Another Wine Blog

Category: Rant

  • The effect of price on wine reviews

  • Why I don’t like anything

  • Great Finds in Grocery Store Wine

    Amazing. You can put your name on a list for wine or beer that sells out in 10 minutes. Now that’s customer service. The kind you might expect at a small store in the older neighborhoods of a big city or a small town. Or if you’re an important customer at the big wine retailer. Not a huge mega-store that sits along the freeway in the suburbs. It’s the kind of service that builds clientele, not just customers.

  • Restaurant Common Sense from the NYT

    Upon reading a New York Times post that advised restaurant servers, I wanted to stand up and cheer at what seemed to border on ridiculous. But the fact that the advice had to be posted doesn’t just sound ridiculous, it is ridiculous. Because the advice is something a server should have learned from his mother and father, not the person training him to work in a restaurant.

  • 2006 Cornerstone Cellars Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon

    When a bottle of something like the wine being reviewed today comes in, I know that if I let it age for a bit it will become everything the wine maker, and wine drinkers for that matter, hope it will become. By opening it while it is so young, not only am I not tasting it when it has reached it’s full potential, I am ensuring that one of a finite number of bottles of something special will never be tasted.

  • Sebastiani Vineyards & Winery added to Boycott

    I first heard about Foley from “twitter.” In the course of talking wine with winebloggers and other ne’er do wells, I met a blogger by the name of WineDog who “tweeted” something about a boycott of Foley wines. WineDog’s blog, Pink Bunny Ears, has a number of posts about Foley. The latest 2-spread Foley feature in Wine Spectator set the WineDog off.

  • Tragedy as Marketing

  • Labor Day and the Work of the Vineyard

    To depart from the multiple posts you’ll find on which wines to pair with your Labor Day celebration (Burgers and Syrah, chicken and Chardonnay, grilled seafood and Torrontés, and if you haven’t been hit by the recession: steak and Cabernet Sauvignon or grilled lamb and Bordeaux) I thought we’d talk about “the true meaning of Labor Day.”

  • The Local Food Movement

  • Wine Competitions: It Won a Medal – It Must be Good!

    A research study published in a recent issue of the Journal of Wine Economics found an interesting aspect of wine competitions that might be disturbing to our the aforementioned winemaker as well as to consumers who choose their purchases based on medals and ribbons: A gold medal in one competition does not mean a gold medal in another. In fact is may not even mean it’s good!