Happy weekend and I hope everyone is enjoying the summer season, staying cool, hydrated, and healthy. Welcome back to your weekly round up of wine-newsy items. Locally, we have to talk about the California wildfire season’s effects on the wine industry (yes, this is an ongoing issue—check AGG and CAWG’s investigation on rejected 2020 fruit), political tensions, and—unfortunately—the continuous spread of COVID throughout the Sonoma community.

On a broad industry level, if you haven’t heard about Russia’s new rules surrounding ‘Champagne,’ take a read and let me know what you think. And—it look like there may be a new, more environmentally friendly, way to achieve Parker Points?

Fun Stuff: Next time you go to a bar, you may just get straws made of….pasta! And (shameless self-promotion), I dig into the notorious ‘wine twins,’ —wines commonly mistaken in blind tasting or tasting exams in my latest article for Wine Enthusiast.

There’s much much much more. So enjoy your coffee, tea, cocktail, wine—whatever time it is while you’re reading this post—scroll through, have fun, learn some stuff. Cheers.

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Good morning my friends. If you haven’t heard, the big industry news this week is the Delicato-Francis Ford Coppola ‘merger.’ Curious what everyone is thinking re: implications for the industry, consumer market, etc.

Beyond that amazingness, we’ve got drought issues here in California, New York ending its cocktail-to-go programs, and memes that may cause a disruptive ‘mom-culture.’

Some fun news: wine video games! English wine week! Oh, and I must recommend the piece posted on JancisRobinson.com entitled “MW Tasting Notes Analyzed,” especially if you’re a student of wine.

It’s all here. Scroll through, learn some stuff, and leave a comment if you have one (or several).

Side Note: No posts, news round up or otherwise, next week. Taking a much needed holiday. So cheers, stay healthy, stay happy, and please drink good wine.

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Hello my friends. Hope all are doing well and staying healthy. Super important now that mask mandates and COVID protocols seem to becoming lifted in more and more areas. I know they are in my neck of the woods. It’s a simultaneous sigh of relief but also a source of anxiety. So, again, I urge you all to stay safe and healthy while venturing back out into the world.

There’s loads of fun stuff in this week’s newsletter—including some scandalous opinion pieces. (I’ll let you scroll through and figure out which.) And in shameless self-promotion, I’ve included an article by yours truly. (First link below.)

If you haven’t had time to check out the site lately, I did have two new posts this week—learn about a few ‘lesser known’ wine regions: Costières de Nîmes and Custoza.

Excellent. That’s me done. I’ll leave you all to it. Enjoy!

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Hello and happy weekend—and happy long weekend for those who get Memorial Day off. I, for one, am taking off early this week, shutting down the home office early Friday afternoon to enjoy the start to the summer season and—oh yeah—my anniversary. ❤️

So, in that spirit, I’ll keep this quite short and leave it to you to scroll through this week’s wine news. Looking ahead, I’ve got quite a few tours and tastings booked, so be on the lookout for fresh content both here and around the globe in traditional media outlets.

Stay safe, stay healthy, and have some good wine. Cheers.

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Happy weekend. I’ll leave you to peruse the week’s wine news. I’ll be found with my head in a study book (and a glass in hand).

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