A young winemaker kidnapped from his vineyard in the Languedoc to learn the ways of the west coast wine business
There are two competing notions about wine. On the one hand, there are people who see wine as a quotidian drink that requires no special occasion to open and no particular knowledge to appreciate...
Here's a big question. What makes a wine worth 20 dollars or 40 dollars or 400 dollars? People ask me about this all the time when they visit the vineyard, and my approach has always been to break...
Yesterday, I had a meeting up in Calistoga and figured I would take a leisurely drive down Highway 29, which most will agree is the most famous wine road for tourists in Napa. I thought that I was...
I want to compare communal / associated blogs in the Languedoc and in California. The short version: Communal blogging is very powerful Unfiltered: Napa Valley Vintners have a very readable blog Corbieres is more winemaker-y; NVV is mostly written by marketing people Owning identity is important in a blog; be yourself and be proud of it Multi-author blogs are good I've often talked about the potential of a joint winemaker blog where multiple winemakers share access and writing privileges on a communal blog...
I'm working on a tool that will help all the lovely people visiting Napa and Sonoma this year find the best places to drink and eat. That means I have to eat and drink everywhere. A hard job, but somebody...
This week, my parents and I were busy presenting our wines (and tasting other peoples' wine) at Vinisud, an enormous Mediterranean wine fair in Montpellier. While there's a lot of interesting stuff to say about Vinisud, I think one of the things that might really differentiate it from similar events in the US is the political importance. Politician sightings My parents saw Cécile Duflot stride by our stand (near the front entrance) with her entourage surrounding her. Cécile is the leader of the Green party so...
Wine consumers visit vineyards for entertainment, and winemakers tend to focus on presenting their wines to visitors (often in a technical or clinical way). --paraphrasing from RMS Study on Oenotourism...
Last week, I addressed winemakers' reluctance to adopt social media in France. I received a very thought out email from somebody in the French wine business so I thought I'd share it on the blog (with...
Foursight Wines blogged about the small size of Anderson Valley compared to other "regions" in California and France. It's pretty interesting to look at scale of production and especially the underlying...
I'm Ryan O'Connell, a geeky American kid who makes wine in the Languedoc and blogs a lot about the south of France. But this year I'm spending some time in California. So I thought I'd start this posterous account where I could write about US-specific adventures and hopefully relate them back to France.
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