Daily Wine News: Judgment vs. Taste

Posted by | Posted in Wine News | Posted on 11-02-2021

You don’t have to like Bordeaux, no matter what old white men say, says Alder Yarrow. “Preference is not the same as critical judgment, and more importantly, it is possible to have your preferences and critical judgment diverge. Just ask half of the Napa winemakers who make massive 15.2% Cabernets by day and go home to drink Gevrey-Chambertin and Chinon.”

Kathleen Willcox reports on how small family-owned wineries are adapting to modern markets for Liquor.com. “The ongoing pandemic, and the manner in which it changed the way the entire world recreates, travels, and makes purchases, has accelerated those changes. It took an alarming pattern and cemented it into a (perhaps permanent) economic reality…That bright spot—finding new methods of initiating sales that depend, essentially, on a producer’s relationship with a buyer—is just one of the ways family wineries are learning to survive, and sometimes even grow, in a challenging and ever-shifting marketplace.”

On Tim Atkin’s site, Margaret Rand ponders the terroir of opera and wine. “It is terribly easy to discard aspects of terroir; less easy to know, except with hindsight, which bits we want and which bits we don’t. We don’t want rusticity? Fine. But if you take out all the rusticity, will you end up with sterility? Great operas, and great wines, have to live anew each year: they are not museum pieces. So what we call the signature of a great terroir is nearly always terroir-plus-winemaker. And it is the winemaker, like the opera director, who decides what the terroir is saying.”

In Vinous, Antonio Galloni heads to Santa Barbara and offers notes on the area’s 2019 and 2020 vintages.

In the Drop, Sarah May Grunwald reports on how a new generation of Italian winemakers is discovering the benefits of chestnut wood barrels.

In Wine-Searcher, the CEO of the online wine auction site WineBid looks back on 25 years of changing wine tastes.

On the blog for Tablas Creek, Jason Haas shares the ways in which Covid made the winery a better business.

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