chairs on large red ribbons made of the finest silk, held aloft by cherubs…
Joan of Arc, Jules Verne And Vouvray (At The Salon des Vins de Loire)
This week, I’m in the historic-but-tourist-friendly French wine region of the Loire, on a press trip attending the the 2012 Salon des Vines de Loire. This annual vinous showcase in Angers features about as many Loire wines as the Loire river is measured in miles (over 600). So, I’m expecting to spit… a lot (and…
Song Of The Happily Depleted Burgundian Bank Account (Domaine Chanson’s 2009 Grand Crus Hit High Notes, And High Prices)
It’s not often that a wine guy avoids a wine region by choice. Yet that’s more-or-less where I’ve found myself when it comes to France’s Burgundy, home of both ethereally-exquisite, mind-blowingly-good wines and overpriced, cabbage-in-the-bathwater bad swill, with little to guide the consumer from choosing one over the other apart from painstakingly acquired detailed knowledge…