Archive for the ‘Writings’ Category
The Growth of Wine In Casual Dining Chains
October 14th, 2011 by Tom Johnson
My new Vineyard & Winery Management article is up. It’s about the growth of “wine programs” in casual dining chains. Both of you who read this blog regularly were tantalized with tidbits of information from my research, including my growing appreciation, if not actual patronage, of Olive Garden. Here are a couple of salient paragraphs: [...]
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The Attributes of Wine Bloggers
August 1st, 2011 by Tom Johnson
Dave McIntyre experiences the recent Wine Blogger’s Conference and reaches conclusions about “whine” bloggers, calling them self-absorbed and amateurish. OK, he didn’t use either one of those words. But his four attributes of wine bloggers include a tendency to write more about themselves than wine, a sense of entitlement, and a herd mentality. So I’m [...]
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Louisville Juice in Print
May 12th, 2011 by Tom Johnson
My article on Kentucky/southern Indiana wine is up at Edible Louisville. I’m pretty satisfied with the piece, given that it was written on a short deadline. The only thing that irritates me is the last paragraph, which I didn’t write. It mentions Kentucky being the home of North America’s “first commercial winery,” which is a [...]
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Local Wine and My Own Sense of Doom
April 18th, 2011 by Tom Johnson
Over the weekend I finished an article about Kentucky wine. The article is for a local food publication and is built around this familiar contradiction: local food advocates are not also consumers of local wine. A sidebar to the article recommends a half-dozen widely available local wines for readers to try. And here’s where my [...]
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Five Ways to F*** With the Sommelier
March 22nd, 2011 by Tom Johnson
Order a great wine and romantically drink it out of your date’s shoe When tasting the wine for the first time, swish it vigorously around your mouth, shaking your head to get wine into every corner, for a full sixty seconds before spitting it back into the glass. Then offer the glass to your date [...]
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Too Legit to Quit
March 10th, 2011 by Tom Johnson
My new piece for Vineyard & Winery Management is up. It’s about the bad economy driving winemakers out on the road to sell their wares, and discovering there are nice people even in godforsaken places like Kentucky.
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Happenstance
February 25th, 2011 by Tom Johnson
I’m out of town with my wife. We’re somewhere we’ve never been before, in a part of the country with which we are not familiar. We’re staying in a house on a sand road that dead-ends at an oyster shell beach. We’re escaping business obligations, which have been fairly intense and which recently culminated in [...]
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I Secretly Write Wine Smut
February 21st, 2011 by Tom Johnson
Palate Press asked me to write a thing about Open That Bottle Night. I did. Don’t tell my wife.
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The Most Interesting Man In the World
September 21st, 2010 by Tom Johnson
Imagine you’re sitting on an airplane and you strike up a conversation with the guy in the seat next to you and he tells you this story: He used to be a racing car driver, mostly on the European road circuit, tearing around at a couple of hundred miles an hour and living a life [...]
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The Point of Wine
July 20th, 2010 by Tom Johnson
Felix Salmon has a nice piece on enjoying good — not expensive — wine that includes this: What’s missing is any sense of fun, or of simple pleasures: a bottle of screw-top rose can be cheaper, more appropriate, and much more delicious at a summer picnic than a six-pack of beer. And it would prove [...]
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