In 2008, Cyril Penn, the editor of Wine Business Monthly, wanted to make sense of the avalanche of winery mergers, sales, and acquisitions that had occurred over the past couple of years. He commissioned a two-page chart to run in the magazine that s...

Think of water, and images of vast oceans, white-capped rapids, babbling brooks, and placid lakes come to mind. Water, however, exists beyond these everyday blue bodies, and today many climate scientists are focusing their attention on another catego...

Chartreuse is an ancient, elusive elixir that has been made for centuries by French monks. Throughout its history, it has been a digestif, a popular cocktail ingredient, and the inspiration for naming a color between yellow and green. In recent years...

The story of California wine hasn’t been told in a book in more than a decade. In the meantime, the community of wine has expanded, social media has changed, and consumers now demand more than the Cabernet and Chardonnay that helped make Califo...

Over the past couple of years, Brunello di Montalcino DOCG has undergone a pivotal shift in its vintage evaluation system with the introduction of Brunello FORMA. This new, data-driven approach was designed to provide a more comprehensive assessment ...

Vermouth is an aromatized, fortified wine. The drink is so immersed in cocktail culture that it often flies under the wine-education radar, though it is, indeed, made from a base wine, fortified, infused with botanicals, and sweetened to varying degr...

The learning curve of wine can be steep. Grape varieties? Thousands. Soils? More than your brain can hold. Regions? Buckle up and get your map out. But one mercifully simple part of wine education is yeast. There’s really only one yeast to memo...

I’m delighted to share an extract from my book, Wines of the Loire Valley. It’s been a huge privilege to research and produce a new reference for this significant, but often overlooked, region of France. Writing the book has allowed ...