Ok… so… South African wine is almost hopelessly underpriced. As in, shot-themselves-in-the-foot-and-will-be-limping-through-the-U.S.-wine-market-for-a-few-more-years underpriced. Which means that exciting bargains exist for the budget-conscious wine lover who’s willing to seek out the best wines from SA. That’s the big take-away for me from my time speaking at the 2013 Nederburg Wine Auction near Cape Town earlier this…
Category: kick-ass wines
Wine Pleasure Through The Whining Pain (Foxen Recent Releases)
Excruciating pain has a way of giving you additional focus. I’m learning this the hard way, courtesy of a degenerated L5-S1 lumbar disk which is causing a bulge that my spinal cord finds disagreeable (“disagreeable” as in “excruciating sciatica that is more painful than when I broke a bone in my hand and is now…
Who’s Buying Ultra Premium Wines? Not Millionaires (Tasting The 2011 Cloudburst Chardonnay)
I was recently contacted by a PR person who didn’t want to send me samples, but instead wanted to interview me about a wine. That probably sounds odd (it certainly feels odd to type it). I suppose that it is kind of odd. But it’s not freakishly walk-away-and-phone-the-authorities-because-this-person-is-totally-psycho odd, when you consider what the PR…
Brett May Not Be The Enemy (Talking Brett With MW Christy Canterbury, And Tasting WineSmith’s Crucible)
I’ve long waged a sort of mini-war (no height jokes!) on brettanomyces. Equating it to barnyard, horse sweat, and Band-Aid stinkiness in vino, as someone who’d personally rather go for the naked, unabashed, nowhere-to-hide purity of wines like Mosel Riesling over the bombast of overdone modern red wines, I hated how Brett buried wines in…