Innehållsförteckning för February 29, 2020 från Wine Spectator

FREE RESOURCES FOR ALL OUR WINESPECTATOR.COM READERS TOP STORIES OF 2019 The most popular articles, Q&As, Tasting Highlights, videos and Unfiltered items of 2019. Find out what you missed! EMAIL NEWSLETTERS Keep on top of our world of coverage with our free email newsletters. Sips & Tips features a top value Wine of the Week. The twice-monthly Collecting letter highlights collectibles and cellar-worthy wines. Our Private Guide to Dining spotlights dining news and great restaurant wine programs, and Unfiltered brings you our irreverent takes on wine in culture, sports and politics. WINE SPECTATOR VIDEO Watch all our wine tips, winemaker inter-views and tastings on your desktop, laptop, tablet or phone. Don’t miss these clips: Wine Star Spotlight: Tim and Carissa Mondavi of Continuum Estate Continuum’s father-daughter team, part of Napa…

As European vintners graple with U.S. tariffs of 25% on many wines, they now face another potential hurdle. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has announced that it is considering new, higher tariffs on European foods, including all wines. Those tariffs could be imposed after Jan. 13 and could be as high as 100%. “I’m freaking out. And I don’t normally freak out,” said one wine importer who asked not to be identified. “We were planning to hire new people. That could be shelved and we could potentially have to consider layoffs.” The proposed tariffs are the latest salvo in the U.S. government’s fight with the European Union over support for airplane manufacturers Airbus and Boeing. On Oct. 2, the World Trade Organization (WTO) gave the U.S. the…

Charting a Course Celebrity Cruises (celebritycruises.com) is reinventing the meaning of “sea” food; being miles from land doesn’t have to mean forgoing fine food and wine. Chef Cornelius Gallagher, formerly of Wine Spectator Best of Award of Excellence–winning Oceana in New York, oversees the food and beverage programs on all of Celebrity’s ships, and as of spring 2019, the brand is partnering with Daniel Boulud, adding some of the world-renowned chef’s signature dishes and his private-label Champagne, Cuvée Daniel, to the menu. There is also a Chef’s Table option overseen by Boulud. Add to that an array of activities such as a wine-blending class and a Riedel glassware workshop, and there’s plenty aboard the brand’s Millennium, Solstice and Edge ships to keep wine and food aficionados happy. Spirits fans can…

Over the past decade, the wines of Canada reached a new level in terms of quality, style and consistency. Chalk that up to investment on the part of talented, passionate vintners, who are planting more vinifera grape varieties and exploring vineyard-designated reds and whites. This evolution was borne out in my recent blind tastings of more than 100 wines from Ontario and British Columbia. Overall, 40% of the wines earned outstanding ratings of 90 points or higher on Wine Spectator’s 100-point scale—an impressive showing compared with our previous reviews of Canadian wines, dating back to the 1990s, only 20% of which rated outstanding. Furthermore, ice wine, the sweet dessert wine made from frozen grapes, no longer dominates the top-scoring bottlings. Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Merlot and red blends are showing comparable…

The rapid expansion of the Internet has dramatically changed the landscape of commerce, including that of wine. Nowadays, you can easily find, order and get wine shipped to your door from the comfort of your own home. However, there are certain ways to go about it, and obstacles you will face, notably due to state shipping regulations. Here’s a guide to the web of online retailing. When to buy online Shopping for wine online is best suited to buying fine wine and bottles that are a little harder to find. “If you’re looking for $8, $9, $10 bottles of wine, it doesn’t make as much sense to buy online,” says Tom Wark, executive director of the National Association of Wine Retailers. “However, if you’re looking more along the lines of…

To find out more about readers’ wine-buying practices, we posted a survey on WineSpectator.com; nearly 1,500 people responded. Although our poll was not conducted according to scientific protocols, it resulted in a diverse group of respondents in terms of gender, age and location. About two-thirds of respondents are male. Nearly half are middle-aged (40 to 64), with a quarter older and another quarter younger. Respondents are fairly evenly distributed across the U.S., with the largest group from the West (29%). About 9% live outside the U.S. They are, not surprisingly, serious wine lovers. About two-thirds are Wine Spectator subscribers (to print and/or digital publications). More than half currently possess more than 100 bottles; 9% have more than 1,000 bottles. And they are enthusiastic consumers, with nearly 90% spending more than…

What do the best wines in the world offer? Quality, value, complexity, singularity and, most of all, diversity. American consumers drank more than 330 million cases of wine last year, and though growth in consumption has slowed, people are trying an increasing variety of wines and spending more But in this incredibly heterogeneous wine world, how does one go about finding the standouts? Wine Spectator is here to help. Our editors reviewed more than 15,000 new releases in independent blind tastings in 2019, as well as hundreds more wines as barrel samplings and in retrospective flights of older vintages. Due to a spate of strong vintages in multiple regions, quality continues to tick upward. Of the new releases we reviewed in 2019, approximately 46% earned outstanding scores of 90 to…

Every now and then, a happy surprise comes along. Something you’re used to unexpectedly punches above its weight or delivers something new. This happened to me recently with two chocolates made by Christopher Curtin, who runs Éclat Chocolate (eclatchocolate.com) in West Chester, Pa., coincidentally near where I grew up. I’ve known Curtin for over a de-cade, and his chocolates always deliver. But this time he really blew me away, with his filled chocolates called Mondiants and his striped Parallel bars. Mondiants ($29 for 5.6 ounces), a riff on the clas-sic chocolate rounds called mendiants, are Curtin’s invention. Chocolate discs a couple of inches across are molded, then injected with filling: cacao nib, caramel or my favorite, peanut butter in milk chocolate. They’re disarmingly thin, delicate even, each with a pattern…

A mere 15 years ago, the direct vintner-to-drinker marketplace represented only a slender slice of the wine economy. But since the 2005 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Granholm v. Heald, which gave states broad latitude to permit interstate winery-to-consumer deliveries, direct shipments of wine in the U.S. have exploded into a $3 billion industry. The effects of Granholm have been amplified by the get-it-now culture of online sales; many producers now offer “buy” buttons right on their websites. And the direct-to-consumer wine marketplace is only poised to grow as more states loosen their shipping laws, says Alex Koral, senior regulatory counsel for industry group Sovos ShipCompliant. The payoff for wineries is clear: higher profits, a stake in the digital economy and strong customer relationships. But what’s in it…

For wine lovers, 2019 was a year of exploration and discovery, with 2020 promising more to come. No-where is this more evident than with value wines, particularly those at the upper end of the quality spectrum, where outstanding ratings of 90 points or higher lead you to a range of offerings from every major wine region across the globe. Great values aren’t simply well-priced bottles. They are wines that are affordable yet feature the best qualities of their region or variety: distinctive character, complex flavors and a sense of place. Because of their wallet-friendly prices—all of the selections in this annual roundup cost $25 or less—these are wines that allow you to experiment with an unfamiliar style or to find your next favorite for everyday enjoyment. All of the world’s…

After the successes of 2016 and 2015, France’s Rhône Valley hits its marks again in 2017, with high quality in both the north and south. The north is more consistent across the board, with ripe, dense wines and a healthy crop level, while the south, though strong overall, is marked by low yields, having faced difficulties during the growing season. Since my previous report (“Next Level,” Nov. 30, 2018), I have reviewed nearly 775 wines in blind tastings at our New York of-fice, about two-thirds of them from the much larger Southern Rhône and one-third from the Northern Rhône. In total, 92 wines earn classic ratings of 95 points or higher on Wine Spectator’s 100-point scale, while an additional 450 wines receive outstanding ratings of 90 to 94 points. More…

Hudson Yards, an ambitious new residential and office complex on New York City’s West Side, already offers restaurants from outstanding chefs including Thomas Keller, José Andrés and David Chang. The latest addition, the Tavern by WS, adds a different aspect: an exclusive affiliation with Wine Spectator, the world’s most widely read wine publication. The Tavern opened on Nov. 13. “Being the Tavern by WS, we of course want to accentuate the wine,” said beverage director Michaël Engelmann, formerly of Wine Spectator Grand Award winner the Modern. Che Engelmann will work alongside executive chef Eli Kaimeh, formerly of Grand Award winner Per Se and Best of Award of Excellence winner Gramercy Tavern. “We are extremely proud to open the Tavern by WS,” said Kenneth A. Himmel, president and CEO of Related…

Brick-and-mortar wineshops come in all shapes and sizes, and chances are, there are several to choose from near your home or office. Once you’re a regular customer, your local shopping experience can be an easy in and out with a bottle or two you’re sure to like. But at first, you might find navigation trickier: Every wine store stocks different items; it can be hard to locate what you have in mind among the many offerings; inventory is regularly depleted and not always restocked with the same bottles; and relevant information about a particular wine is rarely summed up as efficiently as it is in the consumer reports common to many other industries. Yet prowling the aisles need not be a Herculean task. Rather, it should be the amuse bouche…

The 2019–2020 season of the National Football League is treating fans to a once-unlikely match-up: wine and pigskin. More teams than ever have announced official wine partnerships, bringing winter-friendly Cabernets and victory sparklers to stadiums and living rooms. In late October, the NFL itself followed suit, announcing the league’s first official wine. Players across the league are discovering wine and flaunting their bona fides, from Panthers quarterback Cam Newton’s sommelier stylings to Vikings rookie line-backer Cameron Smith, who interned at Melville Winery in Lompoc, Calif., between summer workouts as a student at the University of Southern California. And then there are the veterans. Quarterback-turned–general manager John Elway, quarterback Drew Bledsoe and defensive ace Charles Woodson, as well as former coach Dick Vermeil and late owner Lamar Hunt, who founded the…

Fans of Vintage Port: Get ready to take advantage of a rare set of circumstances. Port producers have declared the 2017 vintage on the heels of their declaration of 2016, making these the first tandem harvests generally declared since 1991 and 1992. In terms of style, the just-released 2017s are more focused and tightly knit than the more rambunctious and showier 2016s, but whichever way your tastes lean, there are dozens of superb wines to choose from. The 2017 vintage marked yet another warm and dry growing season that resulted in a very early harvest in the Douro. But the weather pattern was more even overall, with no heat spikes, compared with the mercurial nature of 2016. “April [2017] was warm, so we started early, and then it stayed warm…