Tune in to what top wine bloggers and experts are decanting into cyberspace with this handpicked weekly review that highlights their latest and greatest. You can also dig into specific things these folks and other wine experts are writing about with WNR’s All-In-One Wine Search tool (motto: "avoid info-overload—just gimme the wine").
Italy takes a spotlight in the wine blogosphere, where, to begin with, Wine Spectator’s Joe Cook informs us that the “jury is still out” on the quality of the wines, just as the harvest is getting started. The basic problem is that although the growing season has seen mostly excellent weather, “cool, wet condition” have set in, Cook reports. But, ah! – the Italian optimism knows no clouds: Not only are vintners cheery (as long as the weather clears quickly) but it might even be an “extraordinary vintage if you took care of your vineyard and cut back on grape yields," said Riccardo Cotarella, one of Italy’s leading enologists quoted by Cook.
Meanwhile, at Wine Enthusiast, Monica Larner gushes that the Montalcino-based Castello Banfi wine estate and castle inaugurated a much-anticipated boutique hotel, “bringing it closer to its goal of creating the ultimate Tuscan wine destination.” It’s not just the wine, it’s the view, too: “Because of the castle’s high elevation, most rooms benefit from long views over iconic Tuscan landscapes of rolling hills and cypress trees.” The photo alone is worth a visit to this page.
But other bloggers are always ready to remind us that the culture of wine does not end at the Italian border. Remember California’s Napa Valley?
Jeff Lefevere at Good Grape recounts a day of wine tasting in Napa, where at one site he “could feel my wallet separate from my back pocket.” The stop at Mondavi was “akin to a Catholic going to the Vatican” (“I mean, you kind of have to go, don’t you?”), but pleasant enough. But the tasting at the V. Sattui Winery turned into a love affair.
It’s not just the wine: Napa’s Patz & Hall winery tasting room rocks.At Wine Review Online, Robert Whitley confides that tasting wine on some days just seems “a bit too much like work.” (Poor guy!) But then other days are “pure, unabashed joy.” Figured out the reason? “It’s the wine, silly!” The object of Whitley’s affection is Napa’s Patz & Hall winery, whose wines are “among the best…of their type made in California.” Even the tasting room rocks.For some reason, glasses (the kind you drink out of) also made a mark in the wine sector of cyberspace.
Saint Vini at The Zinquisition opines on the perennial fuss over the wine prices being charged by restaurants, with the added twist of the markup if you buy it by the glass (btg). Vini does the math and parses the rationale. But don’t get him started on corkage fees!
Donald A. Dibbern, Jr., at the Wine Lovers Page, sets his sights on glasses, too. You know you’ve found a wine lover when he says that “the event we all have been waiting for has at last occurred” – and that would be glass maker Riedel’s introduction of its twelfth different Pinot Noir wineglass shape. All kidding aside, an astute review of why wineglasses have different shapes, and why you should care.
And thus ends this week’s virtual tour of the wine blogosphere. I’m going to go look at that castle in Tuscany again.