Relative to the rest of the world, the wine industry in the United States is still very young. This is especially true of the wineries of the Northwest. Several of the pioneers of the industry in Washington and Oregon are still active in those industries, or are a mere generation removed from involvement. The origin stories of most wineries and [...]

Wine writing in the traditional media has long been somewhat of a boys club. Although there are a handful of women who have managed to penetrate the Riedel Ceiling, such as Jancis Robinson and Alice Feiring, the overwhelming majority of wine writers in print have been male. Thanks to the new DIY options that have sprung up with the advent [...]

I still remember the first time that I heard Johnny Cash’s original American Recordings album. There is something haunting about the vulnerability of an aged Cash’s gravelly voice singing over a simple acoustic guitar. There is an intense honesty that comes across in the music once you have stripped away all of the excess instrumentation and production that had gone [...]

Although my activity as a blogger has slowed to a trickle here on Vinotology, I still count myself as a part of the blogging community. I keep telling myself, and all of you, that I am going to start blogging regularly again. I suppose that I have, if you consider once or twice a month to be “regular”. Most social [...]

I know that this is probably shocking to you, but the wine industry is not the most agile market for adoption of new technologies. That said, there is a tendency within the industry to latch onto marketing fads with the wild abandon of a rabid honey badger. Although the initial reaction to some of these efforts is to applaud wineries [...]

Wine events come in all shapes and sizes, and last weekend Seattle hosted one of the biggest annual wine and food events in the Northwest, Taste Washington. This was my first time to attend Taste Washington, and I spent the majority of the day Saturday serving guest some of Chef Frank Magana’s mind blowingly delicious goodies. The Chorizo Stuffed Prawns [...]

Sometimes I don’t like myself very much. This feeling can be traced all the way back to my childhood. It’s a mommy issue kind of thing. I know that we all have things about ourselves that we would like to change, but I have really honed my self-loathing to a fine point over the years. I have a whole laundry [...]

Getting older sucks. Of course, it’s not really the actual aging that is a problem; it’s the changes that go along with aging that bother us. We have the great pleasure of watching our bodies slowly deteriorate, despite our best efforts to fend off the visible effects of having outlived our physical peaks. There are some of us who decide that [...]