Mike Veseth's Blog, page 19
March 22, 2022
Wine Book Review: Grassroots Perspectives on Portuguese Wine
Simon J. Woolf and Ryanb Opaz, Foot Trodden, Portugal and the Wines that Time Forgot. Interlink Books, 2021.
Portugal is having a much-deserved moment at present. For a long time Portugal wasn’t really on the radar for most people. The situation was so bad that some folks couldn’t find Portugal on a map — I saw a headline that proclaimed Portugal as a Mediterranean destination! It was enough to make Henry the Navigator cry!
Portugal Discovered
Now Portugal is high on the list of popular destinat...
March 15, 2022
Wine on the Nile: Wine Goes to the Movies (and TV)
One of my pet peeves is wine’s lack of impact in popular culture. Celebrity chefs get lots of traction — even fictional cartoon rodent chefs (have you seen the Disney film Ratatouille?). Celebrity winemakers? Not so much.
Wine shouldn’t try to simply imitate food, of course, Watching Michel Rolland micro-oxygenate a tank of Merlot will never be as much fun as watching Julia Child throw together a pot of Boeuf Bourguignon. If we want to reach potential newbie wine drinkers, I think wine needs to...
March 8, 2022
Wine Book Review: Rethinking Wine Market Perspectives
Giacomo Negro and Michael T Hannan with Susan Olzak, Wine Markets: Genres & Identities. Columbia University Press, 2022.
What would you think if you stumbled upon a tasting note for a familiar wine that was written by someone from a very different culture, using different terms and concepts, and set in a different frame of reference? Think of an extreme version of the Chinese wine tasting notes described in a 2013 Wall Street Journal article.
At first you might just be puzzled and scratch your ...
March 1, 2022
Wine and the British Sunshine Tax
If you stroll around London for a while you are likely to come across a scene like the one shown here. An old building with its windows bricked up. Sometimes it’s one or two windows. Sometimes they are all covered over. No sunlight gets in.
Ain’t No Sunshine …
The reason the owners decided to keep the sun out was the window tax, an attempt by 19th-century government in England and then later in Scotland to tax the rich in a manner less invasive than an income tax.
What could be better than a wi...
February 24, 2022
Lift a Glass to Toast Open That Bottle Night 2022
Wine lovers have a lot to celebrate. The calendar is dotted with days devoted to particular wines. International Malbec Day. International Grenache Day. The list goes on and on. They are all great in that they help us both celebrate wine and remember its incredible diversity.
But the greatest wine holiday of them all IMHO is Open That Bottle Night, which is celebrated on the last Saturday of February each year (that’s February 26 in 2022). The idea, according to John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter, ...
February 22, 2022
Build Wine Back Better: “Got Wine?” meets “License to Steal”
“WineRamp” is an important new initiative to try to overcome obstacles to the continued growth in the U.S. wine market. The idea, in simple terms, is that younger consumers aren’t finding the on-ramp to wine that the baby-boom generation discovered back in the day. What’s the problem? Well, it is complicated, of course, and there are many factors at work here.
Got Your Moo-Stache?
But one issue is simple. There are literally thousands of wine brands on U.S. shelves and each one promotes its own ...
February 15, 2022
Lessons from Catena & the Argentina Wine Miracle
The press release begins this way:
MENDOZA, Argentina – February 8, 2022 – Dr. Nicolás Catena Zapata of Catena Zapata winery received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 22nd Annual Wine Enthusiast Wine Star Awards held last night at the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami. This prestigious industry event recognizes individuals and companies for their exceptional contributions to the success of the wine and beverage alcohol industry.
Dr. Catena’s life in wine is indeed worth celebrating. He was a leading ...
February 8, 2022
Has U.S. Wine Industry Consolidation Gone Too Far?
Is the U.S. wine industry becoming too concentrated, with just a few big firms dominating the marketplace? That, more or less, was one of the questions we were asked at the press conference that followed the annual “State of the Industry” session at last month’s Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento, California. How would you answer this question?
The query was prompted in part by Mario Zepponi’s excellent presentation about merger and acquisition activity in the wine industry in 2021. M...
February 1, 2022
What’s Ahead for the Wine Business? Wine Industry Leadership Conference Next Week
The Wine Industry Leadership Conference, a free group of webinars produced by the Wine Industry Network, is set for next Wednesday (February 9, 2022) at 9 am Pacific time. Follow this link for more information and to register.
The program is divided into three parts that are relevant to just about everyone in the wine industry.
Session 1: Economic Forecast – What to Expect in 2022 will fill the hour between 9 and 10 with critical analysis of U.S. economic conditions from Sonoma State University...
January 25, 2022
Wine Book Review: Three Faces of Malbec
Laura Catena and Alejandro Vigil, Malbec Mon Amour. Catapulta Editores, 2022.
Laura Catena and Alejandro Vigil have written a fascinating new book about their favorite wine grape, Malbec. If you know that they are from Argentina and associated with the famous Catena Zapata winery, this connection will seem natural, since the roots of Malbec run through this territory and, I guess, through the authors, too.
Three is a number that is full of tension because it defies a casual “either/or” classific...
