American Wine 2025: Field Notes from the Unified Symposium
Sue and I recently attended the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento, California, North America’s largest wine industry gathering. Attendance was about 10,000 for the meetings, seminars,...
View ArticleThe Three Faces of the American Wine Dilemma
We live in a time when problems we face are complicated but many of the answers proposed to address them are very simple. I am suspicious of simple answers to complicated questions, both in general...
View ArticleWine Economist Flashback: Stumbling into Sherry in Madrid
Sue and I are traveling in Spain and one of our goals is to learn more about what’s happening in the Sherry industry. It is our first visit to Andalucia, but not our first exposure to the world of...
View ArticleWine & the Trump Tariffs: A Cloudy Crystal Ball
I’ve received emails asking me to write about the Trump tariff regime (and other policies) and how they will affect the wine industry. I have resisted so far because there is not enough information on...
View ArticleDon Melchor & Chile’s Good Value Curse
Sue and I have been looking for the right excuse to open a bottle of Don Melchor, the famous Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon that was named 2024 Wine of the Year by Wine Spectator magazine. Finally, we...
View ArticleTenuta Licinia: In Praise of Philosophers & their Wines
If you flip to the back of my 2017 book Around the World in Eighty Wines, you’ll find a list of the wines from my global adventures. I didn’t want to just list them alphabetically or sort by price or...
View ArticleField Notes from a Visit to the Sherry Triangle
Sue and I recently returned from three weeks in Spain. We spent a few days in Madrid (where we dropped in at FEV General Assembly meetings), but most of the time in Andalusia, home of Sherry and...
View ArticleHow Sherry Went from Boom to Bust to Today
We published an article here at The Wine Economist a few years ago, asking “Can Sherry be the Next Big Thing?” “Probably not,” we said. “But it doesn’t have to be. It is a timeless wine waiting to be...
View ArticleFive Faces of Andalusia Wine (Part 1)
Sue and I recently spent more than two weeks in Andalusia, Spain, about half of the time exploring the wine scene and the other half enjoying the region’s history and culture. We covered a lot of...
View ArticleBodegas Tradición & Gonzalez Byass: The Jerez File (Part 2)
This is the second part of our report on the five very different wineries that Sue and I visited during our brief stay in Andalusia. Click here to read the first half of the story. Bodegas Tradición...
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