This is the weekly column People ask what was the most expensive wine I ever received for review. I think their question reflects curiosity about what wine I get to review and how does expensive wine taste. From the beginning, my work was directed at wine that people could purchase in a local store, or at least online. So reviewing 30-year-old wines costing four figures was out of the question, even if I obtained such wine through some vinological miracle. The CliffsNotes answer to “what’s the m...
Jun 25, 2025•4 min
This is the weekly column Vintage and location are keys to understanding wine in Texas, which now produces the fifth most wine in the United States. Texas wine growers must contend with unpredictable and extreme weather events, making each Texas vintage an adventure. Therein lies both the magic and the challenge, because weather and weather events dramatically impact each year’s Texas wine and what grapes are grown. When late frosts or hail thin the grape crop, the crop tends to more more concen...
Jun 18, 2025•10 min
This is the weekly column To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. In June of 2025, such a time has come for my wine writing adventure. In the summer of 2008, the editor of my local newspaper, the San Angelo Standard-Times , challenged me to write a wine column that would entertain and inform the average wine buyer. The “buyer” part was important because the weekly column would be an anchor on the Wednesday food section of the newspaper and advertisers wanted i...
Jun 09, 2025•7 min
This is the weekly column We know wine is magnificent paired with food, enhancing qualities of both. Wine and food also can be a welcomed pairing when dealing with the vicissitudes or triumphs of life. Examples: • Emotionally wrought day with friends or family. Pair movie theatre popcorn and a bottle of buttery chardonnay and a stupid comedy movie. • Signal success at work or in your family life after overcoming obstacles. Pair a bottle of expensive Champagne, a tin of caviar, or—if you are not ...
Jun 03, 2025•4 min
This is the weekly column As May flowers fade, the more stern months of summer saunter into our lives and our wine drinking regimen. Time to lay down big, bold reds and celebrate the buys of summer. Rosés. Lighter whites. Lighter reds, maybe chilled, maybe even with an ice cube floating in the glass. Wine punches like sangria come into play, so refreshing on a warm picnic, backyard soiree day. Stokesiren photo This also can be the time for wines in a can. Perfect for sipping in a boat or by a po...
May 27, 2025•5 min
This is the weekly column Cava is Spanish sparkling wine made using the traditional method developed in Champagne, right? Not so simple. In 1872, Spain’s first méthode champenoise sparkling wine was made in the Penedès region of Catalonia, the steadfastly independent northeastern area of Spain with Barcelona as its capitol. France insists traditional method sparkling wine can only be called Champagne if it is made in Champagne. So Spaniards came up with “Cava” and establishing the Cava Denominac...
May 20, 2025•5 min
This is the weekly column The wine industry faces the first headwinds it has faced in half a century. Inevitably things get snippy in the previously collegial competition among makers. When the rising wine tide raised all boats, generosity and altruism were easy. Comity expected. Neighbor-helping-neighbor commonplace. Now sales are in decline. Competition thins the herd. Makers search for an edge, sharp elbows replace pats on the back. Texas is an example. From the state’s humble wine beginning ...
May 13, 2025•4 min
This is the weekly column Mother’s Day easily can be promoted as “Buy Mom Some Wine Day.” There is the cliché joke: “buy mom wine because you are the reason she drinks.” But there is a less jejune reason to do the right thing—moms who enjoy alcohol drinks overwhelmingly prefer wine over spirits and beer. According to polls over several years, women make up some 60% of wine buyers. Gallup in 2021 reported women choose wine 49% over liquor 26% and beer 23%. Multiple surveys show women are the domi...
May 06, 2025•5 min
This is the weekly column Wine has been a staple of food and culture for 8,000 years. It is not going away. But the wine industry’s exhilarating days of the past 50 years are fading. Let’s explore. Gino Colangelo is the founder of Colangelo & Partners, a leading PR force in the wine, food, and spirits industry worldwide. I asked him about the state of the wine world today. Gino Colangelo What are the biggest threats to the wine world? Gino: “Depends on the day of the week. Tariffs are loomin...
Apr 29, 2025•5 min
This is the weekly column Answers to common wine questions: • What is the difference between my home refrigerator and a wine refrigerator? Your home frig’s internal temperature is around 35 degrees, while a wine frig is between 50 and 60. Your home frig is designed to extract humidity, a potential danger to wine corks. A wine frig strives to have a cork-friendly 45-60 percent humidity. Your home frig likely uses a compressor that causes vibration. A wine frig likely uses a thermoelectric cooling...
Apr 22, 2025•4 min
This is the weekly column Some answers to common questions: • What does “fruity” and “sweet” mean in a wine review? They are two different concepts. Fruity or “fruit-forward” wine is one where fruit flavors dominate over other flavors such as vanilla, oak toast, minerality. Sweet wine has perceptible residual sugar because not all of the grape sugar was converted into alcohol or sugar was added after complete fermentation. Confusion arises when a dry wine with little or no residual sugar has ver...
Apr 15, 2025•4 min
This is the weekly column Wine has an image problem that is both its biggest asset and its Achilles heal. Wine is the most complex alcohol drink. If you examine wine’s consumer base, wine drinkers tend to be older, better educated, upper-middle class or above. The popular image: wine drinkers are old, snotty, rich people. Not an ideal demo if you are a marketeer striving to expand your winery’s customer base. Let’s admit the basic truth behind the stereotype. Wine is complicated. I don’t need to...
Apr 08, 2025•4 min
This is the weekly column Followers of my wine writing know I do not do negative wine reviews. I consider myself a curator rather than a critic. If you want snark about a particular wine, others are happy to satisfy you. Why this conscious choice? There is limited space and time in my newspaper columns, online posts, podcasts—and my life, for that matter. I choose to spend that allotment on subjects you may enjoy and convey positive commentary about wines, people who make them, and where they ar...
Apr 01, 2025•4 min
This is the weekly column Spring is here. What wines are especially suited for the warming days and the return of plants from dormancy? There are many happy choices. Bright acidity, floral aromatics, freshness, lightness, and lower alcohol are hallmarks of wines that pair with the dynamic character of the season. Here are some classic suggestions: • Sauvignon blanc. New Zealand efforts burst with lime and passionfruit and aromas of freshly mowed grass. Efforts from France’s Loire Valley lean mor...
Mar 25, 2025•5 min
This is the weekly column Sixty years ago, Texas wine was a curious microdot in the wine world. Two Texas Tech professors piddled around with a few grapevines, originally intending to make grape jelly to supplement their income. “Doc” McPherson, a chemistry professor, and Robert Reed, a horticultural specialist, wondered if the Texas High Plains around Lubbock could diversify regional crops beyond cotton and corn. Texas Tech encouraged them. In 1969, the pair planted a vineyard with more than 14...
Mar 18, 2025•5 min
This is the weekly column It used to be simple. Good wine had a natural cork. Cheap wine had a screw top. Not any more. The 1990s wine boom stressed cork production and engendered an increase in “cork taint” caused by the chemical compound trichloroanisole (TCA). By some measures, 5% or more of cork-closed bottles exhibited the musty, wet cardboard aromas of cork taint. The wine industry responded. Natural cork makers focused on sanitation and quality control. The problem lessened but cannot be ...
Mar 11, 2025•5 min
This is the weekly column I find Perplexity a useful AI tool researching wine and other topics. In an act of hubris, I challenged it to evaluate Gus Clemens on Wine. Today’s column addresses some of the Perplexity results. You can generate your own evaluation of the column at the site, or evaluate yourself if you have an online presence and the nerve to so venture. Here I address Perplexity’s principal findings: • No wine scores. From the start of my wine writing in the newspapers and online in ...
Mar 04, 2025•5 min
This is the weekly column By best estimate, there are some 10,000 different grape varieties in the world. If you tasted a different one every day, it would take you more than 27 years to complete the task. Thankfully, the world of wine is confined to a smaller number. About 6,000 grapes belong to the principal fine wine species Vitis vinifera. Only about 1,300 are actively used in winemaking. Only 13 varieties make up one-third of global winemaking; 33 varieties make up more than half of global ...
Feb 25, 2025•5 min
This is the weekly column It is a new year and there are sweeping changes in wine bottle sizes in America. Yep, wine makers and glass blowers have a whole new tool kit to entice you into experiencing whatever elixir they have conjured from grape juice and yeast and wood and whatever else the white-coated wine wizards have procured. Last year your bottle choices were limited. Wine could only be sold in 187 mL single-serving bottles (think airplane or rip-off hotel frig), 375 mL “half bottles,” 50...
Feb 18, 2025•4 min
This is the weekly column Valentine’s Day cometh, time for expressing love and affection, although one can argue that should be on your to-do list every day. The celebration has roots as far back as ancient Rome. It was then called Lupercalia, a day dedicated to Lupercus, the god of shepherds, and aimed at promoting health and fertility. As do many celebrations, Lupercalia-Valentine’s links to seasonal change. In the Northern Hemisphere, mid-February typically marks the end of the coldest nights...
Feb 11, 2025•5 min
This is the weekly column Wine columnists are expected to have opinions, and I have many. Here are four to rile up readers. • Stemless wine glasses. They do hold wine and they are harder to break and easier to clean than traditional stemware, but they also commit three cardinal sins for wine enjoyment. First, you have to hold the bowl to use them. That means fingerprint smudges on the glass, diminishing a vital part of wine enjoyment—admiring and evaluating the wine’s color. Second, it is somewh...
Feb 04, 2025•5 min
This is the weekly column Wine labels and wine reviews may include various references to wine blending. Some are specific and informative. Others are distinctions without a difference. Let’s explore the most common blending terms. • Blend. Broadest term. It includes combining various fruits or vinifications to create, develop, or enhance a wine using more than one grape variety and/or vintage. It includes growing and fermenting different varieties together, blending grapes immediately after or y...
Jan 28, 2025•5 min
This is the weekly column Blending is essential to making some of the world’s most iconic wines. We explored the several ways to blend last week. This week, specific wines created by blending. • Champagne can be a blend of pinot noir, chardonnay, and pinot meunier. It often is a blend of different vintages. Champagne houses aim to produce a distinctive, consistent product year after year, and blending grapes and vintages is how they do it. Most of the time. In exceptional years they may make a s...
Jan 21, 2025•4 min
This is the weekly column In general, wines can be divided into varietals and blends. This being wine, it is not so black-and-white simple. Let’s explore. A varietal wine has a single variety of grape on the label. That means the named grape is the predominant grape used to make the wine. In the U.S., the named grape must make up at least 75% of the wine. Oregon, however, requires at least 90% of the grape for pinot noir, pinot gris, chardonnay, and riesling. There are 18 grape varieties exempt ...
Jan 14, 2025•4 min
This is the weekly colum Wine scores. Oh, my. On one level, ridiculous. On another level, essential to wine’s success over the past half century. Some observations. Anyone who ever took a test or got a report card in grade school immediately understands a wine score. Robert Parker was the most visible person to grasp that, and a parade of imitators reinforced it. Many were based on a 100-point scale, but in practice it is a 80-100 point scale. If your wine score was a 79 or less, you might as we...
Jan 07, 2025•4 min
This is the weekly column Happy New Year. We survived another sun circumnavigation. Sunlight grows slowly longer. Spring rebirth looms over the sere, cold-swept horizon. Endure these last temperature-challenging months, and we emerge into warm, bright shining mornings. Two wine types provide solace during this frost-dusted interlude: Porto and sherry. Porto and sherry are fortified wines produced on the Iberian peninsula. Porto in Portugal in the Douro Valley region and sherry in the Jerez regio...
Dec 31, 2024•5 min
This is the weekly colum This column runs on Wednesdays in most markets—Christmas Day in 2024. If you have not secured your wine before now, no chance today. We can, however, look forward to New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. Sparkling wines are stars of New Year celebrations. Statistics indicate roughly 25 percent of all Champagne is sold between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Something like 360 million glasses of sparkling wine are consumed on New Year’s Eve. People who don’t usually drink spar...
Dec 24, 2024•4 min
This is the weekly colum With Christmas/holiday feasts coming soon, what is the ideal alcohol percentage for wine paired with food? The answer is 10-14%. Why? U.S. labeling laws are loony, so the ABV amount on the label can be inaccurate, but this is a discussion of wine-food pairing quality not bureaucratic gobbledygook. Lower alcohol wines allow the grapes to show off and complement food rather than flaunt over-ripe fruit and alcohol. We got to high alcohol wines several decades ago when Ameri...
Dec 17, 2024•4 min
This is the weekly column If you have a wine lover on your Christmas/holiday gift list, some recommendations. Wine always is appreciated. Gift wine they enjoy, a proclivity you likely know, but if you do not, ask. If you are trying to disguise your gifting intentions, there are many clever ways to inquire. Wine lovers are never hesitant to discuss wine. There are almost infinite options depending on the depth of your friendship and your pocketbook. For casual friends, a single bottle festively w...
Dec 10, 2024•4 min
This is the weekly colum Nebbiolo is the extraordinary grape closely identified with the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy and particularly with the region’s great wines: Barolo and Barbaresco. Let’s explore. The origins of the nebbiolo name is a bit foggy. It likely derives from the Italian word “nebbia” or the Piedmontese word “nebia.” Both mean “fog”—a reference to fogs that come to the Langhe region, where the grapes are grown, during the October harvest. Italian Piedmont region vineyard...
Dec 03, 2024•5 min
