Writer Alex Beggs was sitting at a Manhattan restaurant when she saw six fashionable women walk in. Minutes later, the women’s wine orders had arrived: Provence rosé all around. This got Beggs wondering why rosé was suddenly popular again in New York City. She says, “One day — some time in the late mid-aughts maybe?…
Over the past decade, Bordeaux has seen some of the most extreme ups and downs in the history of wine. Coming off a high note in 2000, when wines received excellent scores and were the most expensive in Bordeaux’s history, critics had high hopes for Bordeaux in the new millennium. However, their hopes were dashed…
For decades, wine negociants have had a nasty reputation in the wine world, yet this reputation is undeserved. Jancis Robinson explains, “The old cliché that merchants, negociants in French, are all baddies and growers are all goodies is now well and truly out of date.” Negociants are merchants who buy grapes, juice, or finished wine from…
Collectors trade mailing list horror stories like baseball cards. A Don Rockwell forum member once signed up for the Cayuse mailing list in 2009, and by 2014, he still hadn’t moved off of the waitlist. When he asked the winery when he could expect to become a mailing list member, he was informed that he…
Rhone wine expert John Livingstone-Learmonth isn’t easy to impress, yet when he talks about Jamet, he gushes, “A lot of people would give their right arm to possess even a fraction of this family’s vineyards.” For decades now, Jamet has produced the Rhone wines with greater complexity and depth of flavor than many other estates…
Quality auction houses take every precaution to stop wine fraud, but sometimes, their efforts aren’t enough. Last year, a popular auction house was accused of trying to sell counterfeit wine to customers, and was stopped when a sharp-eyed expert caught the attempted fraud. Years ago, the auction house had successfully sold an authentic bottle of…
MENTIONED IN THIS POST: Bordeaux Burgundy Tuscany Nephrologist Ken Bleifer started collecting wine 50 years ago, simply because he loved the taste. By the time his collection reached 4,000 bottles, he realized he had more wine than he could possibly drink, and decided to sell a few of them off. He soon discovered that he…
Wine experts Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher never planned on becoming serious collectors — it suddenly happened one day when they realized they owned more bottles than they could possibly drink. However, it isn’t always this easy to start a wine collection. As much as 90 percent of the wine sold in the US is…
Writer John Lenart once visited a wine shop, and overheard a customer telling the shop owner that he would never buy a wine that scored below 90. Lenart says, “Aside from making that person sound like a complete wine snob, it’s also a ridiculous thing to say. I wanted to ask if this person could…
An estimated 36 billion bottles of wine are produced around the world every year. With this much wine on the market, how do you choose just one wine worth collecting? Writer Heather Irwin says that you shouldn’t expect to collect the most prized bottles of wine in the world right away. Most collectors, even serious…
If you’ve ever traveled to another state or another country, you’ll find that the wine prices vary dramatically. Living in a state like Oregon, you’ll be used to paying zero sales tax on wines, but when you take a trip down to California for the weekend, you might find that those same wine bottles cost…
When wine writer Evan Dawson first started his wine collection, he says he was amazed by how many “bad wines” he owned. He would buy bottles of Carneros Pinot Noir or Amarone, and years later, wonder what he had been thinking. “I would like to travel back in time and ask myself what system I…