Since we’re in the business of selling I don’t usually go around advertising the fact that there is some quality free stuff on the site. If you’re feeling a little strapped this holiday season (or just miserly) have a look. All it takes is the ability to download a pdf, letter size-paper, an inkjet printer and possibly a letter sized frame and you’ve got yourself an appallingly cheap yet high quality gift.

We received some great press this month from one of France’s most prestigious wine journals, L’Amateur. At least I think it’s good press. Something about the metro, a bottle neck and an extinct bird. Whoa! If your French is better than mine (a fairly low bar), I would be eternally grateful if you could explain [...]

It’s easy to get worked up into a shopping frenzy today, however, I’ve developed a fail-safe way to avoid anxiety: Don’t shop. Crack open a bottle of black wine: a Negroamaro (from Puglia) or the most famous of the black wines, Cahors. I was excited about the Cahors but sadly we didn’t have any in [...]

Sorry, but I’m a social media skeptic. I’ve been online for a while, but only tentatively in facebook and twitter. I have my reasons not to fully plunge into the toxic swamp when there seems to be plenty of fresh air everywhere else: Depositing all of our experiences in a vast database will cause a [...]

“I know it when I see it” -Justice Potter Stewart, 1964 on how to define pornography No one can agree on a term for “natural” wines. Some say that all wines are natural, so “natural” is too vague. Others say that left to nature, wine becomes vinegar, thus no wines are “natural”. “Real” and “authentic” [...]

It’s a great pairing! September has great sunsets and the weather is still warm enough for rosé. We’ve had a few dud rosés lately so it was great to splurge on a bottle of Domain Tempier. It has the richness and intensity that would easily pair with sunsets throughout the fall as well. 2010 Domain [...]

The sad reality of twitter is that, despite its obvious utility, most people are there to market stuff. I kind of am as well; which is probably why I’m so bad at it. I never could “work a room”. I’m not really comfortable mixing schmoozing and selling. And I don’t want to be like the [...]

We’ve improved our Wine Tasting Notebooks, both softbound and hardbound, for their second edition. Perhaps the most important improvement is in the bindings. The softbound version was 60 pages with a single saddle-sewn binding but is now 96 pages with a Smyth sewn binding that’s both more durable and lies completely flat when opened. The [...]

The dark arts of advertising. . .

I can now safely say that we’re a proper wine map company. In retrospect, this should have been our first map, but we were under the erroneous assumption that France was already well covered by other map makers. There are many excellent regional wine maps of France, but the overall maps all seem to fall [...]