My love for Riesling should know no bounds, but alas there is a drawback that has me gnashing my teeth. Is Riesling's image that of a sweet wine?

The best news of the last decade for white wine lovers has nothing to do with Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc or Riesling, though there is good news on all those fronts.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Is that the way the saying goes? Or should it be, "The more things change, the more the younger generation is happy to tell the old folks how to do it better?"

Wine Industry Truth: Bigger is better. Huge, chewy, concentrated red wines (and even a few whites) are better than thin, wimpy wines.

Call me strange, but I love Semillon.

Profit is the main reason wine companies exist. OK, call me a cynic. But that's a reality of life. Without profits, a company would collapse, and wine couldn't be made.

It was a bottle of 1979 Buena Vista Special Selection Cabernet. It had enough dust to have been through a Sahara sandstorm and a lead foil capsule that would make a liability attorney scowl.

Remember those optical illusions that amused us as children, like the drawing of various lines and the question, "Which one is longer?" The reality is that the lines, though they look radically different in length, are the same length.

After the feverish 2005 harvest and the tumultuous work of completing fermentations and getting some wines into barrels, Northwest wineries finally have a breather.

At Wine Press Northwest's recent Platinum wine competition, the judges considered the fate of 212 wines, with the greatest emphasis on red wines since that is the current wave of excitement and is unlikely to change in the current millennium.

If rosé were a human being, it would be reviled by the vast majority of wine lovers - and thus those who read this publication on a regular basis would be guffawing that a wine columnist would spend more than a millisecond chatting about this wretched bum with a sad and dejected look needing more than a shower and a nourishing meal.

The four are what I would call wine travelers: Wherever they go, they visit wineries. They are recent retirees, all residents of Southern California, with sufficient expendable income and they do a lot of traveling.

The word is out. Well, the word is under the radar at this point. In fact, it's so far under the radar that the word is just now only getting out. Uh, leaking out actually. Of course, you can discount the fact that a Midwest wine writer who I spoke with recently was totally unaware of the trend.

As a wine-producing state, Washington has gone from infancy to world powerhouse in about 25 years, and in that time, it has not always seen its success recognized.

The late Louis M. Martini, founder of the Napa Valley winery bearing his name, once said something I have come to use as one of my guiding principles in writing about wine.

Sure, you're going to say something like, "Tell me something I don't know," but the latest news on the Riesling front is that it's heating up, in ways that even I, a Riesling nutcase, never envisioned.

Those of us who consume wine on a daily basis are often more eclectic in our tastes. For us, it’s a bummer when night after night we face the same old stuff.