Corie Brown is the co-founder and general manager of Zester Daily. A former editor and writer with the Los Angeles Times, she received the 2007 University of Missouri Lifestyle Award for her article about climate change and wine, A Scorching Future, and currently is writing a book on that subject. In 2006, she won both first and second prize for news reporting from the Association of Food Journalists. Corie recently was awarded a fellowship by the Foreign Press Center of Japan and will be working in Japan this spring. Previously, Corie was West Coast entertainment correspondent with Newsweekand a columnist for Premiere Magazine. On staff with BusinessWeek in Boston and other McGraw-Hill publications in New York City and Washington, D.C., she has written about energy, the environment and healthcare.
Corie can be reached at:
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Photo credit: Chris Fager
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Corie Brown's Blog
Corie Brown's blog on Zester Daily discusses all aspects of the culture of food and wine
The California wine industry is in a world of hurt. Premium wines are gathering dust on store shelves. Warehouses throughout the state's wine regions are full to bursting as vintners, trusting in the saving grace of annual holiday sales, refused to lower prices and held onto their unsold wines. Well, its January and wine sales have not rebounded. Napa Valley and Sonoma County vintners are holding their breath, wondering who will be first to slash prices. More than 100 bankruptcies or foreclosures are predicted this year. Today, I have a story in the New York Times' new San Francisco edition about one vintner -- Naomi Brilliant -- who is walking away from the wine business after 10 years. She simply stopped making Roshambo, calling it plain crazy to keep lowering prices to try to spur sales. Another story I've written -- posted today on the Entrepreneur Magazine website and set to be the cover story for the March issue -- goes into much more detail about the economic troubles in California's wine country. The piece focuses on the smart moves that one young vintner, James Stewart, is making to position himself to not only survive the downturn, but to thrive.
Sometimes a story needs room, lots of room, to be properly told. And one of the best places to find long, delicious food tales is the University of California's Gastronomica. Several of Zester Daily's writers have been published there. If you pick up the latest edition, fall 2009, Volume 9, Issue 4, you will find Clifford Wright's piece on the mysterious origins of the artichoke. Is this spiky vixen of a vegetable as old as ancient Greece? Check it out.
http://www.cliffordawright.com/caw/assets/Gastronmica-Artichokes-wright.pdf
If you believe, as I do, that an informed and educated wine public will result in better wines, then you will be glad to know that Jancis Robinson is making her writings more easily available to wine collectors. The first lady of the British wine world has linked her Purple Pages with CellarTracker and/or VinCellar. Now, you can access the almost 40,000 wine reviews and drinking recommendations in the www.JancisRobinson.com database directly from your CellarTracker and/or VinCellar accounts. American wine lovers have outgrown the need to pin a number on every wine and, as they gain confidence in their own taste, they are rethinking the definition of "great" wine. The more points of view we have available to us, the better. Bravo, Jancis.
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