I have been writing about wine for many years, with a particular interest in the wines, producers, and regions that reward close attention over time. On the original rjonwine.com I published regular long-form essays on fine wine, and for roughly four and a half years I also wrote a weekly wine column for Huffington Post, often drawing on and adapting that longer work. I was also a frequent contributor of pieces to Snooth and IntoWine.com.
I was honored to be included on IntoWine.com’s Annual “Top 100 Most Influential People in the U.S. Wine Industry.” My wine blog was a finalist for multiple awards, including best overall and best writing awards, in the Wine Blog Awards. I am the most “favorited” tasting note writer (and most prolific) on CellarTracker, where I currently have over 48,000 tasting notes.
I have been mentioned in stories about wine critics in the Wall St. Journal, and interviewed for publications such as Grape Collective and Enofylz Wine Blog,
I have traveled to wine country in Burgundy, Champagne, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Languedoc, Oregon, Santa Barbara, Rioja, Germany, Argentina, Uruguay, the Douro and Madeira. My favorite wine critics and writers include Hugh Johnson, Stephen Tanzer, Jancis Robinson, Burton Anderson, Allen Meadows, Roy Brady, David Shildknecht and Mike Steinberger.
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.
What has always interested me most is not simply whether a wine is “good,” but why it matters: what it reveals about a place, a producer, a grape, a style, or a standard of ambition.
RJonWine.net is both a restoration and a continuation: a place to recover and reorganize the best of the older writing, and a place for new work, especially on Spanish wine, to develop alongside it.
The site is also part of a larger long-term project: bringing together years of travel, tasting, and reflection into a more lasting body of work that may eventually take book form.