For Riesling lovers, the last four years in particular have been a good time to be alive. On one side of the shiny Riesling-fine-wine-world-market coin, Europe’s traditional flag-bearing regions of that grape been performing well; on the other side, we’ve seen the emergence of up-and-coming areas that, while far from wine-drinking household names, undoubtedly have…
Category: wine review
The People’s Republic (Highlights From “Authentic Alentejo”)
In the grand scheme of the wine world, Portugal appears to be the county that stands tall, despite its relatively small size (about 575 miles long, and just under 140 miles wide). In Napoleonic-complex fashion, it makes up for its stature in other ways; Portugal is in the top ten worldwide in vineyard acreage, per…
Contact Points (A Decade Of Cà Maiol’s Molin Lugana)
Walter Contato knew potential when he saw it. Like an inordinate number of Italians before and after him, this successful Milan-born businessman took holidays in the sometimes-too-charming-for-words (as in, how-the-hell-are-we-gonna-get-the-car-through-these-narrow-Medieval-streets?!?? levels of charming) Lake Garda town of Sirmione. As an inordinate number of successful white businessmen seem to want to still do, Contato eventually decided…
37th Heaven (Highlights From The 2017 San Francisco International Wine Competition)
By the time that you read these words, the results of the 37th (!!) annual San Francisco International Wine Competition should be publicly available, so I thought that I would share some of the highlights among the event’s big winners. The SFIWC is one of my favorite weekends of the year. Under the watchful eyes…