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The world has changed - through technology, through wine-making techniques, the quality of wine is greater than it's ever been. Whereas ten, fifteen years ago it was very easy to find lots of bad wine, it's kind of hard now. The technology, the science - it's like, are you kidding? We're in the golden years of wine!

Our very long-term prospective hinges on making the best possible wine we can.

Wine is wonderful stuff. But so many people are put off by the snobbery of it.

I'm actually surprised how technical a lot of commercial wine production is. Things are done very much from an industrial chemistry point of view at certain price points, but that's not the impression you get with wine.

Wine writers have been around for almost as long as there has been wine, but in the past, generally speaking, most wine writing was uncritical and emphasized wine as a romantic, historic beverage. Criticism and comparative tastings were eschewed for fear of offending the trade, which most writers depended upon for survival.

Essentially, wines are fermented grape juice, so I'm trying to make the point that the wine world is about scores and marketing and kind of creating a scarce resource where they don't really exist.

There are many great wine producers from all over the world making fantastic wines. Italian wines especially are making an enormous comeback after sometimes being labeled as inexpensive jug wines.

I'm an entrepreneur first and a wine critic second.

Don't let anyone tell you what you ought to like... Some wines that some experts think are absolutely exquisite don't appeal to me at all.

Very good wine was bought at ten pounds per pipe, the contract price; but the superior quality was fifteen pounds; and some of this was not much inferior to the best London Madeira.