News

News June 6, 2011

Thinking of Opening a Winery in Napa? You Should Probably Read this First…Part 4 of 4

Following on from yesterdays post, the following is part 4 of 4 of a post made by a friend of mine, Lucas Meeker – Assistant Winemaker at Meeker Vineyards in Sonoma. The post originally appeared on professional Q&A website Quora.com. The question Lucas answered was: What are some Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of Owning a Napa Winery? My annotations throughout the article appear in the form of: [Notes like this], and as always I’ve…

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News June 6, 2011

This Week In Wine – P.Diddy Teaches Wine Etiquette, $73k Champagne, VinPass and More!

    VinPass: Wine Lovers Can Now Check In A new social game called VinPass has just recently launched. It’s an application for wine lovers to "share wine reviews, win badges and earn real rewards. VinPass uses the ‘check-in’ paradigm popularized by location-based social network Foursquare and extended into other areas by the likes of GetGlue (entertainment) and Foodspotting (food). In a nutshell, you check-in to tasting a certain type of wine. If you write…

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News June 5, 2011

Thinking of Opening a Winery in Napa? You Should Probably Read this First…Part 3 of 4

Following on from yesterdays post, the following is part 3 of 4 of a post made by a friend of mine, Lucas Meeker – Assistant Winemaker at Meeker Vineyards in Sonoma. The post originally appeared on professional Q&A website Quora.com. The question Lucas answered was: What are some Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of Owning a Napa Winery? My annotations throughout the article appear in the form of: [Notes like this], and as always I’ve…

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News June 4, 2011

Thinking of Opening a Winery in Napa? You Should Probably Read this First…Part 2 of 4

Following on from yesterdays post, the following is part 2 of 4 of a post made by a friend of mine,  Lucas Meeker – Assistant Winemaker at Meeker Vineyards in Sonoma. The post originally appeared on professional Q&A website Quora.com. The question Lucas answered was: What are some Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of Owning a Napa Winery? My annotations throughout the article appear in the form of: [Notes like this], and as always I’ve…

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News June 3, 2011

Thinking of Opening a Winery in Napa? You Should Probably Read this First…

This is a slightly unusual post for me, but I should at least give you a short background on the following posts. This original article appeared on the Quora.com, an extremely useful and fairly new website devoted to questions and answers from people of all backgrounds on a vast array of topics. It’s kind of like Yahoo Answers, except the people answering the questions tend to be much more credible in their knowledge. Make sure…

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News June 3, 2011

Gary Vaynerchuk’s Daily Grape Feature – Azur, Rose Syrah, California 2009

This post is another feature from Gary Vaynerchuk’s Daily Grape wine newsletter. 2009 Azur Rose Syrah, California Varietal: 90% Syrah, 10% Semillon Gary’s explanation of the wine:  With spring in full-effect, it’s getting to be rosé season. Ladies, this will go great with all those outfits. And guys, don’t be afraid of the pink stuff! On a more serious note, there’s so much more out there than just that sweet, White Zin your Grandma used…

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News June 2, 2011

South African Wine Regions of Note

I don’t know about you, but I always seem to have a tendency to forget about South Africa. Not that the wines are bad, but they certainly have their high and low points…<cough>…Pinotage…<cough>…   I’m not just going to pick on Pinotage (a crossing between Pinot Noir and Cinsault), but I think it’s fairly obvious that South Africa had the big plan that it was going to become the grape that was finally going to…

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News, Pairings June 1, 2011

How to Evaluate a Food and Wine Pairing.

I think it should go without saying that everyone has a lifetime worth of experiences and knowledge relating to food tastes and characteristics; but most of us don’t necessarily pair wine with meals on a daily basis. As a result, it could be stated that the general population lacks a decent ability to match appropriate wines with particular foods. Because of this, we generally have a shortage of good advice that people can use in…

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Funny, News May 28, 2011

This Week In Wine – May 28th 2011

  English sparkling wine should be called Champagne, says Camilla English sparkling wine should be called Champagne, according to the Duchess of Cornwall. The quality of English fizz is so good the drink "is champagne" the Duchess declared, echoing what many in the English wine trade believe, but showing scant regard for complex and strict European food labeling laws. The Duchess’s comments came as she and the Prince of Wales toured the Denbies Wine Estate…

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News May 19, 2011

Gary Vaynerchuk and his Daily Grape

I can only guess that the majority of people who navigate toward my humble little website (thanks by the way!) have never heard of Gary Vaynerchuk. Well, for starters that’s him in the picture. Spitting. Let me give you a very quick background on Gary: – Born in Belarus in 1975. – Immigrated to the U.S. in 1978, where he already started showing entrepreneurial tendencies trading baseball cards as a kid . – Gary’s father…

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News May 7, 2011

This Week In Wine – 5/7/11

    Warning: This wine may contain fish bladders Wine lovers could be in for a bizarre shopping experience when a controversial federal law comes into effect in summer 2012. Get ready for label warnings declaring that your favorite beverage contains fish, eggs or milk. As part of new Health Canada food and beverage regulations designed to protect allergy sufferers and people with severe food intolerances, alcohol producers will be required to list an array…

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News, Social Media May 6, 2011

Top 8 Wineries Doing Facebook Right!

It was surprisingly difficult to write this article. This title originally was “Top 10 Wineries Doing Facebook Right!” but I just couldn’t find 10 wineries. A much easier post would have been “Top 200 Wineries Doing Facebook Wrong!” I could name-names, but that wouldn’t be very fair now would it? The thing that makes all of this worse is that the really big ones, supposedly the ones with the big marketing budgets are generally the…

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