Taking the world one wine at a time.
I have to admit that I didn’t even want to write this post, but it seems to keep getting blasted at me from every angle on the Interweb (I guess the PR company must has really been hammering-out the samples on this one!), so find myself in the position of being forced to share my two cents… Volere (pictured below) is a boxed-wine like any other box wine, except for the minor detail that the…
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An interesting thing happened yesterday! The Mrs. was scrolling through the popular page on Pinterest (as she does on a weekly basis), and she saw an image she recognized. Randomly enough, it was my wine bottle Christmas lights! This particular photo was from a post I did back in December of 2010, way before I even started using Pinterest, and therefore wasn’t one of the items I had pinned. In fact, if you perform a…
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Dom Perignon has filed a false-advertising lawsuit suit, seeking to end a competitor’s claim that its Champagne is: “The No. 1 Rated Champagne in the World.”Moët Hennessy USA (the makers of Dom) say Armand de Brignac “is intentionally misleading consumers” about the quality of its bubbly, a champagne highly favored by hip-hop star Jay-Z, and also allegedly helped spark the notorious SoHo club brawl between Chris Brown and Drake earlier this year. The lawsuit by…
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This is an issue I’ve been contemplating writing about for a few years now, but it appears Dan Berger beat me to the punch! He writes: I’ve heard winemakers and wine geeks say: “A pinot noir isn’t wine until it’s five years old. Before then it’s like robbing the cradle.” Tasting many of the 2010 pinots recently, that particular phrase came to mind! Many are tasty (partially a result of the cool temperatures throughout California…
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#6 Mobile sites load faster. How many times have you gone to a website, only for it to take a little too long to load, so you shouted “Screw this!” and ended up clicking somewhere else? I do it daily. There is no reason to believe that businesses around the world don’t lose customers due to the load time of their website. Amazon.com are the perfect example, who after a lot of research, found that…
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It’s only in the past few months that I’ve started to take mobile websites seriously. The first time I realized the full potential of a “mobile-optimized website” was last year at the Wine Bloggers Conference in Virginia. They had their whole website optimized for mobile, something which I personally found particularly useful when is came time to check the seminar and guest speaker schedule. I just remember thinking: “Wow! This is so much easier to…
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A Government-funded report in Australia has found that the price of wine needs to be raised to combat growing levels of alcoholism, after it was found that wine can be purchased for as little 30 Australia cents a drink (about the same in US$), making it cheaper than water. The report comes in the midst of growing public concerns about Australia’s binge-drinking culture. The Australian National Preventive Health Agency has been asked by the Government…
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The news coming out of China is that the Shanghai police have arrested a wine counterfeiting gang, seizing thousands of bottles of “fake Bordeaux” in the process. The ringleader had been running the scam since 2010, using Chinese wine whilst the labeling process was being completed. Allegedly, the bottles were not direct copies but so-called “funny” bottles which use the names of famous first growth estates; however, the bottles still infringe on trademark laws. The…
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Every winery faces the problem that at one time or another: a quantity of their wine has not sold. Most often, there is nothing wrong with the wine — it merely hasn’t sold in a defined period of time. At some point the winery or wholesaler has to decide how to make this excess juice “vanish.” But making wine disappear is more complicated than it may appear! Most wineries can’t simply afford to deeply discount…
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I continue to receive numerous questions from people looking for advice on building a wine cellar, and whilst I can usually help to answer most peoples’ queries, I prefer to occasionally defer to the superior knowledge of my good friend Curtis Dahl, co-owner of Joseph & Curtis. Curtis is an expert in all matters wine cellar related, since his company builds some of the finest wine cellars known to humankind! I accumulated a few wine…
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For those of you who aren’t “down with the kids,” a meme (according to Wikipedia) is: “an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” In a nutshell, a meme [pronounced “meem”] is most commonly seen on social networks in the form of a photo with a funny tagline attached (as shown to the left). Paul Mabray (of Vintank fame) posted an article a few days ago which really struck…
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An investigation in Italy has been launched, after some idiot thought that putting an image of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler on their wines was a good marketing idea. One of the bottles features “the man with the silly mustache” performing the Nazi salute, another alongside the words Mein Kampf (meaning “my struggle” in German), and a third depicting Hitler posing with the late Pope John Paul II, which has been manipulated (obviously!). The Italian authorities…
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