Henry Sidel knows how to market high-end beverages; he helped launch Belvedere and Chopin vodkas. He thought he had his eyes open to the market obstacles when he founded Joto Sake in New York in 2005 but that doesn't make those obstacles easier to overcome.
Except for the absence of tie-dye, the second annual Natural Wine Week in San Francisco could have been an event right out of 1967.
Can you imagine using a jeweler's eyepiece and tweezers to pull the male organs off a grapevine?
Randall Grahm can. It's a patient task, but he's doing it because he's impatient.
For Israeli wines, “kosher” is a blessing and a curse. Israel right now is one of the most exciting wine countries in the world. The country made almost exclusively bad sweet wine for its first 50 years, but now it’s like California of the 1970s, in a period of rapid growth and experimentation and great increases in quality. But the kosher marketing conundrum hangs over everything: how to sell Israeli wines, kosher or not, to non-Jews, a necessity if the industry is to sustain its present growth.