Christina Pickard

1 week ago | wineenthusiast.com | Christina Pickard

For a nation roughly the size of Colorado, New Zealand produces an outsized amount of wine. Around 105,000 acres are devoted to wine production. On the North and South islands, where most of the population lives, grapevines dot the dry riverbeds, valleys, lake edges and rolling hills pocked with limestone boulders. Vineyards span the subtropical Northland region to arid Central Otago, the most southerly commercial wine region in the world.

3 weeks ago | wineenthusiast.com | Christina Pickard

Growing up in the 1980s and ’90s at the edge of the Finger Lakes region, located in the center of New York state, my “terroirs” consisted of the local rod-and-gun club, the speedway and the hole-in-the-wall Chinese takeout on Main Street. There was a wine scene, so I’d heard, but most of the wineries catered to bachelorette crowds—wine slushies-on-tap kind of vibes.

3 weeks ago | wineenthusiast.com | Christina Pickard

On a recent trip to New Zealand, I sat in the audience at the renowned Pinot Noir NZ conference, listening to a litany of sobering statistics delivered by climate experts and environmental activists. They warned that the planet is in worse shape than we once thought—January 2025 was the warmest January on record. “The world will be brought to its knees,” Damon Gameau, a climate-focused documentary filmmaker, warned a stone-silent crowd.

2 months ago | wineenthusiast.com | Christina Pickard

Adversity breeds innovation, so they say, which is exactly why so many grape varieties grow across New York State. The latest count by the New York Wine and Grape Foundation? 134. Most of the Northeastern state’s wine regions are regulated by bodies of water—including the 11 Finger Lakes, the Hudson River or, in Long Island’s case, the ocean—and experience a short growing season with high disease and pest pressure due to wet, humid summers.

2 months ago | bonappetit.com | Christina Pickard

Between 1990 and 2004 the volume of Aussie wine exported to the US exploded, from around 550,000 annual cases to a whopping 20 million, led by “critter” wine brand Yellow Tail and its many cheap and cheerful companions—as well as pricier balls-to-the-wall reds like Mollydooker. The latter were showered with lofty point scores by renowned American critics of the time, who had a penchant for “bigger is better” wine styles that rarely lived up to the hype.