Mike Veseth's Blog

Nine months ago today, The Wine Economist published its annual column that, inspired by the upcoming Unified Wine & Grape Symposium, looks ahead to the future. The theme was sort of anti-climactic at the time, but it seems pretty much on the mark at this point: the future of wine is always uncertain, but 2025 is special. There are more unknowns and even unknown unknowns than ever before.

Frozen by Doubt

That’s a problem because fear, uncertainty, and doubt tend to freeze businesses in their trac...

This column is inspired by a recent birthday celebration dinner that featured three very different Saperavi wines from Georgia.

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Mariam invited us to a dinner celebrating her husband Todd’s birthday and we accepted with enthusiasm, offering to bring some Georgian wines with us. Mariam is originally from Georgia, so her dinners often feature dishes you’d find at a Georgian supra feast. Sue and I were happy to share Georgian wines, but we had a selfish hidden motive. We wanted to see what our f...

“Globalization versus Terroir” is the title of my first published essay on wine economics. It appeared as a chapter in my 2005 book Globaloney: Unraveling the Myths of Globalization, which was the third in a four-volume series analyzing globalization and its discontents. (See list of books below.)

The wine world has changed a lot in 20 years and my thinking about the wine economy has changed, too, so I thought it would be interesting to re-read that first essay and see what I think about what I ...

If only wine were as simple as love.

How Can You Tell?

How can you tell if someone really loves you? The answer is simple, according to Betty Everett’s 1964 hit tune “The Shoop Shoop Song.”

Does he love me, I want to know
How can I tell if he loves me so
Is it in his eyes, oh no you’ll be deceived
Is it in his eyes, oh no you’ll make believe
If you want to know, if he loves you so
It’s in his kiss
That’s where it is, oh yeah

The truth about love is not reliably revealed by objective observable i...

Will white wines replace red as the defining wine of the Rioja region? No, probably not. A recent Decanter tasting of more than 700 wines included only about 150 white wines. That’s many fewer than the red wines, of course, but probably more than you expected, given the dominant identity of Rioja wine.

Look for more and more white wines from Rioja as well as other areas where red wines have previously taken center stage. Here’s the story.

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“Is White Wine the New Red?” That’s the question we a...

Sue and I don’t really need an excuse to make s’mores. What could be better, especially on a warm summer evening, than Hershey’s milk chocolate and a toasted marshmallow wedged between crispy graham crackers? So when August 10 rolled around (National S’mores Day, but you probably already knew that), we were all set.

What Could Be Better?

What could be better than s’mores? Well, how about wine and s’mores? It is not a ridiculous idea and we are always on the lookout for unexploited wine-tasting o...

Sometimes it takes a special event to nudge you to take another look at a familiar winery or wine region. That’s what recently happened to us with the wines of Tuscany in general and San Felice in particular.

A Tuscan Wine Giro

Our old friend Peter and new friend Gina are newlyweds planning their first visit to Italy. They’ve booked a house near Montalcino for a week. Did we have any tips? Yes, of course, we love talking about Italy and Italian wine, so we met over Sunday lunch on the patio. Bri...

It is useful to step back for a minute and appreciate some of the ways that the wine industry is evolving under the influence of innovative producers. Sometimes innovation is so obvious you can’t miss it. That was the case for us, for example, when Sue and I participated in the big SIMEI wine technology program in Milan. But innovation takes many forms. Herewith three interesting Italian case studies.

Product Innovation: Pasqua Wines

Pasqua Wines, which celebrates its 100th birthday in 2025, was...

If you know, you know. If you don’t, you probably don’t. That’s the way it is with the wines from Virginia.

Guess Again

How many wineries do you think there are in Virginia? Virginia is a more important wine-producing state than most people imagine. There are 386 wineries in Virginia, according to the Wine Business Monthly annual “Review of the Industry” issue. That places Virginia at #7 in the U.S. winery league table behind New York and Pennsylvania and ahead of Ohio and Missouri (two states w...

Sue and I are still searching for non-alcoholic wines that pass our “Second Glass Test.” We think that NA wines should remind us of the types of wines they are based on and be tasty enough that we would ask for a second glass. It doesn’t hurt if the NA wines are priced in the same range as their alcoholic cousins, but that’s not a strict requirement.

Mionetto’s NA Italian Sparkling wine is a good example of what we are looking for. Mionetto is a famous maker of Prosecco wines, so their NA wine (...