Mike Veseth's Blog, page 30
February 19, 2020
Liquid Assets Podcast: Can U.S. Wine Win Back Its Mojo?
[image error]“Can U.S. Wine Win Back Its Mojo?” That’s the title of the lastest Rabobank Liquid Assetspodcast, which I recorded along with Rabobank’s Global Strategist Stephen Rannekleiv and Analyst Bourcard Nesin in Sacramento during the annual Unified Wine & Grape Symposium meetings earlier this month.
The mojo question was at the front of our minds because earlier that day the speakers at the State of the Industry session had painted a complicated picture of American wine’s prospects. There are still...
February 18, 2020
Wine Book Review: Adventures on the China Wine Trail
[image error]Cynthia Howson & Pierre Ly, Adventures on the China Wine Trail: How Farmers, Local Governments, Teachers, and Entrepreneurs Are Rocking the Wine World. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).
I remember my first taste of Chinese wine very well. My university student Brian brought a bottle of 1999 Changyu Cabernet Sauvignon back from his study abroad semester in Beijing. It didn’t really taste much like Cabernet, but it was the smell that really got me. “Ashtray, coffee grounds, urinal crust” was the...
February 12, 2020
Money, Taste & Wine: Best of the Best Wine Writing 1995-2020
[image error]Gourmand International has been spotlighting the best food and wine books and writing for 25 years and for this year’s big fair in Paris they are recognizing what they consider the “best of the best” of the last quarter-century.
[image error]I am happy to announce that my book Money, Taste, and Wine: It’s Complicated! has been shortlisted for the 25th anniversary best wine writing award (it previously won the 2016 best wine writing prize). Here is a quick summary of the book in case you haven’t read it...
February 11, 2020
Wine Book Reviews: Vino, Économie, Le Guerre & Leonardo’s Vines
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Four wine books with intertnational twists or your reading consideration.
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Alessandro Torcoli, In Vino Veritas: Praticamente tutto quello che serve sapere (davvero) sul vino. Longanesi.
Billy Joel tells us that wine is a simple thing. A bottle of white? A bottle of red? Perhaps a bottle of Rosè instead? Alessandro Torcoli wants us to know that wine is actually complicated, but not so complex that we can’t enjoy it. And that’s a good thing.
Torcoli is editor of Civiltà del Bere, a leading...
<<<February 4, 2020
Second Thoughts about the Wine Wizards of Oz
“The Wizards of Oz” (see below) appeared on The Wine Economist a dozen years ago in February 2008. It looked to Australia for insights about what might be ahead for the wine industry. I’d forgotten all about this old column until it started getting “hits” recently, which caused to me give in another look.
The basic idea was that what’s happening in the global wine market sometimes happens in Australia first or most clearly. I think this might have been one inspiration for my book Extreme Wine...
January 28, 2020
Wine Book Review: Back to the Future? Strong, Sweet & Dry
[image error]Becky Sue Epstein, Strong, Sweet & Dry:A guide to Vermouth, Port, Sherry, Madeira and Marsala. Reaktion Books, November 2019.
What do Vermouth, Port, Sherry, Madeira, and Marsala wines have in common? They are all fortified wines (the “strong” part of the book title). You probably have bottles of several if not all of them stashed away somewhere in the back of the wine closet, although you might not have thought about them in a while.
And they are all delicious. Time you brought them out of...
January 21, 2020
It’s Going to be Huge: 2020 Unified Wine & Grape Symposium
The Unified Wine & Grape Symposium is just a few weeks away (February 4-6 in Sacramento) and I am already excited. The Unified is North America’s largest wine industry event with about 14,000 in attendance for the trade show and seminars.
Bursting at the Seams
The 2020 Unified promises to be bigger and maybe even betterthan ever before. The event has been moved out to the Cal Expo fairgrounds for 2020 while the Sacramento Convention Center is expanded and remodeled — the Unified simply...
January 14, 2020
Wine, Adapting to Climate Change, & the Peter Parker Principle
[image error]The Red Mountain AVA is Washington’s smallest, warmest, and maybe its most distinctive wine-growing region. The warm part has been advantage for most of Red Mountain’s history. But not any more, according to Gaye McNutt and Benjamin Smith, owners of Cadence Winery and the Cara Mia Vineyard.
Too Darn Hot
Climate change has had a variety of effects that condition Smith’s ability to make the elegant wines he prefers. Earlier harvest, potentially higher alcohol levels, sunburned fruit, tough...
January 7, 2020
Wine and the Dry January Syndrome
It is easy to dismiss Dry January (going alcohol-free for the first month of the year) along with Veganuary as typical well-intended New Year resolutions on lists that might also include pledges to quit smoking, keep a daily diary, make better use of that gym membership, and spend less time fiddling with your phone.
Resolutions are an optimistic impulse. They signal that we think we still have the ability to improve, which is important. There is also an element of penance in some...
December 17, 2019
2019 Wine Economist Top Ten
[image error]This is the time of the year to look back on 2019 and ahead to 2020. Here at Wine Economist world headquarters our contribution to the first part of this exercise involves probing the data provided by WordPress, our internet host, and seeing which weekly columns got the most attention. It’s one way to gauge what’s on readers’ minds.
The most-viewed column by far this year wasOutlaw Wine? 19 Crimes Succeeds by BreakingAll the Wine Marketing Rules, which first appeared in 2018. 19 Crimes is a...
