Archive for March, 2011
Leftover Wine? I’ve Heard of It, But I’ve Never Actually Seen It
March 30th, 2011 by Tom Johnson
The shocking implication of this dated wine stopper is not that there are people who can’t recall when they uncorked their leftover wine. It’s that there is leftover wine at all. What’s wrong with people?
Posted in Hardware | Comments (2)
Go Ahead and Show Me, Missouri
March 30th, 2011 by Tom Johnson
I will be drinking local wine with the Drink Local Wine people this weekend in St. Louis, where I will not wear any of my Chicago Cubs regalia. The subject of the event is Missouri wines. Jeff Siegel, regular LouJu commentor and Wine Curmudgeon, claims that I will not be able to distinguish between Missouri [...]
Posted in Events | Comments (6)
For Some Reason, I’m Not Annoyed
March 30th, 2011 by Tom Johnson
An interesting short profile of Brad Ball, an apparently teenaged sommelier who owns a wine bar in Charleston, South Carolina. Ball explored the world of branded wines aimed at Millennials and discovered it to be — these are my words not his — a cynical exercise in repackaging lousy wine. He puts it like this: [...]
Posted in From the Web | Comments (0)
For Their Next Trick, They’re Going to Reserve Every Hotel Room in Cancun Forever
March 29th, 2011 by Tom Johnson
Chinese businesses, flush with capital, are buying vineyards and chateaux in economically depressed Bordeaux. The latest: Laulan Ducos, a Cru Bourgeois chateau far, far out on the Medoc Peninsula. It is the second to be taken over by Asian investors in little over a month, and the sixth Chinese-owned vineyard in this celebrated wine-producing region…Such is the [...]
Posted in News | Comments (1)
How To Make a Small Fortune In the Wine Business
March 28th, 2011 by Tom Johnson
Start with a large fortune: The seeds of (Patricia) Kluge’s financial downfall were sown in 1999 when, along with third husband William Moses, she established the Kluge Estate Winery and Vineyard on 960 acres near Albemarle (Virginia). The couple’s plan: Create vintages that would establish Kluge Estate, and subsequently Virginia, as an East Coast mecca [...]
Posted in Signs of the Apocalypse | Comments (1)
Somebody to Hate: The Consultant, Revealed
March 28th, 2011 by Tom Johnson
The discussion has apparently run its course, and here’s what our world’s-most-odious wine consultant looks like: He’s Belgian but pretends he’s French, because if he admitted he were from Belgium he wouldn’t be as loathsome – and his psychology is that he wants the rest of us to hate him as much as he hates himself. He [...]
Posted in Not Particularly Anything | Comments (4)
Somebody to Hate: Building the Perfect Bad (Wine) Guy
March 25th, 2011 by Tom Johnson
Yesterday we had an interesting discussion defining the attributes of the perfect wine-industry villain. Here’s what we have so far: He (it was unanimous that he has to be a “he”) is rich, arrogant, and knows little of the wine business — but that doesn’t stop him from being smug in his assumption that he [...]
Posted in Not Particularly Anything | Comments (23)
Brewing Scandal: iPad Empowers Beer Drinking at Work
March 24th, 2011 by Tom Johnson
Bloomberg inflates time-killing goofiness of Yelp engineers into obligatory West Coast trend piece here.
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)
Overstating the Importance of Food and Wine Pairing
March 24th, 2011 by Tom Johnson
Wines & Vines dives into the data and discovers that most wine isn’t consumed with food. The report noted that high-frequency (wine) consumers are less concerned with food/wine pairings than the industry assumes. Sizeable minorities, however, felt some types of wines don’t taste good without food (41%) or seldom have wine without food (30%). There [...]
Posted in Data | Comments (2)
I’d Love Someone To Hate
March 24th, 2011 by Tom Johnson
Do you think wine blogging would generate more interest if we had someone really good to hate? Wine is an industry lousy with French people, so you’d think there’d be someone we could all agree on, a real son (or daughter) of a bitch that could be the focus of our rage and frustration. But [...]
Posted in Not Particularly Anything | Comments (29)