It's nearly impossible to believe just how provincial the wine world was in 1978, the year I launched my journal, 'The Wine Advocate.' There were no wines exported from New Zealand and virtually none from Australia (including Penfolds Grange, one of the greatest wines in existence).
The wine world is so big. Yes, there are styles of wines I don't like. Orange wine, natural wines and low-alcohol wines. Truth is on my side, and history will prove I am right.
When I started in 1978, the greatest wine in Spain, Vega Sicilia, wasn't even imported to the United States. The alleged greatest Australian wine, Penfolds Grange, wasn't imported to the United States. There were no by-the-glass programs. Sommeliers were intimidating.
The first wine I drank, a Chateau Haut-Brion, I was 22, it was my first glass of wine, and I discovered voluptuousness. From there, I started tasting French wines, then Spanish wines, then Italian wines.
There are many great wine producers from all over the world making fantastic wines. Italian wines especially are making an enormous comeback after sometimes being labeled as inexpensive jug wines.
I like California wine, I really like wines from Washington state. I love wines from Spain and Italy. I don't know about French wines at all.
In the wine world, crusaders would have wine consumers believe that the only wines of merit are something completely indefinable but which they call 'authentic' or 'natural.'
Burgundy was the winiest wine, the central, essential, and typical wine, the soul and greatest common measure of all the kindly wines of the earth.
The premise of Nossiter in 'Mondovino' would have been a lot more accurate when I started writing about wine in 1978 than when the movie was made in 2003. When I started, I was enormously critical of California wines, and I thought the entire wine industry was on a real slippery slope.
What's important in a cellar is having wines that have a broad range of drinkability, which California Cabernet does. Wines with a broad range of drinkability give you a lot of flexibility; they are the sort of wines that make me feel secure. I think of my wine cellar as security - if the apocalypse comes, I can just go down to the cellar.
It is giving me a great satisfaction, because I had the notion that we could make great wines equal to the greatest wines in the world, and everybody said it was impossible.
There's great wine from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile and, of course, California. But there's nothing like a really great French wine, they're so well balanced. The better the wine, the less you feel the effects I think.
Man's nature is not a bit the same as wines. He loses flavour as his life declines. We drink the oldest wine that comes our way. Old men get nasty, old wines make us gay.
Halloween is tomorrow. A group of wine experts has actually come up with a list of the best wines to pair with Halloween candy. They say, "White wine goes great with Skittles, red wine goes great with Twix, and ... we're alcoholics, aren't we?
There is no question that Australia's most dramatic assault on the world market has been with its value wines. These are generally not from specific appellations but blends made by huge enterprises like Penfolds, Rosemount or Casella Estate - the group behind Yellow Tail.
Of the sparkling wines, the most famous is Perth Pink. This is a bottle with a message in, and the message is "beware". This is not a wine for drinking; this is a wine for laying down and avoiding.
From a wine critic's perspective, there are far too many innocuous, over-oaked, over-acidified, or over-cropped wines emerging from California. While those sins would not be a problem if the wines sold for under $20, many are in fact $75-$150. That's appalling.