Forbes’ Tyler Colman set out to find the best wine app that could identify wine bottles in his cellar using only his phone’s camera. After trying a few cellar management apps, he landed on one that looked promising — until he put it to the test. The app claimed it could scan any wine bottle’s…
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…
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…
I grew up in a California winemaking family, and through this network, I got to know dozens of winemakers in Napa Valley and Sonoma. One of these social connections earned me a free weekend stay at a house on a beautiful California vineyard. Without this complex social web, I would have never had the opportunity…
Hannah R. Ruehlman had a problem; she needed to find a bottle of wine from 1952 as an anniversary gift for her husband, but she had no idea where to start. She turned to husband-and-wife wine writing team Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher for help. Fortunately for Ruehlman, John Brecher was in the same…
Wine investor Tom Gearing has seen his fair share of nervous wine collectors trying to get into investment-grade French wine for the first time. Collectors often feel as though they need to spend thousands of dollars on the top wine estates in France in order to get decent profits from their investments, but this isn’t…
The best wine critics in the world act as gatekeepers of the wine market. They have the power to sink a wine with a terrible review, or raise a wine up to legendary status. However, wine critics aren’t always consistent with their ratings; a study in the Journal of Wine Economics found that in blind…
Writer Jonathan Ray jokes that “bachelor wine merchants” make the best godparents; they pick out incredible birth year wines for their godchildren that will last two decades or more in the cellar. Ray explains that he has eight godchildren of his own, and has bought them each a case of wine as gifts when they…
No matter how experienced you are, wine faults can fool you. Just ask wine writer Chris Kissack, who fell victim to buying cooked wine. In his blog, he describes buying three bottles from a well-respected wine retailer. Even though he says he noticed some minor signs of heat damage on the wine’s cork, he didn’t…
Backlash has been brewing over jammy, bold California Cabernet. Critics of wine “Parkerization” (named after wine critic Robert Parker) claim that these big Cabernets are the epitome of what’s wrong with the modern wine market; namely, that subtle flavors are being sacrificed for bold, rich notes that fade quickly. Winemaker Bill Dyer adds, “Colors…
How much would you pay for a bottle of 1995 Latour? If I told you that the bottle hadn’t left the Latour estate since it was bottled nearly two decades ago, would you be willing to pay more for it than a bottle that’s passed through dozens of hands in its lifetime? In 2013, collectors…
When I was living in a tiny two-bedroom apartment after I graduated from college, I had to come up with creative ways to store my wine. I carved out the perfect little space in my walk-in closet (which was easily one of the biggest “rooms” in the unit). I was proud of my miniature wine…