No matter how seriously you take wine, the reality is that wine is a pleasurable product. It can be enjoyed on many levels, from wine coolers at the beach to a collection that warrants a mention in your will. But enjoyment is why wine exists. It is a pleasure to drink wine. It is a fascinating hobby … [Read more...]
Riesling – Arguably the Greatest Wine Grape in the World
By Dan Berger Riesling is probably the greatest wine grape in the world. Since such a statement is open to challenge (and surely will be), I used the word “probably” so as not to irritate the misguided people in this world who think red wine commands the top ten spots on the World’s Greatest … [Read more...]
The Bargain Bin
By Dan Berger Thirty years ago, I spied a rack of discounted wines and on it was a bottle of a 1971 Burgundy, a wine from a great vintage then already a decade old. It was on sale for half its original price. I asked the shop owner, a savvy chap, why the wine was discounted. He said he’d … [Read more...]
Running a Scam
By Dan Berger When you sit down to taste a glass of wine, one of the first things you do is to make an instant judgment as to whether you like it. And the more you know about the wine, the easier it is to make that judgment. Say someone hands you a glass of white wine and asks, “What do you … [Read more...]
Judging the Judgings
By Dan Berger Judging wine isn’t a science, though those who publish numbers for wine rankings imply it is equivalent to the grade placed on a math test. I’ve written before of the difficulty of determining how a 2007 Chevalier-Montrachet that is blessed with a score of 93 compares with a 91 … [Read more...]
Proximity Judging
By Dan Berger A close friend had a slightly irritating experience with a wine that had been highly rated by a major wine magazine. The publication gave the wine, a red Rhône, a score of 91, so my friend bought a bottle of it (it was about $12) and said, “I’d have had a hard time getting … [Read more...]
Learning the Techniques of Wine Marketing
The transparent truism about the marketing of wine is that we are all victims of a scheme that predetermines who will buy a certain wine based as much on its price as any other factor. All of this must be adjusted, of course, to factors that are changing all the time -- as will be seen in a few … [Read more...]
Tasting Aberrations
We still excited for each wine release and tasting A decade ago, a wine was released that got me excited. Apparently no one else was as intrigued as was I. I was judging wines blind on a panel with other skilled tasters. I gave one wine the highest possible award. Only one other person of the … [Read more...]
Restaurant Wine Tales
By Dan Berger For decades I have heard restaurant owners say they would like to find some alternative wines for their wine lists. Starting in the early 1990s restaurant owners began to tell me that they wanted to get away from the massive lists of Chardonnays they were carrying and wanted more … [Read more...]
To Wine.net
By Dan Berger Following a blind tasting of several wines, I took two of the best home to see how they would develop. The following day, both had improved markedly. No surprise, of course. The wines being evaluated were deep, rich red wines needing bottle age, so a bit of air naturally … [Read more...]
