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Anything but Chardonnay, ABC – a phrase that many wine enthusiasts may remember from the 90s. The saying was coined due to a large movement against the overoaked, extracted Chardonnays that began to dominate shelves and wine lists at the time.

It’s difficult in today’s day and age to take a second to slow down and breathe. It seems that every moment our attention is being pulled in a million different directions, principally from the technology involved in our lives.

The New World – an expression almost all wine professionals are familiar with. For those who don’t know, the “New World” in a wine context generally refers to any winegrowing region outside of Europe. In Practice, this can describe not only a place, but a style.

For a few years now, the ongoing rhetoric in the alcohol industry has been this: as older consumers age out of consumption, younger consumers are failing to pick up the slack they are leaving behind.

Geek has been in the wine business for almost five decades (!) and writing on these pages for 25 years. During that time, there have been many changes in the industry; many economic ups & downs, many trends that came and went, and many changes in consumer demand.

We have touched on this before, but some recent encounters brought it to front of mind again, so we thought we would share some what we believe to be hard truths about the business of selling wine.

As we have noted on this page several times before, wine goes through fashions. From broad trends such as the rise of American wines’ share of the pie compared to imported wine, to the drop of Merlot sales due to a movie, to dry French rosés, to many, many others.

We have addressed on these pages previously the sometimes-confusing terms of Organic Wine, Natural Wine, Biodynamic Wine, Sustainable Wine, not to mention the new discipline of ‘Regenerative Viticulture’ (which is its own rabbit hole).

Italy’s best wines have rightly earned their spot in the upper levels of the world’s most collectible wines. Though there is a long list of Italian wines that can compete on the world stage, it is Barolo, Brunello, and Bolgheri that make everyone’s list of Italy’s top wines.