Read about
special
offers
tastings
and events...

This weekend, hundreds of our nation's top wine professionals will converge on Dallas, Texas for Texsom, the state's annual sommelier conference.

Last year, nearly 600 persons attended, including thirty-four Master Sommeliers and four Masters of Wine.

More than 150 wines were served at event seminars and more than 200 were poured at the grand tasting held on the last day of the conference.

A really interesting thread on the Guild of Sommeliers forum caught my eye via Twitter this week.

More than seven months have passed since Rudy Kurniawan became the first person to be convicted of wine fraud in the U.S.

The story first broke in December 2009, when my friends and colleagues Peter Hellman and Mitch Frank began reporting it for Wine Spectator.

(Here's the Rudy Kurniawan entry on Wikipedia.)

Earlier this week, New Yorker magazine psychology and science blogger Maria Konnikova published a post devoted to "what we really taste when we taste wine."

The post was inspired by a recent "live-action" experiment by Columbia University neuroscientist Daniel Salzman.

We are sad to report that a high number of vineyards have been damaged by a string of hailstorms over the last few weeks in Europe.

The worst came in late June, when a terrible storm literally decimated the Côte de Beaune in Burgundy (see this post by Wine Spectator editor Bruce Sanderson).

Damage estimates that have been circulating on social media and in closed email lists put the numbers as high as 90-100 percent lost crop in certain areas of Burgundy.

"Make no mistake," wrote the New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov (one of our favorite American wine writers) in late 2013. "An American cider renaissance is well underway."

azienda, landed property, estate, domestic work, from the Spanish hacienda, from the Latin facienda meaning things to be done from facere, to do.

The term azienda means business and is used to denote a company or firm in Italian. An azienda agricola is a farming business; an azienda vinicola is a winery (awine business).

When Boulder Wine Merchant owner and Master Sommelier Brett Zimmerman and I chatted the other day about why you should trust your sommelier, he made an observation that struck me for its sheer brilliance and simplicity.

"One of ways that the sommelier makes your dining experience better," he said, "is that — if you let she or he chose the wine for you — you can spend more time talking to your dinner companion, whether a first date, a spouse, or an old friend."