How sommeliers can use social media to build their influence online

Working at a place like NIKE isn’t much different than going to school and getting a degree in branding. During eight years working there, I had the opportunity to look under the hood and learn how how a brand works from the inside out.

After leaving NIKE in 2003, I moved to Colorado and got a job with Charmer-Sunbelt despite having zero sales experience…

The first part of this article outlined some of the possible interactions between vines and vineyard soils. It indicated that the latter consist of a physical framework (with more or less pore space and organic matter) that is of geological origin. It also illustrated how geology figures prominently in the wine world. Whether or not it is justified, it is almost as though writers like to mention mineral and rock names…

Vineyard geology – the rocks and soils in which the grapevines are rooted – pervades the world of wine. To illustrate the point, the picture below is a collage of wine labels – all of which bear geological terms. The back-labels on wine bottles also may mention geology, as in the following extracts: “our wine originates from limestone soils”; “the chateau is on sandy limestone from the Cretaceous period”; …

Wine is definitely a subject to fashion sense, too. Alsace is reminiscent of a 1970s lampshade you had forgotten for years in the attic but now you bring it up again with enthusiasm and dust it off.  When you start to grapple with Alsace, maybe you are like me, first consulting one of the hundreds of wine books that all of us have collected over the years working in the wine business. But the information on Alsace is quite…

British Columbia (BC) is a small but rapidly evolving wine region in western Canada. Despite grapes being planted and wine made for decades, the modern industry only really got underway with the signing of NAFTA between Canada and the United States and the subsequent planting of quality vinifera varieties from 1990 onwards.

There are five official wine regions within BC, known as Designated Viticultural Areas (DVAs),…

What is a clone? With regard to wine, that is. Are vine clones akin to Dolly the Sheep? Frightening! Yet, in the New World, and particularly in the United States, we obsess over clones, especially with regard to two of the world’s most coveted vitis vinifera grape varieties: Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

 How peculiar.

 (Oh, and don’t worry. Dolly and 777 aren’t exactly the same. After all, Dolly required three mothers…

“I never lift to my lips a glass of this noble wine without seeing faces that are gone, and hearing the voices and the laughter and the jests that are no more.”
-Silas Weir Mitchell, A Madeira Party (1895)

Great Madeira is a bulwark against corrosion and timeless amid our half-lives of gentle decay.  It is inscrutable: to reduce it to tasting notes and the crude ephemera of snapshot opinions or scores seems…

The second of my Loire four-part series concentrates on eastern Touraine, which I have  extended westwards to take in Touraine Azay-le-Rideau and northward to the valley of Le Loir. 

If your image of the Loire is a series of honey-coloured châteaux, then you will be thinking of this section of the valley, the garden of France. Thinking of châteaux like the lovely Azay-le-Rideau and Chenonceau or the grandiose pile that…