Wine

The bottle of wine you see in the picture was on sale for $20 at K&L Wines in San Francisco last weekend. So what?This is a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape from a good vintage, 2006, and its former price was around $40. Chateauneuf du Pape is the crowning prince of the Southern Rhone and commands high prices. I don't think I have ever bought a bottle from this appellation at that price in the last few years. Needless to say I asked a clerk at the store what the was going on. His reponse gave me an epiphany about[...]

Our most recent Friday night wine tasting took place at our friend Padmesh's house. Pad, as we call him, has come to build an extensive Bordeaux collection which he has been sharing with us in the past few years. We have come to know especially the 1990 vintage through bottles he has opened repeatedly. Thus, on this occasion when he brought two decanters filled with red wine we pretty much figured they were going to be good Bordeaux's. We usually do not engage in decanter ceremonies unless we lose a cork in an old bottle we had trouble opening, and[...]

I generally shy away from immersing myself in the details of technical winemaking. I figure I am a member of the "audience", and for me it's the "performance" that counts, rather than what it took to produce it. Having said that, after 15 plus years of wine tasting, it is impossible to ignore some winemaking techniques. Take the demonstrated bottle as an example. It is an offering from a monthly wine club I belong to in a San Francisco wine shop. It is a Gigondas, an appellation near the famed Chateauneuf du Pape region of Southern Rhone. The wines here,[...]

Is there life after CEO tenure in one of the best known wineries in the world? For Michael Mondavi, there certainly seems so. Michael, the eldest son of the famed Robert Mondavi, who passed away in 2008, ran his father's famed wine conglomerate, located both in Oakville for the high end Robert Mondavi label, and in Lodi, producing the lower end, higher volume Woodbridge, for many years. In September 2004 he resigned his position in what had by then become a faltering publicly traded company, and within a few months, in December 2004 Robert Mondavi Winery was sold to Constellation[...]

An old Turkish proverb goes, "it's not who reads a lot that's knowlegable, it's who travels a lot". A suitable point for the middle ages when what you read was mostly religious dogma, but what you saw in journeys, arduous and dangerous as they were, was more valuable. Nowadays the proverb no longer applies, except that is, in the wine world. Have you ever tried to read about some complex wine geography like Bordeaux or Burgundy and gotten totally confused? What about the hundreds and hundreds of wineries of California in what is now a dizzying array of appellations? When[...]

Magazines that take ads from winemakers and have a vested interest in promoting wine consumption generally have a tendency to report bad news in tangential euphemisms or positive spins. I am referring to such publications as Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast or The San Francisco Chronicle wine pages. Thus an ugly reality was presented in starkly blunt terms in a magazine that is not primarily wine oriented. In an article entitled "Left Out in the Cold", San Francisco Magazine (June 2010 edition) proclaimed that the California Syrah market has collapsed. Various makers, sellers and distributors were quoted as complaining that they[...]