We had our annual anti-Valentine’s day party two nights ago, and it was a blast. Everyone brought something, and my wife and I filled in the rest. We had barbeque from Lockhart, gulf shrimp, farmer’s market goodies, and stuff from the garden all whipped up into a feast. Of course there was wine to go along with this good stuff, and we tried them all to see what paired the best. [click to continue...]

I moved to Silicon Valley in 1984 to work for Data General. It was an amazing time – the birth of both the technology age and the modern era of Californian wine. I spent my days making semiconductors and weekends visiting wineries and tasting wine with friends. The various wine producing areas of California were less well defined then. Appellations were a European thing. But certain areas were all ready recognized for their ability to produce grapes and wines of distinctive quality and character.

Howell Mountain was one of my favorite areas, and the fine wines produced by Ridge and Dunn from that region were among my favorite wines. So when Craig Camp of the The Wine Camp Blog asked if WineEnabler.com wanted to try Cornerstone’s 2004 Howell Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon, I was thrilled. [click to continue...]

Our weary and alcohol-soaked traveling party of four arrived back into Austin at around midnight last night after the first annual Wine Bloggers Conference in Sonoma, CA. This event was a blast – a non-stop, two-day party and blogger love-fest, which Rachael has affectionately dubbed “Wine Camp”.

This was my first large-scale wine tasting ever, and like Hardy said over at Dirty South Wine (one of our new blogging friends from the weekend), the most important rule learned is to “Spit, spit, spit”. I couldn’t agree more, and blessedly it only took me one hung-over morning, not two or three, to figure it out. [click to continue...]

I just returned from Santa Rosa where I had the fortune to witness the beginning of a revolution (code jockeys would call it an emergent property) at North America’s first Wine Bloggers Conference. The name does not seem to suggest anarchy or shifting tectonic plates, but the people and companies at last weekend’s conference are starting a revolution in the wine industry.

On its surface, the Wine Bloggers Conference was a group of hobbyist and industrial folks getting together to drink wine and exchange ideas, but the whole is often larger than the sum of its parts. During the conference, I met many wonderful people and had a great time, but what impressed me the most were the love, knowledge, and respect the attendees showed for wine. [click to continue...]

Now that wine is making its way into the online community, folks have begun to tinker with the idea of an online wine sommelier. In theory, it sounds like a wonderful idea.

You grab your iPhone or Blackberry, connect to a site, and enter your dinner choice. The mythical program then determines your location via the GPS function of your handheld device and hunts up the online version of the wine list or wine inventory at your current location. The program then cross applies your specific taste profile and your meal information and recommends the best wine.

What a great idea! However, there is nothing even close to this available yet on the internet. The programs we’ve experimented with fall into two categories. Programs that require the end user to have lots of knowledge about wine to use, or programs that return information that is of little value unless you know a lot about wine. [click to continue...]