When you think world-class pizza, Sacramento may not be the first city that comes to mind. If you consider yourself a conoscitore di pizza (or connoisseur), you'll probably think first of Naples, where pizza was invented. You might also think of New York City. But Sacramento?

And yet, according to at least one expert on the topic (who has the bona fides to back it up), Masullo Pizza is one of the best pizzerias in the entire country.

And why not Sacramento? It has a great Italian community, nobly represented by the world-famous Corti Brothers grocery store and its resident food and wine expert, Darrell Corti. The ...

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The adoption of social media in the wine industry provides a counter-intuitive insight. It is often said that social media helps "level the playing field," that it helps small businesses compete with larger companies.

And yet it seems to me that in the wine industry it is the bigger, more successful wineries that have more fully embraced social media as a way to engage consumers. By contrast, so many small wineries are struggling to figure it out and take advantage of the opportunity that social media offers.

Two charts in a webinar presented by Silicon Valley Bank and titled State of the Wine ...

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That's a rhetorical question, of course. Americans have been drinking wine since well before there was an America to drink wine in.

It's equally true that wine appreciation in America is not a new phenomenon, although it seems to have grown significantly in the last few decades, especially among the middle class. It's definitely true that Americans now spend more on wine. And according to the Wine Market Council, the US wine market has continued to grow in spite of the economic downturn that began in 2008.

However, "American wine drinkers [still] consume much less wine than many other countries on a per ...

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Good news for wineries.

NPR's Planet Money reports that the relative amount of money Americans spend on alcohol hasn't changed much over the past 30 years. However, "Of the money we spend drinking at home, more goes to wine and less goes to hard alcohol. The percentage of our booze dollar that goes to beer hasn't changed much."

Despite that report, it does seem to me that consumption of hard alcohol has been on the rise lately. Certainly there's a lot of buzz these days around signature cocktails. Mad Men  probably helps stoke the popularity.

Regardless, wine purchases have increased significantly, according to the ...

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MarketingProfs recently published an article by Guy Kawasaki, a well-known author and social media expert, on the advantages of Google+. It's an informative piece, and I've quoted the entire article below for its information value. Nevertheless, I don't agree with the basic premise of the article.

Here's why:

I don't buy his argument at the end that Google+ = passion. Do you use Google+ on a regular basis? Do you know anyone who does? Is passion the driving force for using it? That seems like a weak argument to me.
Whatever amazing technical capabilities or potential the social media app may have, if ...

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