Drinking without Dogma – Writing without Wonder‽

𝅘𝅥𝅰  Don't bother they're here 𝅘𝅥𝅰 

When I look at the “inside baseball” world of wine writing lately, I want to puke. It is as if this little manufactured bubble, which displays little if anything of a natural reality, exists for the simple reason that folks need something to hang onto in regard to the way they identify themselves in the world. Apart from the artifice, the performativity, the virtuousness and the constant scuffling for the top rung, where are the stories? What happened to the story tellers?

Choosing Your Hill - Bric by Bric

So much of what we’re enveloped in lately seems to be a battle over where to plant one’s flag. There is such an overabundance of information pulling us one way or another. I’m not just talking about the wine world, which has it share of battles, but the overall sphere of experience and existence. It just feels like everyone is itching for a fight. Which hill are you willing to die on?

What the Next Ten Years Actually Held

redoing a 2025 blog post over a 2016 set of guesses about Italian wine in America 

Ten years ago this past January I sat down and made a list of guesses about where Italian wine in America was going. I hedged at the top, the way one might:

Looking back is so much easier than this. But the past is dust. So where are we going? All I have are some educated guesses. Maybe not predictions, but inklings from the tea leaves.

The past is indeed dust and the tea leaves have all dried out. Here is the scorecard.

Ziff & Dale Decanted - The Strip Returns

It's been the better part of two decades since a corkscrew and a decanter first started arguing with each other in the back of a restaurant, after hours, over whatever was left in the bottle. Ziff & Dale. Some of you might remember. Most of you won't, and that's fine too.

A few things have changed since then. The wine world, obviously — natural wine wasn't a headline back then, orange wine was still a curiosity, and nobody was asking a bot for a food pairing. The people those early characters were drawn from have gone their own ways since.