Although my “background” is in “science”, I can’t help but be fascinated by the business side of wine. The hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of different wines can be nearly identical in chemical makeup (but differing in concentrations and subtle flavour compounds), meaning that such a global product is heavily dependent on marketing.

The label is the one thing you can fully control – the prices are taxed, and the buyers and agents (and the government, for that matter) pretty much make or break your availability in markets. It’s tough being a bottle of booze.

So, this week’s class was about marketing and consumer trends. Each of the wines that we tasted were chosen to display a scale of quality, the strategies their brands attempted to achieve, and the markets that these products were aimed towards.… read more

First: yesterday, the books I ordered came in the mail! Happy birthday, me!

Really exciting, though. The super thick Wine Grapes is an exhaustive list of the main commercial grapes in the wine world, compiled by Jancis Robinson MW, Julia Harding MW, and José Vouillamoz. So, pretty much a Pokedex for grapes. There are only a handful of individuals in the world who have been born in a precise generation to be able to understand analogies that bridge wine grapes and Pokemon. Magikarp and Nebbiolo? Eevee and Loire Chenin Blanc?! The possibilities.

The latter book, Grapes & Wines by Oz Clarke and Margaret Rand, is a little bit friendlier in a sense that it reminds me of those small quasi-encyclopedias with pictures that I always used to read as a child.… read more