Wine of the Week: Vistini Ribolla Gialla Colli Orientali del Friuli 2010

Ribolla Gialla is one of my all-time favorite grapes. It’s also an excellent way to wean your friends off Pinot Grigio. It’s usually more complex and less fruity – tighter and more elegant. That said, Vistini makes an amazing orange-hued(from skin maceration) Pinot Grigio.

One strange thing about this wine is that it gets more intense in the mid-palate, which is the opposite of pretty much every other wine. It might be just a short phase this bottle is going through or a phase that my taste buds are going through as well.

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 [...]

My apologies to everyone who has been camping out in our virtual line. If you would like to pre-order, you can do so now for a 25% discount. The map will ship on May 3rd, 2011. Thank you for your patience.

It’s great to hear that Wine Blogging Wednesday is back. I wasn’t a great participant but missed it (kind of like the water when the well runs dry). In the spirit of true unoriginality, I reached in the fridge door for a Tio Pepe while watching the Arsenal – Barcelona match (Arsenal 2-1 woo hoo!). [...]

Leonardo Locascio wants to simplify Italian wine laws. Although he’s done a great deal to get Americans to look beyond the wicker basket Chianti bottles of the 1970′s, he’s now had enough. At the Vino 2011 Conference in New York City last month he said “most Italian wine laws are totally irrelevant to the American [...]