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Incumbent in doing what we do is trying to educate and explain why we have made a particular recommendation. There are a lot of factors in buying anything from cars to homes to, well, bottles of wine. Perspective is one of them. Maybe we think too much about this stuff. But we speak to a

We’re crazy for Carmenere! And I gotta say, it certainly took Chile long enough to figure out their ‘home team’ grape. I mean, honestly, kind of tough to do the whole ’we have Carmenere’ thing and then not really make a good one for, like, a decade.

No one was more surprised than we were when we were offered the opportunity to sell the Champagne de Barons de Rothschild Brut at roughly half price a short while back. You know the story, Baron Benjamin de Rothschild of Château Clarke, Baron Eric de Rothschild of Château Lafite Rothschild, and the late Baroness Philippine de Rothschild, along with

Never in the past two decades of the Wine Advocate has there been a 98-100 point score on a wine that was priced under $100 dollars. As you may know, the 2009 and 2010 Pontet-Canet both received 100 points and are now selling for $250 dollars! In fact, as crazy as it may sound, I save ALL my

This is one of those stories that kind of defies the odds. The tale itself is simple enough as told by the ‘creators’. Four friends from New York decided to descend upon the Napa Valley. Not unlike most visitors from the outside, they toured and tasted over the course of four days. On the fifth day they had decided

“Vietti's 2016 Barolos are stratospheric. I have been following the wines for several years, first as separate lots, then as young wines in barrel. In all of those tastings, the wines were never anything less than mesmerizingly beautiful and full of potential. Now that they are in bottle, that potential has been realized. These are, quite simply, the most monumental

Sometimes wine labels come as a result of a lifelong plan, and sometimes they just happen spur-of-the-moment. In this case it was the latter. The names on the label are highly respected in their fields. The ‘Newton’ is Jeff Newton, a pioneering vineyardist in the Central Coast. His firm, Coastal Vineyard Care is considered a top

Sometimes you travel a long road to end up where you are. That is certainly true of Elliot Dolin. Born in New York raised in northern New Jersey, like so many kids of the 1960s, he picked up an instrument (bass guitar) and got involved with a fledgling local band. Only in Elliot’s case, it went a little further. He

We interrupt a regularly scheduled offering for what one might consider an upgrade. What are we talking about? Well, we had a perfectly delicious piece in the email queue on the Bodegas Muriel Rioja Reserva 2015. But as we approached its slotted time, the importer dropped something on us perhaps even more compelling, a crazy price reduction on a 14-year-old

The press has pretty much said all that needs to be said to sell Mike and Kendall Officer’s Carlisle Winery over the last few years. Virtually every creditable source who writes about California wine has pretty much heaped on the (justified) praise over the years, and he doesn’t have to worry a lot about selling his wines. Fans of