Vinography

Let’s keep the autumn vibe going this week, shall we? Some of the most spectacular autumn vineyard views I’ve ever seen were on a trip to the Douro Valley in Portugal, where terraced vineyards stood out against green grass underneath and the sheer scale of the place made for impressive views every way I turned.

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Hello and welcome to my weekly roundup of the wine stories that I find of interest on the web. I spend each week exploring the internet for everything published about wine online, and here’s all the stuff that I think would be worth your valuable time.

This past July 28th, the wine world mourned the death of pioneering winegrower David Hirsch, who showed the California wine industry, and the wider world, that Pinot Noir could be grown brilliantly a mere 3 miles from the chilly Pacific Ocean in the shadow of towering redwoods.

A 2014 tractor accident put the then-70-year-old Hirsch in a wheelchair and hastened his ...

The Douro Valley is one of the most jaw-dropping slices of wine country to be found anywhere on earth. Stunningly beautiful, it is also massive on a scale that few other wine regions can approach. With incredibly steep hillsides sporting terraces blasted out of solid rock with dynamite, climbing thousands of feet up from the river valley to incredible heights, the sheer human...

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve picked up a bottle of wine that had the words “old vines,” “vieilles vignes,” or “vigna vecchia” on the label and turned it around to find absolutely no further information about the vineyard that produced it. Were the vines 40 years old or 140? Did this come from one old vineyard or several? Those two words seem to be doing an awful lot o...