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New York Riesling Diary: Day 7 – A Tale of Two Wine Cities
Everyone has their blind spots, including me, and some of them are the product of the town you live in, as something that happened yesterday afternoon here in NYWC (New York Wine City) reminded me. It wasn’t the first time … Continue reading
New York Riesling Diary: Day 3 – NYWC is the Place, #NOWIS the Time
The story of wine is one of the oldest, but there’s always a new way it can be told! All the many projects I am involved with revolve around storytelling and recently (thanks Robert McKee for your wonderful book ‘Story’) … Continue reading
Ontario Riesling Diary: Day 4 – The “Others” of Ontario
If you are on my wavelength, then you’re always interested in the things that don’t fit in, that is don’t fit into the mainstream, the pattern of convention, the box. Sometimes this is linked with failure, more commonly to modest … Continue reading
Ontario Riesling Diary: Day 3 – Let me be Franc with You
As regular visitors are aware, this blog is devoted primarily to the wines of the Riesling grape, just like my book BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH (pub. Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2014), but I occasionally throw a sidelong glance in … Continue reading
Ontario Riesling Diary: Day 2 – Canadian Inspiration (with Thanks to Steve Driscoll & Ian Brown)
Every time I arrive here I have the same feeling of pleasant disorientation, because Toronto is so obviously one of the great cities of the North American continent, yet this is also most definitely not America What makes it different … Continue reading
New York Riesling Diary: Day 2 – Where the Next Story is to be Found (Welcome to the Corner of West 16th and 6th Ave)
I often ask myself where the next story is to be found, particularly when I’ve been in one place for a long time and familiarity has made me contemptuous of my surroundings, so that I have ceased to take them … Continue reading
Berlin Riesling Diary: Day 8 – Very Long-Term Planning
Most of my work is horribly short-term stuff. I taste a wine/various wines in order to write about it/them here or in my column in the Sunday edition of the FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG (German language) on the same day, or … Continue reading
Berlin Riesling Diary: Day 6 – $196,000 for a Bottle of Smith-Madrone Riesling from California
Pictured above are Stuart (left) and Charles Smith (right) of the Smith-Madrone winery on Spring Mountain in Napa Valley, California. They’ve got good reason to look happy, because a bottle of their dry 1997 Riesling just sold at auction for … Continue reading
Berlin Riesling Diary: Day 4 – Can You See the Real Me?
Can you see the real me? Can you? I first heard The Who’s Quadrophenia album in November 1976 just over three years after it was released, and that line from the song The Real Me instantly etched itself into my … Continue reading
On the Riesling Road: Day 3 – 2014 in Germany is Up in the Heavens & Down to Zero
The Mainzer Weinbörse, the annual major presentation of the new vintage by the German VDP producers association is just about to end after two grueling days. They weren’t grueling only because of the sheer number of wines on show (more … Continue reading