Earlier this year, thousands of customers sued California wine retailer Premier Cru for allegedly running a Ponzi scheme. According to these collectors, Premier Cru sold them more than $60 million in French wine futures, but failed to deliver the bottles as promised. Lawyer Thomas Boothe says he lost $161,000 in investments on French wine futures,…
A Wine Spectator reader named Joe M. wrote in to wine expert Dr. Vinifera with a conundrum: he had a bottle of 1889 Rare Malmsey, but he wasn’t sure whether he should drink it, or keep it as a trophy bottle. Since the reader had no plans on selling the bottle, Dr. Vinny told him,…
What if you bought tens of thousands of dollars worth of wine at an auction, only to discover that a significant number of the bottles were fake? This is exactly what happened to one wine collector who bought dozens of bottles of decades-old Burgundy. The collector was curious whether all of the wines in the…
Wine collector Penelope Wise says she first started buying Bordeaux and Burgundy out of bond because she loved seeing the wine stacked inside her home cellar. When she started traveling more, she wasn’t around to keep an eye on her home cellar as often, so she started buying wine under bond through a London merchant,…
Did you know that only 10 countries are responsible for making 80 percent of the world’s wine supply? That’s because grapes are a fickle fruit; to grow them, you need a climate with relatively little rain, the ideal amount of sunlight, and the perfect balance of fast-draining compounds in the soil. Knowing how difficult it…
Painting your wine cellar is deceptively easy, and can quickly turn into a nightmare. I once knew a wine fanatic who wanted to transform the extra basement space in her house into a wine bar. She started off strong, replacing the carpet with tile, buying a humidifier, and installing wine racks on the walls. At…
In the film Sideways, a character muses, “You know, the day you open a ‘61 Cheval Blanc…that’s the special occasion.” The main character in the film is obsessed with 1961 Cheval Blanc, and for good reason; in its best vintages, it’s one of the finest wines in the world. But the 2005 Cheval Blanc received…
The biggest mistake I ever made as a young, inexperienced wine drinker was when I chose to keep a bottle of Italian Dolcetto given to me on my 21st birthday by a cousin studying in Italy over the summer. I had no idea at the time that it wasn’t a wine worth cellaring, so I…
When you think of celebrating the holidays, you probably imagine crystal flutes of fine Champagne, but writer Eva Weirich dreams of Cremant de Bourgogne. Her family originally bought this famous sparkling Burgundy to cook with, and over time they’ve realized they enjoy drinking Cremant more than Champagne, especially during the holidays. She says Cremant is…
Wine enthusiast Tim Atkin once opened a Chenin Blanc that was bottled in 1921, and to his surprise, the wine was supremely sweet, with a fresh, crisp profile that could compete with any young wine on the market today. If Chenin Blanc can age so well for more than 50 years, why isn’t it on…
In 2006, Master of Wine Susan McCraith decided to put the en primeur system to the test to find out whether collectors should invest in wine before it’s been bottled. She pre-ordered six magnums of Feytit Clinet and 12 magnums of Chateau Jonqueyres while they were still in the barrel, spending about $383 on the…
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?…
