Wine

A recent addition to my living room, the picture you see on the left, brings a new chapter to my wine collecting saga. It is a 920 bottle indoor storage unit, a monster. But a pretty one.I started collecting in 1996 and soon found the need for a storage unit. Stockton being located in a delta with a high water table, there are almost no houses with basements here (with the exception of the Miracle Mile neighborhood north of Downtown). Thus all wine storage occurs above ground, either in dedicated cellar rooms or, as in my case in storage units[...]

The wine snob that I am, I particularly take pride in my disregard of well known wine pundits, names such as Robert Parker, and my own opinion of the subject acquired by my own tastings. It is thus with much humility that I will announce an episode of recent gullibility which deflated my baloon of hauteur, at least temporarily. It happened after I discovered Gary Veynerchuck.For those of you who have not heard of him, Veynerchuck has become, arguably the second most popular wine pundit after Parker. His is a wine shop owner in New Jersey who has become an[...]

The esteemed movie director Francis Ford Coppola, of "Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now" fame, nowadays is more a winemaker than an artist, presiding over an ever enlarging wine conglomerate in Napa and Sonoma. As much as I have loved his great movies, I have intensely disliked his wines either for their quality or their price. I have not come near any Coppola wines in several years, until last night when Bobby, my wife Julie's son, opened a "top of the line" label from his Sonoma outfit called "Archimedes". I approached the bottle with much trepidation and reluctance.Coppola got into the wine[...]

Greetings from Turkey. Travelling in my original home country for two weeks I have found myself in a wine desert. While I am quite sure of the existence of a fine wine culture in the country, especially in Istanbul, I am not on a kind of trip that allows any exploration of it. My Turkish friend Selim Hacisalihzade, who has lived in Zurich most of his adult life and knows French wine in particular, met me on our first night in Istanbul. He now divides his time between Switzerland and Istanbul. One of his first admonishments to me was that[...]

What I am about to recount has become a common refrain in the wine world. Maybe it will come out with a bit of a personal spin.I recently joined a red wine club at K & L, a Bay Area wine chain, which sends me two bottles a month. The store is well diversified, and does not particularly specialize in anything. Thus the bottles they select for shipping end up being a hodge-podge of what they think their customers will like, cutting accross different regions and varietals. I find these samples quite refreshing, because many are wines I would never[...]

This past Saturday, the Wall Street Journal had a startling proclamation on its front page, above the fold, above the label: "the fraud of wine by the glass", it announced. Inside was their weekly wine column, now shared by two authors who alternate each week. The journalist, a New Yorker named Lettie Teague headlined with "why I hate ordering wine by the glass". Finally! Someone in an influential media outlet is putting to words an in-your-face dirty little secret of the wine world. I noticed this years ago, and feel exactly the same as the author. Ordering wine by the[...]