Almost all of my wine tasting education has been practical. That is to say, what I know about evaluating wine and how I evaluate wine has resulted from tasting wine a lot. Beyond that, my inquiries into the practice of…
Writer and author James Conaway helped me get my first job in the wine industry. It was his 1990 expose of the Napa wine industry, "Napa", that I wrote a review of and put in my portfolio to show potential…
It’s entirely absurd that I spent the past 8 months blissfully unaware of Chris Kassel’s blog, "Intoxicology Report". It is by far the best new wine blog I’ve come across in many, many months. Kassel is a long time wine…
Sometimes, when you open old boxes, you find something pretty remarkable. I had the chance to pull some old boxes that held materials from my first years and days in the wine PR business. One of things I found was…
I think I’d be a pretty good wine reviewer. After 20 years of tasting wine regularly and with a certain cache of knowledge in the subject of wine, and given my propensity to be able to focus intensely on a…
First…All wine bloggers are wine writers, but not all wine writers are wine bloggers. That said… Wine blogging isn’t dying. But it is tired. Enthusiasm for the platform and for the practice is on the wane. The same can be…
One of the defining aspects of on-line wine content today is that it has become increasingly difficult to track what is available on the Internet, whether you are a consumer or a member of the trade. This is as much…
Every now and again I like to take account of what wine books will be coming our way in the next few months. It’s a way of glimpsing what I’ll be thinking about in the near term where wine is…
As a wine publicist, I almost always am dealing in minutia, not Big Picture thinking. It’s the nature of the job. What’s the best way to deliver this message? How to define this niche? What’s the import of this particular…
An article Sunday in the Boston Herald on the demise of Quarterly Review of Wine after 35 years of publishing its thickish, glossy, well-edited magazine brought to light a couple of issues that fascinate me. First, in the article publisher…
Today in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman writes about the era of "average" being over: "Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so…
“We are marrying the authority of print to the authenticity of experience.” This is how Diane Malloy, the new publisher of the venerable Ladies Home Journal, explained to the New York Times that publication’s transformation to a magazine that will…
