“As a group, Sonoma cabernets tend to be overlooked—an indignity, and it needs to go,” wrote the wine columnist Frank Prial in a 2000 New York Times article. I could not agree more. Cabernet Sauvignon is rarely an underdog. After al...

Though Spain is one of the largest wine producers in the world, industry-wide acceptance of its fine wines has taken an exceedingly long time to establish. It was just 20 years ago that “big” had grown in dominance to be the defining styl...

Food and wine connoisseurs are a relatively new breed, but they were many decades in the making. The first shoots emerged in the early 1800s with the dawn of modern food and wine books, which provided readers with the knowledge and information they n...

Wine lovers often marvel at the tremendous versatility of Chardonnay. Ever the chameleon, Chardonnay gives us such disparate entities as Montrachet and Champagne; steely Chablis and buttery California examples; hordes of supermarket bottlings and a h...

“Imagine Musigny like a big lake. It’s a large, luminous, and deep lake. A lake that includes Amoureuses, by the way, that includes also most of the premiers crus, but that doesn’t include Bonnes Mares. Bonnes Mares is at the edge o...

On the surface, Spain seems relatively straightforward as compared to the other top producers of wine worldwide. It has just 97 DOP-level regions—nothing like the nearly 400 appellations of France. Unlike Italy, which claims as many as 2,000 na...

Chianti Classico is the first wine I truly loved. In the summer before my junior year of college, I spent two months studying opera in Arezzo, just east of the appellation’s edge. On that trip, I visited my very first winery, San Felice, where ...

Where do wine regions come from? The question might seem overly simplistic, yet every region has an origin story. While the Old World has several orders of monks—or perhaps Roman soldiers, or maybe Phoenician traders—to thank for the prol...