Archive for July, 2009

US Navy, wine and coke, Brazilian ice wine, Starbucks – sipped and spit

constablesSIPPED: raging keggerThe crew of a US Navy frigate “made history” by delivering wine to the Tower of London! Yes, check out the size of that barrel in the reduced sized crop of the AP photo to the right! The ship was the first foreign ship to participate in ceremonial festivities wherein all passing ships must render some cargo for protection from the Constable. The crew had the option of giving rum, oysters, mussels, cockles or rushes but opted for the wine instead. But which wine was it? [AP]

SPIT: wine and coke
Bulgarian authorities found bottles of Bolivian wine (yes, it exists!) to contain massive amounts of liquid cocaine! According to Decanter.com, all but 68 of 1,020 bottles of Bodegas Kohlberg wine were found to be liquid cocaine. Wow, that would have been a shocker to open one of those from your local store! More evidence that mixing wine and coke is never a good idea…

SIPPED: Department of What The…
Decanter also reports that a winery in Brazil (yes, there are some!) will be making its first ice wine. The Perico Winery is making the wine for export in 2010 from a vineyard 1,300 meters (4,265 ft) above sea level.

SIPPED: Grande Pinot
Starbucks is going local. In a store rolling out this week in Seattle, the chain will be trying out a “coffeehouse” format, eschewing the ‘Bucks name and logo. According to a story in the Seattle Times that includes tales of their local snooping, the location “will serve wine and beer, host live music and poetry readings and sell espresso from a manual machine.” But will they have grande nonfat Pinot?

Box wines in O, Oprah magazine and Forbes.com

ybwines3My monthly column on Forbes.com is about box wines. It’s an area that I’ve been interested in for a while and I’m glad to see greater adaptation, acceptance and quality. Click through to see the latest Cotes du Rhone that gets a thumbs up. And which Manhattan restaurant is now putting box wine right on the table.

And, coincidentally, the August issue of O, the Oprah magazine also has a short piece on box wines. They generously called me in to serve as their expert. You can find it on p. 34 in the gutter, wedged between a giant red stiletto and a full page ad for K-Y liquibeads.

The category is still uneven but the quality also appears to be improving. What’s happening in your neighborhood: Are box wines improving?

Related: “In the NYT suggesting to drink inside the box

Some like it hot and high alcohol – others don’t

chilisWe love our impossible food-wine pairings around here. While we don’t always agree on what works, we do know what works individually, almost intuitively.

Now a sommelier is trying to break food-wine pairing down to a molecular level. According to a story in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, François Chartier is making the “corkscrew counterpart of molecular gastronomy.” His new book, Papilles et molécules (Tastebuds and Molecules) is apparently selling like hotcakes that have been reduced to a mere powder and then reconstituted as foam.

Many of the pairings reaffirm the classics such as oysters with muscadet and sauternes with foie gras, so score one for intuition.

But others defy conventional wisdom. To the tape:

Perhaps Mr. Chartier’s most controversial recommendation is high-alcohol wines with spicy foods. Conventional thinking in wine-nerd circles has long been that alcohol fuels the fire. But Mr. Chartier says it’s simply not true. For what it’s worth, I think he’s right; try spicy Thai dishes with high-alcohol gewurztraminer from Alsace or red zinfandel from California and be amazed by the synergy.

What do you think, a little ripasso with your Thai red curry? Zinfandel and chicken jalfrezi? Personally, I’m inclined toward a Mosel Riesling. But I’ll try anything once!

Small wineries tweet harder

underpantsgnome

What do a winery (and vacation cottage!) outside of San Diego and a Muscadine wine producer in North Carolina have in common?

They are both the quantitatively best winery adapters of social media: Eagle’s Nest Winery has over 6,000 followers on Twitter while Duplin Winery, “the world’s premier Muscadine winery located in Rose Hill, North Carolina” has nearly 4,000 fans on Facebook.

Whodathunkit! Do the small, new or off-the-beaten-path wineries tweet harder? Rounding out the top five twittering wineries are: a winery founded in 2001 in the Barossa Valley; a proto-winery in Sonoma that has yet to sell a bottle; an Iowa winery; and Mouton Noir wines based in Harlem. Read more…

Red wine powder, fraud, art exhibit, Lance – sipped and spit

trekneatrougeSIPPED: Desperation!
The Swiss water purification company, Katadyn, has a wine-like product for non-discriminating, thirsty trekkers. They market a red wine powder that hikers can take on the trail, add some of their purified water, and voila, wine! Only they won’t call the 8% alcohol drink “wine,” mostly because the association of Chianti producers has complained. Katadyn’s defense: “We are well aware that we’re not even permitted to call the product wine. No grapes were used in its production, it’s simply a product that is flavored to taste like wine.” Coming next year: powdered beer. [Der Spiegel]

SPIT: family relations
Gary Heck of Korbel has sued his daughter, Richie Ann Samii, for defamation in postings on Craigslist. She denies the allegations in the Sonoma Press Democrat. The two are also involved in legal maneuverings over a multimillion dollar stake in the company.

SIPPED: fraud
Why do the empty wine bottles that fetch the highest prices on eBay correlate with those that are the most expensive and presumably authentic when full? An academic study (in progress) suggests counterfeiting. [Freakonomics]

SPIT: fraud
Researchers at the University of Bourgogne in Dijon have developed a way to track the barrels used for aging a wine: using a mass spectrometer. Each forest has an identifiable fingerprint for its lumber and that can be traced for 10 years after leaving the barrel. The researchers suggest that it could prevent fraud in wine, passing off a less expensive wine as a pricey one. But perhaps its best use might be to track whether the barrels came from the same pricey forest they claim to be from–or a low cost competitor. [New Scientist]

SIPPED: Wine paraphernalia on display
The Art Institute of Chicago has a two-month exhibit called “A Case for Wine: From King Tut to Today.” They describe the exhibit as the first of its kind at “tracing this beloved libation’s surprisingly significant role as a stimulus and source of artistic endeavor.”

SIPPED: red wine in the Tour
And if you were third overall in the Tour de France, what would you imbibe the evening before the rest day? Check out Lance Armstrong’s tweet for his answer: “Made it to Limoges…Gonna have dinner, drink a glass of red wine, talk to my kids, and crash out!!” Hopefully it was the real deal and not the powdered “wine.”

Obama’s gift to Berlusconi: new American wine in old floorboards

What could President Obama bring Prime Minster Berlusconi as a gift for the host of the G8 summit? Berlusconi, an affluent and powerful man, can already get pretty much whatever he wants delivered to him poolside, after all.

Obama chose to present him with something he might never have had before, a gift of American wine! Specifically, a wine from the Vermentino grape grown in North Carolina’s Yadkin Valley made by Raffaldini Vineyards.

See the video below where Thomas Salley of Raffaldini explains how State Department officials requested samples of the wine from this Italian American family. And how the wine will be presented in a wooden case using old flooring from the Oval Office. Reduce, reuse, recycle!

Also note the transcript provided by FOX 8 in High Point NC, which hilariously misquotes Salley as saying, “The Vermentino grape is Sardinia variety so it’s native the the island of sardine.”

UPDATE: Whoops, Obama gave the wine to the Italian President, Giorgio Napolitano NOT Prime Minister Berluscsoni. Berlusconi will have to bum a sip from him.

Can social media save the day for wineries?

125298482_d311563fcc_mToday’s Wall Street Journal has a piece on the luxury wine market that’s either sobering or heartwarming. If you’re in a producer, it’s probably sobering to read more about the sluggish sales, depressed prices for wines, the prospect of lost pricing power in the future, and possibility of increased merger and acquisition activity. But if you’re a consumer who is into high-end wines, it’s heartwarming to have the possibility to scoop up bargains, as one wine consumer does in the story.

The article suggests that “some of the newer operations [wineries] are using new marketing techniques to cope.” A case study:

Alpha Omega, a boutique winery in Rutherford, Calif., has begun using online services Facebook and Twitter to reach out to its customers. The winery three years ago began targeting consumers directly, and the strategy is now paying off; revenue is up 40% so far this year, compared with a year ago, in part because it doesn’t have to share many revenues with a distributor, says co-owner Robin Baggett.

Call me a skeptic, but I fail to see how the winery’s 296 friends on Facebook, 407 followers on Twitter and no blog can really help them move their wines (even if one of their tweets had a Palin-esque all caps consisting simply of “I love WINE.”) Their range of wines, crafted by winemakers Jean Hoefliger and Michel Rolland, starts with a $28 rosé and moves up to a $480 three-pack of reds in a wooden case. The WSJ article states that wines north of $25 are experiencing “a sharp falloff” so there must be some other secret sauce at Alpha Omega.

If it’s selling directly to consumers and bypassing distributors, then great. But I would imagine in this case that the 20% discount to club members speaks more loudly than their tweets.

Can social media really save the day for wineries? A story making the rounds these days is that the internet devalues everything it touches. But if both luxury and non-luxury wineries can somehow make social media work to increase their profitability while lowering prices to consumers, then that would be a heartwarming tale for all.

Apera, topaque, vintage, lickoffable – Aussie fortifieds grasp new names

Earlier this year on this blog, we put our heads together to try to come up with a name for port style wine, made in America. Well, thanks to a new bilateral accord with the EU, Australian winemakers found themselves in a similar situation of needing to find a new name. And here’s what they came up with: nothing. That’s right, they will scrap use of the word “port” and describe their fortified, port-style wines as either “vintage” or “tawny,” depending whether it is from one vintage or a blend of several and whether it is aged in bottle or in barrel.

However, other fortified wines whose names conflicted with European place names have gotten new names. Heretofore, when ordering a glass of sherry style wine made Down Under, the proper term to use is Apera, which is a gentle riff on aperitif. And the wines formerly known as Tokay, a name that clashed with the sweet wine from Hungary, will now be known as Topaque. Eegad, that sounds like something from a medicine chest, not a liquor cabinet.

But if the Australian group for renaming fortified wines had listened to one suggestion they might have come up with something zippier. At a recent tasting, a non-Australian member of our group described these unctuous sweet wines as “lickoffable,” as in you want to drizzle them on your partner’s body and lick it off. Yikes! What a way to boost…sales!

jamesgodfreyJames Godfrey (pictured right), winemaker for thirty years at Seppeltsfield in the Barossa Valley, told me that he saw the new names as an opportunity. The term sherry has “a lot of baggage,” he said, elaborating that the new name will give them an opportunity to energize their new category of aperas, including dry, medium dry and medium sweet (which replace Fino, Amontillados and Oloroso), with younger consumers.

To find the names, a trade group generated about 200 names that could still be trademarked and then ran them by some producers, journalists, sommeliers and shop owners to come up with a list of 20 finalists. Then they surveyed 600 consumers to come up with the winners, apera, topaque, vintage and tawny. (If you want to see more on their strategy for developing the “New Era” names, check out their incredibly detailed report here as pdf.)

What do you think about the new names? A clean break or sour grapes? And what of “lickoffable”?

And stay tuned for part two of this exciting story to see what I call it when I actually taste a bottle of Topaque!


winepoliticsamz

Wine Maps


Monthly Archives

Categories


Blog posts via email

@drvino on Instagram

@drvino on Twitter




winesearcher

quotes

One of the “fresh voices taking wine journalism in new and important directions.” -World of Fine Wine

“His reporting over the past six months has had seismic consequences, which is a hell of an accomplishment for a blog.” -Forbes.com

"News of such activities, reported last month on a wine blog called Dr. Vino, have captivated wine enthusiasts and triggered a fierce online debate…" The Wall Street Journal

"...well-written, well-researched, calm and, dare we use the word, sober." -Dorothy Gaiter & John Brecher, WSJ

jbf07James Beard Foundation awards

Saveur, best drinks blog, finalist 2012.

Winner, Best Wine Blog

One of the "seven best wine blogs." Food & Wine,

One of the three best wine blogs, Fast Company

See more media...

ayow150buy

Wine books on Amazon: