In the voluminous amount of words that are dedicated to the conversation on wine both in print and on-line there is a tendency to focus on what's new, what's hot, what's cultish, what's fashionable. This makes sense. What's New is...

Following on from the previous post about interesting search terms, I’ve been seeing some other strange/interesting ones appear lately.Some selected odd ones over the past month or so; anthony bourdain gay? - Thanks to Ed saying that this was the most interesting search term that he received in a comment on the previous post, now I’m getting them! CAM FRUIT. COM - Looking at the first...

... associate with would be in jail right about now. Yet, last week I received the first threat of legal ... and desire to publish, nobody wants to open the paper and read about three bad wines - so in general ... good thing about the internet and wine reviews is that reviews will balance themselves out ... than one sample, but indicating that it was only one sample if that is the case) or keep quiet about...

There has been some news recently about two $2AUD ($1.50USD) cleanskin wines being offered by Dan Murphy’s, who are owned by a major supermarket chain here in Australia. I decided to see what a $2 wine tastes like and to put it into a blind test against another wine. My girlfriend poured ... if you don’t want to think about it. I am sure that this is the cleanskin and I’ve had worse wines...

I just finished reading in California Grapevine an address that Dan Berger gave the Wine Press Club of New South Wales. You can also find it online HERE. (ATTN: PDF) In it, he offers selected advice for the wineries and...

Forty years ago this spring, David Lett went against the best advice of his UC Davis professors and put Oregon’s first Pinot Noir plants into the hilly red earth outside Dundee, just southwest of Portland. Vintage 2006 marks the 40th anniversary of the birth of Oregon’s Pinot Noir industry. And yet the occasion passed with relatively little notice as winemakers went about harvesting their grapes...

"Do your wines contain sulfites? My friend is very allergic and she'll go into shock if she drinks wine containing sulfites." That’s enough to scare me silly. All I need is to have a gasping, cyanotic customer on the floor. "Well, uh," I stammer, "then perhaps she'd better not have ...

Wine is such a mysterious beverage. Wine geeks will sniff it, quaff it, swizzle it, and then come up with all these wild descriptors: cassis, meadow, leather, mushroom. Where do all these elusive aromas and flavors come from? Partly from the grape, partly from aging in oak, (partly from our ...

Hearty-healthy phenolics are the most touted benefits of wine, but another study, performed by biochemist Carlos Muller of California State University at Fresno, measured levels of salicylic acid in various California wines. Salicylic acid, which is also the active ingredient of aspirin, is a powerful antioxidant which also lowers cholesterol ...

One of the more frustrating experiences in wine appreciation is the discovery that the wine you've been looking forward to enjoying was the victim of a random drive-by slaying perpetrated by a tainted natural cork. The musty, moldy, mushroomy, chlorine-scented damp-basement and wet-cardboard stench that cork taint imparts, even in ...