I blogged a month ago exactly about the challenges of harvesting during the remnants of a particularly nasty tropical storm. As I wrote then, the rain was great for soon-to-be-harvested vegetables, but not so much for grapes, which will give a far tastier wine if the sugar is allowed to concentrate a little. William Layton [...]
What’s the problem? The issue at hand is that wine consumers in Maryland cannot order a bottle of wine from an out of state retailer and have it shipped to their house. This is because Maryland law dictates that alcohol retailing in Maryland flows through the Three Tier System: producer-distributor-retailer-(you) For more on the three [...]
I posted a short bit on Wells Discount Liquors and, thus, became a wine blogger. Fortune and Glory ensued. At the time, my goal was to cover Maryland and Virginia Wines as they tried to grow from also-rans into respectable wine regions. Since then I have published 217 posts (and at least 400 typos) about [...]
On almost every American wine map, there are four states: California, Oregon, Washington, and New York. There is constant rumbling that Virginia is poised to breakthrough and make it five states on the map, but the rumbling has yet to to produce anything. To see how one would vault into the elite club, it’s best [...]
Gazette.net reports that the 2006 Blank Ankle Crumbling Rock, a Governor’s Cup winner, is selling like hotcakes. “We have probably sold 150 cases. It’s been going like crazy,” O’Herron said recently. Clearly my snarky jabs at the wine prices at Black Ankle aren’t working. Forty dollars a bottle and the wine is flying out the [...]
Amid the news of bank seizures, declining real-estate, and congressional ordered bailouts, fine wine prices are on an absolute tear. Everyone is buying. Asians are buying. Russians are buying. All these new buyers are competing with the old buyers, because while prices are rising the old buyers are still buying. Buy buy buy. Prices of [...]
These days, lots of wine critics claim that they didn’t want to score wines, but their readership couldn’t process their results without numbers and turned into beer-swilling barbarians. The reality is that nobody takes you seriously unless you crown a winner. Remember back in little league when the kids were too young to keep score? [...]
Recently Gary Vaynerchuk tore into some Napa Valley Suits during the annual “Ahead of the Curve” seminar (coverage here and here). Vaynerchuk told the conference attendees that “Your brand equity is not as strong as you think. Just because you’re Napa doesn’t guarantee victory.” Millennial-generation adults who are already having a significant impact on the [...]
I heard about this yesterday but didn’t mention anything because I thought it was April Fools fallout (and I wanted to keep my Chinon story on top). Well, it’s April 4th and if the joke is still going then this is the greatest April Fools joke in history because everyone is reporting on it, not [...]
I recently came across a blog post (actually written in .doc) that derided the pricing of Virginia wines in light of their perceived quality relative to that of the rest of the world. That post was from 2003, so it’s a problem that isn’t new. More recently, fellow bloggers at Wine Compass lamented the pricing [...]
You are currently browsing the archives for the Blowhard predictions category.
