Jan Norris: Food and Florida

Did you know that 90 percent of all the wine sold in the U.S. is sold for less than $15 a bottle? Most of it is bought at grocery stores or in wholesale clubs. Yet, very few of these wines are ever reviewed by the serious wine press. Enter Mark Spivak – our own sometimes [...]

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Here’s a hypothetical situation, an agricultural version of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal: Assume you are a highly successful commercial farmer, with assets in the billions. You decide that you want to grow corn in some region of the world where corn will not naturally grow: under the polar icecap, or in the Mohave Desert. You [...]

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Only a few gleams on Sterling’s shelf By Mark Spivak, consumer wines columnist First, a little background: Englishman Peter Newton, who ran the Sterling International paper company in San Francisco, founded Sterling Vineyards in 1964 with 50 acres of grapevines. The first wines appeared in 1969, positioning Sterling in the second wave of new California wineries [...]

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Readers: Today I welcome a new columnist to my stable of writers on my blog. He’s Mark Spivak, who will be reviewing consumer wines — the everyday kind that most of us drink. Spivak, a fellow reporter, hosts the wine show Uncorked! Radio on WXEL-90.7 FM Tuesday nights at 7 p.m. He also writes his own blog, Spivak on Wine, and is [...]

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