Every couple of years we see a new flood of articles announcing the arrival of women sommeliers. My issue with these well intentioned pieces isn’t the effort to highlight the achievements of 50% of our planet, but that they tend to get some fundamental facts wrong and often fail to give credit to the women who were paving the way twenty years ago. Being a guy in this industry and voicing a critical opinion on the…

Terroir and the Importance of Climate to Winegrape Production

Wine is the result of myriad influences that are often embodied in the concept of terroir, a term which attempts to capture all of the environmental and cultural influences in growing grapes...

Pisco. Two countries lay claim to it. One claims exclusive rights to the name. But as that country’s biggest competitor is also its biggest customer, everything gets a little more complicated...

I moved to Santiago, Chile in early 2015 and got curious...

I’ve been told that life is about the journey, not the destination, and I try to remember this when I’m up at 6:00 a.m. for a tasting group, or at my desk at midnight after work writing an essay about modern viticultural practices in New Zealand. When...

An in-depth report by Daniel Bjugstad of Pizzeria Locale in Boulder, CO.

Friuli Venezia Giulia, the border region between Italy’s Veneto and the neighboring countries of Slovenia and Austria, has been divided amongst empires for nearly two thousand years. The Romans, Huns, Goths, Lombards, Venetians, French, Austrians, Italians and Yugoslavs have all laid claim to the region at some point in history, and each culture…

For sure, gin is not among the world’s oldest spirits. Indeed, scarcely 300 years have passed since the Protestant William of Orange took the throne of England, Ireland and Scotland and called upon local compounders to provide an alternative to the imported...

Sunshine, amazing beaches, and nightclubs. That’s all anyone used to talk about when the word “Miami” was mentioned. And yes, those three things still (appropriately) draw droves of people to the southern tip of Florida… but today, you’re just as likely to hear people respond with “cocktails, cuisine and culture” as reasons for checking out our Magic City.

As a matter of fact…

Harvest truly is a magical time. It’s the culmination of a year in the vineyard. The world recedes to the end of a long tunnel, as all daily obligations are temporarily relieved, allowing pure, crystalline focus on the task at hand. This is true in all forms of agriculture, but particularly so in wine. For us, harvest is both the completion of our farming year and the beginning of our winemaking cycle, and it provides…

The purpose of each of the charts below is to link the chemical causes of distinctive wine aromas to the potential descriptions we can use to describe these elements. Each class of aromatic compound is explained in more detail in our Science of Tasting Expanded Guide.

Special thanks to Madeline Puckette from Winefolly.com for working with us on these graphics.

Fruit, flower, and herb:

• Many fruity aromas and lightly…