Many wine people imagine that their favourite alcoholic beverage is innately superior to any others. Robert Joseph suggests that pursuing this line may not prove to be very productive.
Robert Joseph watched an internationally popular business reality television series for the first time in a decade - and found it included surprisingly useful lessons about margins, branding and distribution. Here are four key takeaways.
Robert Joseph often likes to defend (or at least, explain) the apparently indefensible. Here, as thousands of professionals consider the high cost of attending ProWein, he offers a reasonable explanation for those high hotel prices.
Franciacorta is the latest region to break itself up into subzones. At first glance, this seems too complicated — but Robert Joseph suggests there may be method behind the madness.
When a host says 'can I get you a drink?', they're rarely offering No-Lo wines or sparkling tea. Robert Joseph suggests that, despite not containing any alcohol, these are ‘drinks' too – and deserve rather more recognition than they're currently given.
Robert Joseph suggests that, if the wine industry is to combat the threat of Neo-Prohibitionism, it needs to work together with producers of other forms of alcohol, to create a strategy, acknowledge some of its own failings, and to understand where its foes are coming from.
From velvety and juicy to fascinatingly complex: Thanks to a predominantly cool climate and many autochthonous grape varieties, red wines from Burgenland and Lower Austria are increasingly moving into the international spotlight.
