Mike Veseth's Blog, page 3

Don Melchor & Chile’s Good Value Curse

Sue and I have been looking for the right excuse to open a bottle of Don Melchor, the famous Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon that was named 2024 Wine of the Year by Wine Spectator magazine. Finally, we decided that the act of pulling the cork was excuse enough, and we enjoyed the wine with a nice steak.

Don Melchor is the flagship winery of Concha y Toro, one of the world’s most respected wine producers. The wine was world class, balanced and elegant, and paired perfectly with a dry-aged steak. I adm...

Wine & the Trump Tariffs: A Cloudy Crystal Ball

I’ve received emails asking me to write about the Trump tariff regime (and other policies) and how they will affect the wine industry. I have resisted so far because there is not enough information on which to base an argument or opinion. There is lots of speculation, but not yet much solid fact.

Beyond Speculation?

“Wine and the Age of Uncertainty” was the title of my remarks at the State of the Industry session at this year’s Unified Wine & Grape Symposium (which I previewed on The Wine Econo...

Crisis and Change: Rethinking California Wine

Elaine Chukan Brown, The Wines of California (The Classic Wine Library, 2025.

California wine has a long history of facing what feel like insurmountable challenges. It also has a long history of people coming together to problem solve, innovate, and succeed once again. Honest examination of pressures on the industry can reveal ways the people of California might plan its future. (p. 303)

Elaine Chukan Brown’s terrific new book has just been released. It is not just a good book but an important o...

Wine Economist Flashback: Stumbling into Sherry in Madrid

Sue and I are traveling in Spain and one of our goals is to learn more about what’s happening in the Sherry industry. It is our first visit to Andalucia, but not our first exposure to the world of Sherry wines. I thought you might be interested in this “Flashback” column from 2017 that reports on our very successful search for Sherry in Madrid. This flasback might especially timely given a recent Financial Times article on “How Sherry Got Chic Again.”

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Can Sherry Be the Next Big Thing?

The Wi...

Wine Books: 20 years of Chateau Feely, 30 Years of Gourmand Book Awards

Today’s column celebrates two anniversaries: 20 years of Chateau Feely and 30 years of the Gourmand  Awards. What connects these two events? Wine books, of course, and the stories they tell us about wine and about life.

Grape Expectations: 20 Years of Chateau Feely

Caro Feely, Grape Expectations: A Family’s Vineyard Adventure in France. (First book in the Vineyard Series of books about Chateau Feely).

This is the 20th anniversary of Chateau Feely, a small organic and biodynamic winery in South W...

Wine Goes to the Circus: Stags’ Leap Winery & Cirque du Soleil


New consumers and new occasions are on every winery’s wish list these days. You can sit around and wait for things to happen or you can go out and try to help people discover wine and find a reason to drink it. You might not think that a circus performance is the obvious occasion for a glass of wine (or that the families that attend such events are obvious potential customers), but old thinking won’t necessarily solve the problem.

That’s how Sue and I ended up at a performance of Cirque du Sol...

Wine Film Review: Eden (and its discontents)

Eden. Christopher McGilvray, director. Isiah Flores, cinematographer. View the trailer here.

Here’s the thing about wine. Geeky people like me spend a lot of time (and money) learning about it, thinking about it, talking about it, and even drinking it. But the point of wine isn’t wine. It is something more.

Sue and I are reminded of this every year when we host a group of friends for Open That Bottle Night. Everyone brings a bottle of wine, a story about the wine, and some food. We celebrate th...

The Three Faces of the American Wine Dilemma

We live in a time when problems we face are complicated but many of the answers proposed to address them are very simple.  I am suspicious of simple answers to complicated questions, both in general (this was the theme of my 2005 book Globaloney) and when it comes to the American wine industry.

Draining America’s Wine Lake

Wine Economist readers already know about the American wine industry’s general over-supply problem.  Despite several short harvests in a row in California, wine inventories re...

The Wine Economist 1000

The Wine Economist first appeared on May 29, 2007, with a report called “Bottling the 2005 at Fielding Hills Winery,” which compared the volunteer bottling line to Adam Smith’s famous pin factory. Incredibly, The Wine Economist is still publishing its weekly newsletter after all these years and last week’s post was the 1000th in the series.

The  Wine Economist has averaged about 1000 words per column or 50,000 words per year, which is roughly equivalent to about two full-length books every three...

American Wine 2025: Field Notes from the Unified Symposium

Sue and I recently attended the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento, California, North America’s largest wine industry gathering. Attendance was about 10,000 for the meetings, seminars, and the massive trade show. The event is simply too big to summarize, so we jotted down field notes instead to give you a sense of the action. Here, in no particular order, are some of our observations.

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Wine industry trends. White is the new red. Stable sales are the new growth. Wine sales are down i...