Mike’s Steinberger’s Wine Diarist has quickly become one of my favorite wine pundits in the fray. His professional background as a former writer for Slate comes through time and again as he crafts wonderfully insightful and well-thought articles. One that I felt was worth sharing was from yesterday called Quiz Time wherein he talks about the recent points scoring in Napa by “Proxy-Parker”, Antonio Galloni. Everyone is in a bit of a flutter over the fact that the scores seem to have been inflated which Dr. Vino talks about.
Mike takes all of this one step further and presents the text of two reviews without mentioning the wines (or the publication) and asks readers to assign the scores that they had. If you care about scores, you should read that article and the comments first before reading the follow up that tells what the actual scores were. It says a lot about the whole points system given that there were a number of well-respected wine writers who weighed in on the subject.
Next on the list to check out is an article by the always delicious Taste of Croatia where they write up an article about the wines of Korak from a village called Plešivica that’s about 45km south west of Zagreb. This region has a special warmth for me as my father’s family is from about 1km west of Plešivica, in a similar village called Kupeć Dol. There have always been a great many “domaće vino” (home winemakers) in my family and despite all the buzz that the coast of Croatia gets, the folks in this area produce some really great vintages year after year from grapes that are happier with less sun such as Pinot Noir.
