Please consider voting for steveheimoff.com for Best Overall Wine Blog. You can click here, then push the red “VOTE” button and scroll down. Voting is only open through this Friday. Thanks. * * * Loathe as I am the wander into the blood alcohol limit debate, I’m making an exception this time, to come

Please consider voting for steveheimoff.com for the Wine Blog Awards' Best Overall Wine Blog. Voting is open until Friday. Thank you. * * * Trading down from Gucci to J. Crew may not seem like the toughest sacrifice in the world, but even the top 2 percent of upper-income Americans is “thinking twice” about spending

Robert Parker, in what was called “a rare interview with the French magazine Terre du Vins,” denied “the idea of the ‘Parkerisation’ of wines and the emergence of a richer, riper style made to please the critic’s palate.”  Now, the information I cited above comes from an article about the Terre du Vins interview that

It’s Friday morning, day two of the Alexander Valley Cabernet Academy, where I’m moderating a series of panels for about 35 sommeliers, from all over the country, who were invited to the event, which is sponsored by the Alexander Valley Winegrowers. I think AVW’s feeling is that Cabernet Sauvignon is their primary grape and wine,

I’ve long had a soft spot for Alexander Valley, the AVA in Sonoma County that stretches up from Healdsburg to the Mendocino County line, at Cloverdale. I came to know the valley especially well during the year I spent writing my first book, A Wine Journey along the Russian River. I got it into my

I’m mad as heck and I’m not going to take it anymore! I’ve had it up to here [you can’t see me, but I’m holding my hand up to my forehead] with writers who complain that “wine consumers have little use and perhaps even less tolerance for wine tasting notes.” That is simply a falsehood.

The shortage of California wine is rippling through the system, causing serious if not quite catastrophic consequences. Winery principles tell me that when their sales forces fan out across the country, buyers are unhappy at the lack of supply and in some cases are personally blaming the winery! I’m sure that distributors as well as

I was reading the other day that Ningxia, the Chinese autonomous region (roughly equivalent to a U.S. State) in north-central China, “will introduce the first winery-based classification system in China within the next few months.” The article explains how there will be “6 classes in this classification." The director of the governing body [of the]...

and then wake up at 6 a.m. the next morning (this morning, as you read it), there's not much time or brain matter to come up with a detailed blog post. So today, there won't be one! I'll just say Le Cirque is old-fashioned NY, glamorous and retro. You expect the Rat Pack to come

I like rosé wine, but for the longest time I didn’t think California had many good ones. There were all sorts of problems. I found a Renwood 2005 “too watery for recommendation,” a fairly common problem for a type of wine that’s delicate to begin with. Another set of issues arose with a Dominari 2005,

Lots of work-related travel coming up. I’m off to New York for a quickie tomorrow to attend the big Red and White Bash, Wine Enthusiast’s 25th anniversary celebration, at the Hudson Hotel, on West 58th, in busy midtown. From the sound of it, it's going to be quite the par-tay. I already have my red

Mike Veseth, the wine economist whose blog posts and occasional research papers I always look forward to reading, published another thought-provoking piece last week. It’s about what he calls “context-sensitive” tasting, a term I’d never heard before, but one I’ll use going forward, because it’s snappy and useful. My readers know that I tend to...

Benjamin Lewis writes, in his superb new book, Claret & Cabs, that the Left Bank of Bordeaux, and to some extent the Right Bank, is undergoing an identity crisis, as more and more Classified Growth chateaux bottle second wines. It used to be that the handful of chateaux that made a second wine used grapes

Is great wine the product of terroir, technique, or both? Regular readers of my blog know that this question, or concept, intrigues me as do few others. I’ve frequently quoted the great Prof. Peynaud, who says terroir is Mother Nature; when man brings his or her own touch to the finished product, the combination of

If you think you’ve seen a shift in your food magazines toward more lifestyle and celebrity coverage, you’re right.  “A handful of food magazines have found [advertising] success by broadening their traditional focus on recipes to more of a lifestyle approach, capitalizing on popular interest in destination restaurants, celebrity chefs and travel,”...

I’ve been tasting a lot of Cabernet Sauvignons lately. The 2010s are entering the market in full force; meanwhile, there’s still a good quantity of 2009s also arriving. The fun is in comparing the vintages. As a wine critic, I’m loathe to come to premature conclusions about vintages. I do it, of course, like just

The 2012 California Grape Acreage Report is hot off the presses and the most noteworthy fact is that white winegrape acreage is down from 2011 while red winegrape acreage is up, but just barely: a mere 274 acres, about a tenth of one percent over 2011. This actually continues the trend of the last ten

Running into Gary Eberle again at this weekend’s big Cab event in Paso Robles brought back beautiful memories. I first met Gary when I was sent by the magazine I used to work for to write a story about him. That must have been around 1990. I’d heard of him, of course, for by then,

To Paso Robles this afternoon for a quick trip to moderate the first CAB Collective, a local group organized to promote the Cabernet Sauvignons of Paso Robles. Good timing: Paso is on the verge of a renaissance, if it’s not already happening, and tastemakers–sommeliers, writers, chefs–are starting to take note, especially of its red win...

My favorite event of the year, at which I speak and taste with others, is my annua gig at the student wine club at the University of California’s Haas School of Business. I did it last night for, I think, the fifth year. These future MBAs are so smart. At least half the questions they

I was reading Peg Melnik’s article on Chateau St. Jean’s 2010 Belle Terre Vineyard Chardonnay, in yesterday’s Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, which reminded me that Chateau St. Jean pretty much single-handedly created the vineyard-designated Chardonnay market in the 1970s, with a brilliant series of wines crafted by their then-winemaker, Richard Arrowoo...

Before I was a wine critic–which is to say, before any of my publishers would let me actually review and rate wines–I was a wine reporter. For quite a few years, I worked for numerous publications that wrote about the nuts and bolts of the wine industry. Those articles could be about almost anything: a

I was reading this article from New Zealand in which this “pioneer of Marlborough wine says that the corporate-dominated New Zealand industry is making it harder for family-owned wine businesses like his to survive.” It immediately brought to mind the comment, which you hear frequently, that the largest wine companies also are crowding out smaller,...

  A Facebook friend commented to me: I rarely have to purchase wine .. but here in Ontario Canada we have to do so at a WINE STORE … so I walked in yesterday and was floored by the number of wines that had been judged by Steve Heimoff !! so like any good wine

I am. Wanker [from Wiktionary}:  (UK, Australia, New Zealand, slang, pejorative) An idiot, a stupid, annoying or ineffectual person who shows off too much, a poser or poseur; someone who is overly self-satisfied. The Brits and their island relatives south of the equator love the word “wank” which in addition to the above meaning has

It’s interesting, in the light of this new report on the status of direct-to-consumer wine shipments in the U.S., to project the trend into the future and imagine what the American distribution system might look like in 15 or 20 years. The report’s most startling discovery is that DTC’s dollar value last year “was greater

I’ve been reviewing some really good Grenache Blancs lately that me me wonder if this isn’t the up and coming white variety in California. Other critics, it seems to me, give more emphasis to Roussanne and Marsanne than they do to GB. But good as those wines can be, they’re sometimes too oaky or heavy

People are always asking me when they should drink this or that wine. I wish I had an easy answer for them, like, “Oct. 29, 2024, at 7:18 p.m.” They want specificity and certitude, not a lecture. But the question of when to drink a wine is very complicated. First, it depends on how mature

Instead of reading second- and third-hand accounts of that notorious National Academy of Sciences report on the impact of climate change on the world’s grape growing areas, let’s do something radical: look at the actual report itself, to see what it does–and doesn’t–say. I don’t know about you, but after reading different articles about...

My highest Cabernet scores are still heavily centered in Napa Valley and its sub-appellations, but I’ve been so impressed by how strong Paso Robles is coming on. Cabs from more established wineries, including Eberle, Vina Robles and J. Lohr, have developed a graceful, delicious elegance that used to be lacking sometimes. This may be due

But it wasn't always.  If you came of age before the era of Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay and Mario Batali, you might be surprised to learn that, until comparatively recently, men were considered genetically and temperamentally unfit to cook. That was certainly true when I was a little boy. Mom’s place was in the kitchen.

If the predictions in this just-released study are true, then Napa Valley will be too hot for fine winemaking in a generation or so. That being the case, today’s young bloggers, who hope to make money writing about wine someday, might find it in their interests to take up residence in Billings or Fort St.

I’m going to be moderating the panel on clones at The Chardonnay Symposium, which makes it sound like I know all about them when, in reality, I know very little. However, a panel moderator doesn’t have to know much about the topic at hand. The secret to moderating a panel is simply to get the

I think a lot of people feel the same way as Louise Saunders. She writes that, after pretending to like wine for 30 years, she finally realized that she really doesn’t. I have friends who don’t like wine, for various reasons. They’re not against it morally, but it doesn’t sit well with them. Some of

I wrote a post recently, “Aromatic whites, including Albarino, come of age,” which was sort of a general musing on the new popularity of these wines, a development I fully support because they can be lovely. Among the comments my post got was this one, which I’m reproducing in full because I want to make

Official word from my source is that The Wine Advocate has hired its new reviewer for the California Central Coast as well as the Rhône Valley. He’s Jeb Dunnuck. I had never heard of him, which means absolutely nothing. So I pulled out the old Google machine and here’s what I found out. Jeb is

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Zinfandel over the years. Well, maybe “hate” is too strong a word. Let’s call it a love-dislike relationship. The grape is notorious for uneven ripening, so that superripe flavors can co-exist right next to green, minty ones, giving some Zins a bizarre awkwardness. This danger makes growers wait until

I’m not taking sides in the brouhaha down in Santa Barbara County, where winery owner Blair Pence wants to expand the borders of the Santa, err., Sta. Rita Hills appellation to include some of his vineyards that are located further inland, to the east. I haven’t seen any statistical data that would indicate, one way

Albarino is one of those grape varieties nobody in California thought too much of, like Pinot Gris and Gruner Veltliner, until comparatively recently. Why should they have? California vintners fell into two categories in the modern era: those who wanted to sell commodity wines to lots of average consumers, and those who wanted to create

Paul Gregutt is my friend, the wine columnist for the Seattle Times, author of Washington Wines & Wineries, the Pacific Northwest Editor for Wine Enthusiast Magazine, owner of the excellent blog, Paul Gregutt: Unfined & Unfiltered, and, as of this month–a wine producer! Paul and his partners, at Precept Wine Brands, have started a new...

One of the biggest challenges to the wine critic is determining if a wine is ageable and, if you think it is, then how long to recommend that your readers age it. This is irrelevant for most wines, but for that small handful of wines that do indeed improve with age, it’s perhaps the single

My definition of a great wine book is one where there are things on every page about which I could write an entire essay. I don’t mean because the writers say such stupid things that common sense and good taste demand that they be challenged (which is the case with most new wine books). I

It’s so interesting that the production of wine around the world fell to its lowest level in 37 years in 2012, due to dismal crops in France, Spain and Argentina. Contrast that with the all-time high, record grape crush last year in California, and it looks like good news for Golden State vintners who export

Far be it from me to dispute the findings of a survey conducted by a reputable outfit, but I’m not buying the portentous headline, “Popularity of chardonnays declines” and the report that “consumption is down,” as this study contends. It was done by Napa Technology, whose website describes it as “dedicated to designing innovative Intelligent

Hubris is the ancient Greek concept whose meaning can be roughly equated with the old saying, Pride goeth before a fall. Hubris is always a danger for high achievers in any field, including business, politics, sports and, yes, wine. The opposite of hubris is what may be called humble gratefulness. Forutnately, there’s a lot more

“When did you stop beating your wife?” is the classic Catch-22 question. If you say “Last week,” you admit to having beaten your wife. If you reply that you never beat your wife, you sound defensive. Either way, you lose. It must feel the same way when a winery owner is told that he’s not

What I wrote yesterday isn’t to say that all Bordeaux tastes alike. Lewin doesn’t go there and, in fact, goes out of his way to point out distinctions between chateaux (e.g. Haut Brion and La Mission Haut Brion) that must be due to something–although he cautions the reader that “the only difference [between them] is

One of the most enduring memes in wine is that of terroir. (A meme, by the way, is a cultural idea that spreads virally from human to human. Memes have been compared to genes in that they may mutate in response to environmental pressures, a concept I’ll return to in a minute.) We all know

Dinner last night at Ruth’s Chris, on Van Ness. It was a Treasury Wine Estates event. Treasury is a big company; here in California, they run Beringer, Chateau St. Jean, Etude, Stags' Leap Winery and others. In other words, a pretty impressive portfolio. The centerpiece of the menu was, as you might expect at a

People ask me why I don’t score more wines 100 points. Other critics who use the 100-point system are far more lavish than I am. I’ve only given five perfect scores in all these years. Parker by contrast had 19 perfect 100s (for 2009 Bordeaux) in issue #199 of the Wine Advocate. I’m not here