About

Welcome to my wine blog. I am a Human Resources exec by day, and full-time wine geek and wine writer all the rest of the time. I was honored to be included this year on IntoWine.com’s Annual “Top 100 Most Influential People in the U.S. Wine Industry.” This blog was a finalist last year for the best overall and best writing awards at the Wine Blog Awards. I am the most “favorited” tasting note writer (and most prolific) on CellarTracker, where I currently have over 27,000 tasting notes. I am also a panelist on monthly videos this year on various wine subjects on IntoWineTV.com.

I am fortunate to reside in the San Francisco Bay area, with easy access to the wine country of the Santa Cruz Mountains, Napa and Sonoma. This area is also home to several well established tasting groups and retail stores that do regular tastings that I frequent. I have traveled to wine country in Burgundy, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Languedoc, Oregon, Santa Barbara, Argentina, the Douro and Madeira. My favorite wine critics and writers include Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson, Allen Meadows, Roy Brady, David Shildknecht and Clive Coates. I lived in Los Angeles until 2004, and still visit regularly to see members of my tasting groups there.

My tasting notes are patterned as follows: color; nose; palate; finish (then, parenthetically, other notes about the wine, based on what I’ve learned from tasting with the winemaker, distributor or others knowledgeable about the wine, such as the cepage, barrel treatment, drinking window). If I tasted from a format other than the standard 750 mil bottle, I’ll indicate that at the beginning of the note; ditto if it was a barrel sample instead of bottled wine. My descriptors are ordered from most dominant flavor component to least dominant. If I am tasting in an environment (e.g., darkly lit restaurant) where it is difficult to accurately assess the color, I will omit that feature from the TN, as I will if I’m doing a big trade tasting, where I will just focus on the nose and the palate (or just the palate if I’m having to go at super speed) as the biggest key(s) to judging a young wine, in particular.

For more on my wine aesthetic, see my post devoted to that topic: http://www.rjonwine.com/bordeaux/my-wine-aesthetic/

Hugh Johnson and Richard

Jancis Robinson and Richard