jamie goode's wine blog

Great to see that Authentic Wine has been shortlisted for the Andre Simon awards. My last book, Wine Science, was also shortlisted, but lost out to Hugh Johnson’s Wine: a life uncorked.

The good thing about the Andre Simon awards is that they are judged on the afternoon of the presentation ceremony, so no one knows [...]

Some discussion on twitter at the moment about whether terroir is relevant to consumers. It’s all a bit daft really, because no one has defined who these consumers are, and everyone is talking as if there is just a single wine market.

To understand the wine market, the first rule is that you have to segment. [...]

I really enjoyed today’s small but perfectly formed Majestic press tasting, held in a stock room at their fine wine store in St John’s Wood. [As an aside, they have some cracking wines on the shelf there, and while there is a nominal 6 bottle minimum purchase, I strongly suspect that nice polite buyers purchasing [...]

The nature of a blog post is that it is somewhat ephemeral. Most blogs don’t encourage readers to hunt around the archive, even though there are tag clouds and category links. So I thought I’d collect some of my most significant blog posts from 2011 all in the same place.

Wine writers: making money on the [...]

For any wine critic or writer, impartiality is a non-negotiable.

And I think that all wine writers realise this. So the real danger is not corruption, or obvious conflicts of interest. Rather, it’s the subtle loss of perspective that being sucked into the wine trade brings with it.

As a writer, I gain a great deal by [...]

Look, I’m no business expert. But as an amateur photographer with a strong affection for Kodak, and particularly the Kodachrome film (deceased for some years), I think there are some lessons for the wine industry as outlined in this account of the decline of this once great firm.

The main lesson is that current performance isn’t [...]

For the benefit of those of you who are blog visitors, but don’t get to the main wineanorak.com site, here’s what I posted there of late. Some people ask why I have both a blog and a website running in tandem. The answer? It’s because blogs are good for some things, but not for others. [...]

Some intense activity on Twitter today discussing wine and health. Lots of views expressed, although proper discussion of topics like this in 140 characters is quite tricky.

The discussion was prompted by a tweet by Cam Haskell about a meta-analysis looking at the evidence for health benefits of antioxidants. It is here.

This is not a research [...]

I was really intrigued by this graphic from high-end wine merchant Berry Bros & Rudd. It shows the trends in their wine sales over the last year. Some are quite surprising; others perhaps less so.

The first point: it re-emphasizes that there is not just one wine market. Of course, to try to extrapolate these results [...]

Although it’s an arbitrary date in the diary, January 1st is a good time to think about fresh starts. We all need a fresh start now and then, and once a year is quite a good frequency.

2011 was a complex year. Good and bad. Probably more good than bad.

Many of us enter 2012 with lowered [...]