Champagne has been hailed as the king of wine for centuries, but over the past 10 years, it is slowly being replaced in popularity by sparkling wine from other regions. Sparkling wine sales in other countries have increased by 40 percent, selling about 2.3 billion bottles globally every year, compared to Champagne’s 3 million…
In 1988, billionaire Bill Koch bought the wine of a lifetime: four pristine 1784 Lafite bottles owned by Thomas Jefferson himself. Koch paid wine collector Hardy Rodenstock nearly $500,000 for the privilege of owning a piece of wine history. In 2005, Koch submitted his bottles to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, but soon discovered…
With wine fraud, it’s difficult to know how widespread the problem is until major collectors like Bill Koch become its victims. The wine industry brings in about $300 billion per year in revenue, but experts believe that hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits are made exclusively on fake or mislabeled wine. A recent study…
Perhaps no state in the US has surpassed expectations in 2015 more than Oregon. International Oregon wine sales have increased by a whopping 50 percent over the past year, which is the most a single state in the US has increased in more than 10 years. A renewed culture of fine wine in the…
The age of the truly free New York sommelier might be over. The New York State Liquor Authority recently announced that it will change the state’s beverage laws, making it impossible for restaurants to craft wine lists based around wines from private collections. In other words, New York restaurants will only be able to…
Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “I think it is a great error to consider a heavy tax on wines as a tax on luxury. On the contrary, it is a tax on the health of our citizens.” At the time this quote was written, Jefferson was in an intense fight against British taxation in the United…
Some collectors can store their wine in a cool, dark home cellar, but most collectors are better off investing in a professional cellar service to avoid bottle spoilage. Most wine experts agree that storing a wine between 52 and 55 degrees is the only safe temperature range, depending on the varietal. Yet what many experts…
When today’s sommeliers taste wines, they can often immediately pick out the unique flavors and bouquets associated with bottles from Champagne and Bordeaux. That’s partly because, in the late 1800s, French land became cheap and plentiful, allowing winemakers to purchase entire regions of their own, and to grow the grapes to the same high standards.…
Winemaker Kirk Grace has said that a vine’s age often has less to do with the resulting wine’s flavor than the cultivation of the vine itself.1 He believes that winemakers who allow their vines to grow thick canopies of leaves will be disappointed by the results, and that vines with too few leaves have a…
While many serious wine collectors focus on vintages from years when the growing conditions were ideal, for collectors who look at wine as an investment, this may not be the best approach. Off-vintages cost less up front than premium vintages, and also appreciate at a rapid rate. For example, 2008 Bordeaux vintages cost, on average,…
More than 20 years ago, serious wine collectors never spoke about New Zealand wines. Despite an ideal climate and rocky terrain, the country’s producers only began cultivating grapevines in earnest in the late 1980s. Today, wine is New Zealand’s largest export, earning more than $1.3 billion annually. The popularity of New Zealand wines has…
In my experience tasting Chablis wines, one tasting note consistently shines through: flint. The limestone-rich soil in this terroir is sprinkled with fossilized oyster shells that allegedly add minerality to its flavors. While scientists have found that mineral flavors certainly exist in wines, they are still unsure why this minerality is present. In multiple studies,…