By Charles Olken

If you are a frequent visitor to this place, you probably know that I was, in my early professional career, a practitioner of the dismal science known as “economics”. It was not long, however, before wine collecting graduated first from recreation into passion and then into a second career in wine journalism. That all happened several decades ago, but the economist in me never seems to let go. Oh, I try to fight it. I try to stick to my last as wine critic and experienced observer. I just do not always get it right.

Lately, I have been getting my economics fix at a website and blog written by a real economist. Mike Veseth is a Professor of International Economics at the University of Puget Sound and the author of several books that attempt to explain his and my dismal science. To his everlasting credit, Veseth is now in the midst of authoring something a bit tastier entitled Wine Wars: The Curse of the Blue Nun, the Miracle of Two Buck Chuck and the Revenge of the Terroirists.

His website proclaims itself to be what you get when you cross the Wine Spectator with The Economist, and while it is perhaps a little easier to grasp than The Economist, it is clearly a lot deeper than any kind of analysis you are likely to read in the Spectator. In short, his blog, The Wine Economist is a smart and easy read, and it is just what a thoughtful wine blog ought to be. It explains, it challenges, it expands our understandings of the wine world.

His most recent entry is entitled “There’s (Wine) App For That” in which the good professor relates the findings of students in his The Idea of Wine class in which several research papers probe the intersection of wine and technology. There is much to be learned here just as there is much thinking required in response to his blog entry, The Paradoxx of Wine Choice.

Clearly, this is a thinking person’s wine blog with much that will draw you in. And it is this week’s Best of the Blogs.

The Wine Economist
www.wineeconomist.com