Mike Veseth's Blog, page 5

Wine Book Review: Breaking Down the Barriers to Understanding Wine

Pascaline Lepeltier, One Thousand Vines: A New Way to Understand Wine (Mitchel Beazley, 2024). Beautifully illustrated by Loan Nguyen Thanh Lan. First published in France in 2022 as Mille Vignes (Hachette Livre).

There are different ways to taste wine depending upon your purpose. There is tasting simply to enjoy the wine, which is different from tasting it for critical review, which is different from technical tasting in search of faults to be corrected.

In the same way, there are different ways...

Strength in Numbers: VITÆVINO and Wine’s Global Battle for Hearts & Minds

There is a lot of work to do to restore wine to the place (in the market, in society) that many of us believe it deserves. Here in America, for example, we have recently concluded the successful launch of Come Over October, a program that seeks to replace the image of wine as dangerous alcohol with the idea of wine as an integral part of healthy and satisfying lifestyles.

What I liked best about Come Over October 2024 was that it provided a broad umbrella that wineries and wine regions big and s...

Wine & Value: Push, Pull, Squeeze

A cynic, according to Oscar Wilde, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. For some reason, this characterization is often associated with “dismal science” economists like me. Today’s Wine Economist column hopes to make an exception to Wilde’s rule by focusing on wine’s value problem and how understanding it can help explain recent market trends.

Price versus Value

Inflation is on everyone’s mind these days (both as an election issue and in more general terms), so it is not surpr...

Global Market Trends: Is White Wine the New Red?

The global wine market is in flux these days and much of the attention is focused on falling consumption in the post-pandemic era. Global wine consumption actually peaked a few years ago, as the graph above shows, but the trend was disguised for a while by Covid pantry-stocking and other factors.

The falling sales volume is a stark fact that concentrates the mind, but it isn’t the only wine market change to consider. The strong trend of premiumization seems to have lost momentum, too, which may ...

The Curse of Corporate Wine-Think Déjà Vu?

The global wine industry continues to adjust to the “new normal” market environment, with recent news stories focusing on strategies to support demand (Come Over October), grubbing-up programs to reduce grape supply, and restructuring wine winemaking businesses (Vintage Wine Estates bankruptcy, Duckhorn Vineyards acquisition, etc.) after a surge of consolidation fueled by cheap money came to a sudden end.

The restructuring has sometimes returned wineries to the people and families that founded t...

Alcohol and the Idea of Wine

A brief rumination inspired by the Come Over October movement.

I was very fortunate to be appointed to an endowed university chair about 20 years ago, which afforded me great freedom in what I could teach, so long as the classes contributed to the college education goals. My first new class was called “The Idea of Wine” and it quickly became the school’s most popular course, with a waiting list longer than the class list itself, even though the students knew it wasn’t a wine-tasting course and c...

Is October the Month You Finally Try Non-Alcoholic Wine?

Is October 2024 the month you finally try non-alcoholic (NA) wine? Maybe you’ve never sampled NA wine before or perhaps you have and were disappointed. In either case, this might be a good time to see what’s going on.

The Case for NA Wine

The NA wine market in the U.S. is growing, which is worth noting since the overall wine market continues to struggle. NA wine sales have grown by more than 25 percent over the last year, albeit from a relatively small base.  On an anecdotal level, we have watch...

Bordeaux Bloodbath? Grubbing Up Deja Vu

You’ve probably seen the news from Europe. The headline on Politico read, “Bordeaux bloodbath! France pays winemakers to dig up vines.”  The French government has allocated €120  million to subsidize the removal of as many as 30,000 hectares of grape vines in the Bordeaux region due to unfavorable market conditions, according to EuroNews. That’s about €4,000 per hectare. The Bordeaux program is part of a bigger plan to take as many as 100,000 hectares (out of a total of 800,000) out of productio...

Wine Film Review: SOMM Cup of Salvation

SOMM Cup of Salvation is a new release from the talented team at SOMM Films who have already given us SOMM, SOMM: Into the Bottle, and SOMM III. Their wine-film catalog now also includes a streaming channel called SOMM TV. If wine is your passion and video is your medium, you can have it all pretty much 24/7.

SOMM Cup of Salvation is now available via Apple, Amazon, and SOMM TV streaming platforms and is scheduled for limited theatrical release very soon. Here is a link to the new film’s offici...

Second Thoughts on Pinot Grigio?

Sue and I find that we are having second thoughts about Pinot Grigio. And that’s a good thing.

I am not quite sure where and when it began, but we must have had a series of disappointing Pinot Grigio (PG) experiences. Maybe we were at too many receptions where PG was offered as the white wine alternative to Chardonnay. The wines seemed designed to avoid offending anyone, with no distinctive characteristic to raise eyebrows or draw attention and no rough edges either.

Pinot Grigio became a reliab...