The holidays are upon us—the most wonderful time of the year for many, the most insane time of the year for those who work in restaurants. During my Beverage Director days I loved being busy and looking at the sales every night, but I would dread counting...

A couple of years ago I was asked by the Guild of Sommeliers to write an article about the wines from Southwest France.  I enthusiastically agreed, but said that I could not write just one article because the region was too vast.  Instead, I decided to break it down into three articles, to be researched in the three regions over three successive summers. The first installment dealt with the wines from Irouléguy, Jurançon…

Headlines about the most recent high profile counterfeit wine scandal read like the chapters of a crime novel: A Vintage Crime; Wine Fraud Case Takes Another Twist; Counterfeiter Sentenced to Ten Years. Rudy Kurniawan, an Indonesian immigrant who at one...

I came to wine from a background as a scientist. I spent six years at university—three each for my undergraduate degree and doctorate—and so I became pretty good at thinking scientifically. Many of you will have come to wine from careers or studies that are similarly quantitative. You can measure things; you can formulate hypotheses; if you study enough you can nail down the answers. Cause and effect. 

And…

Boston. Too old school. Too insular, too cynical. Too small-town to compete with major markets. Too, well, Bostonian.

No one knows the blemishes of our beautiful city more than those of us who have struggled through the ranks in restaurants, retail shops and distribution channels, working with laws and gatekeepers that feel like they were put into place right after Paul Revere ran through the night to Lexington and Concord…

Every couple of years we see a new flood of articles announcing the arrival of women sommeliers. My issue with these well intentioned pieces isn’t the effort to highlight the achievements of 50% of our planet, but that they tend to get some fundamental facts wrong and often fail to give credit to the women who were paving the way twenty years ago. Being a guy in this industry and voicing a critical opinion on the…

Terroir and the Importance of Climate to Winegrape Production

Wine is the result of myriad influences that are often embodied in the concept of terroir, a term which attempts to capture all of the environmental and cultural influences in growing grapes...