One of the most enduring and appealing aspects of the "blind" tastings utilized at most major wine competitions is the inevitable surprise value wine that emerges to compete on equal footing with much more expensive and usually more well-known ...

Wine competitions are now a fact of life throughout the United States. There are more than 60 that I am aware of and probably a few dozen more that are flying under the radar.

Wineries have a singular purpose when they enter a wine into a ...

Beaulieu Vineyard traces its roots to the turn of the century, when Georges de Latour purchased a vineyard in the Napa Valley near the village of Rutherford. No one knows for sure, but it's a good bet the BV wines of that era weren't much of a ...

It isn't often that I hand out a perfect score to one of the thousands of wine samples I taste each year.

I can remember a Montrachet from Drouhin, a cabernet from Nickel & Nickel. There have been a handful of others, always from the usual ...

The still relatively small world of wine journalism has been atwitter lately over the future of wine criticism. There has been both elation and angst, triggered by the news that the world's most prominent wine critic, Robert Parker, had sold an ...

I am often met with a raised eyebrow when I mention that I am off to judge at a wine competition. It seems many do not connect the concept of a so-called "award-winning" wine with the fact that the wine must have been subjected to critical ...