Welcome to Hits and Missives

Wine, music, food, and life ...

I’ve been in the wine industry for over 30 years and have been writing about wine for most of that time. Late last year I published a book on professional wine tasting called “Message in the Bottle: A Guide to Tasting Wine.” It took over ten years to write. But I’ve also written a great deal about any number of other non-wine related things, especially since 2020. Just months before, my wife Carla gave me a year's subscription to MasterClass for a Christmas present. The first thing I watched was Neil Gaiman talking about writing. He's a favorite fiction author. One of the things I took from Gaiman's lectures was simply to carve out time every day to write. I decided to do just that and started writing what I call the daily "500," a missive or essay. The topic could be anything from food to wine to music to childhood experiences with the provision that it had to be a minimum of 500 words long. Regardless of theme, the intent was to consistently work on improving my writing and editing chops.

In time, 500 words became a thousand. And now I've written over a thousand of these missives. Hence my Substack, which will be published twice a month.

I hope you enjoy it.