Dr Vino's wine blog

Last week, our first-grade son brought a pamphlet home from public school equating wine and pot.

On one page, entitled “Drugs are trouble,” wine, beer, marijuana and cigarettes are graphically depicted in a cage making cat calls at children. Wine, marijuana; they’re both drugs! On the flip side, at least they differentiate between wine and illegal drugs–all while introducing the topics of crack and cocaine!

I can see it now: “Sonny, come help daddy pick out a nice wine for tonight’s dinner. Should we have a ‘47 Cheval Blanc or a ‘61 Lafite? Look, there’s your birth year wine over there that we can drink together when you turn 21. Oh, watch out–don’t step on daddy’s crystal crack pipe!”

In all seriousness, for six-year-olds? Come on. The whole discussion is not only heavy-handed but also grossly premature. (Checking on the web site of the company that produced the educational materials, I see topics such as “fighting germs” and “following directions” for first graders; drugs and alcohol are saved for fifth grade so someone at the school may have been overzealous.) We’ll just keep on having wine with dinner and our son is welcome to smell it whenever he wants.

For the parents out there, what have you seen about in your children’s schooling? How has wine consumption been framed, if at all, for your kids outside of the home? And what do you do if it clashes with your worldview?

Related: “Should kids be banned from wineries?
“Maine prohibits children from observing wine tasting at stores

Back in March 2008, when word leaked out about Amazon’s possibly selling wine, Mike Steinberger asked, hopefully, whether Amazon.com could end the war over direct wine deliveries. He continued: “the entry of the Internet retailing colossus into the business seemed just the thing to finally break the logjam over interstate wine shipping.”

Instead, the logjam crushed Amazon (AMZN). Late Friday, winebusiness.com ran a story that Amazon was putting its wine retailing business on hold, citing correspondence between amazon and wineries. I contacted members of the AmazonWine team for comment and they were either away on vacation reply or said that they could not comment. The Wall Street Journal got through to a spokesman who confirmed the wine trial was over.

The intractable logjam was the interstate shipping laws that govern interstate wine shipping. You can get 200 pages or so on it in my book Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink. Or you can check out Tom Wark’s post for a more concise background on the logjam known as the three-tier system. Further, California law on unlicensed “third parties” may have affected the group’s plans.

I look forward to the final analysis of how exactly Amazon attempted to achieve a different structuring of interstate wine retail and why, sadly, it flopped. While AmazonWine kept program was kept under wraps, conventional wisdom is already blaming the bankruptcy of New Vine Logistics, which put the domestic wine component in jeopardy (imported wines were also to be available).

Given the economics of shipping wine, the company may have been targeting higher-priced bottles. In that regard, the economic backdrop didn’t help the plan as high-end wine sales have softened in the past year even though overall consumption of (lower-priced) wine is slightly higher.

In other news, Forbes.com ran a piece late Friday piece entitled, “Must-read wine blogs.” It’s a must-read itself and will give you some tips on some more blogs to add to your feed reader, if those good ones mentioned are not in yours already.

In a piece entitled, “Eat Local; Drink European,” Eric Asimov of the NYT tackles the apparent paradox at the core of some San Francisco restaurants: while the menus extol fresh local produce, the wine lists are often dominated by wines from Europe.

Why? One wine director, Chris Deegan of the restaurant Nopa, says “I find myself drinking European wines most of the time and pairing European wines more successfully with the food.” Mark Ellenbogen, wine director of a top Vietnamese restaurant, says, ““At Slanted Door, you need low-alcohol, high acid wines with residual sugar, and they don’t come from the New World.”

Asimov continues the topic of the unwieldy pairings many American wines make with food over on The Pour. He writes, “the riper and riper styles of wine that have become popular in this country simply are not versatile with food, so restaurants look elsewhere.” He also notes some exceptions that he has found.

Wine style aside, I crunched some numbers for the piece based on my previous research on the carbon footprint of wine. Even though container shipping offers greater efficiency from a greenhouse gas perspective than trucking, a 9,500 mile sea journey still comes out higher than a 60 mile truck trip.

By way of an offset reminiscent of our bottle-for-bottle challenge, several restaurants in the Bay Area have discontinued serving water bottled in the Alps and now serve local, tap water, still or sparkling. And you can even try this at home.

Over at the new blogazine, Palate Press, there’s a posting about a pair of women who bare all and then jump in a tank full of warm, fermenting pinot juice, seeds and skins. No, this isn’t the recreational sport of tank diving; they did it in the name of “pigeage” or a punch down that keeps the floating bits (known as the “cap”) moist. Most wineries do this with a long tool while some use a method of taking juice from the bottom of the tanking pumping it over the top.

Here’s the photo that ran with the posting: what’s your caption? Try to keep it PG-13 or somewhat safe for work.

If we ingredient labeling on American wines, would they have to add naked woman if they do the traditional pigeage?

SIPPED: match made in a barrel room
Jean-Charles Boisset and Gina Gallo married over the weekend in a private ceremony at the San Francisco Fairmont according to winemag.com. Each is a wine scion: Boisset Family Estates is the third largest wine company in France and E&J Gallo Winery is the largest in the world. They both have wineries and vineyards in Sonoma.

SPIT: trophies
Dick Grace of Grace Family Vineyards tells the SF Chron “the pendulum has swung too far” on the cult wines he pioneered: “We have to get over what I call the trophy mentality.”

SPIT: more trophies
“If I buy a bottle for $100 from Napa Valley — and believe me, there are hundreds — I’ll mark it up to $225. But no one is buying those,” Rajat Parr wine director at RN74 in San Francisco told CNN in a piece entitled “wine buying for vultures.” As a result, Parr is “saying no to all Napa Cabernets until customers drink what’s left.”

SIPPED: a new chapter
Mariann Fischer Boell, the EU Commissioner for Agriculture who oversaw a controversial reform of the wine sector in 2007, has announced she won’t seek another five-year term. [MFB blog]

SIPPED: bigger Terroir in NYC
Marco Canora and Paul Grieco tell Grub Street that while they’re leaving Insieme (boo hoo) they will be adding a newer, slightly larger Terroir wine bar in Tribeca (yay!). We look forward to adding it to the map of the best wine bars in NYC!

I’ve wanted to visit the Dominus Estate in Napa since it was built in 1997. But it’s not open to the public. So when I was in Napa in February as a speaker at the Symposium for Professional Wine Writers, I inquired about visiting and was glad that they offered me the chance. So here’s an edition of Dr. Vino inside! (And a change for trying out a new photo “gallery;” background and annotation appear after the jump.)

Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher used their Friday WSJ column to blast a hole in the side of the barrel that is American Chardonnay, calling it, “simple, sweet, alcoholic and false.” Moreover, much of the pricey stuff isn’t getting discounted, as many other expensive wines are. They write:

So, did we find great bargains? No. We did not find cutthroat competition on price among higher-end American Chardonnay. It’s as if most wine stores these days are like developers who built homes on spec and now refuse to lower prices even in the face of weak demand. More important, most of the wines themselves weren’t good values at any price. They were too often disappointing, with too much oak, too little fruit and little care. Too many tasted like stagnant water, like pickling spices, or like vanilla flavorings added to water. They were not pleasant to drink on their own and would not pair well with any food…

We wondered, honestly, who they think their market is and we finally realized that many high-end American Chardonnays have become the Cadillac of the wine world. Their core audience is older, moneyed and comfortable with the names they’ve come to know. As a result, too many Chardonnay producers have decided that, as long as the bottle is just as heavy and the label is just as nice, they can take advantage of those customers by shirking on quality. But even General Motors decided, in the long run, that Cadillac needed more attention—not to mention younger buyers. We don’t believe that the current business model for most producers of higher-end American Chardonnay will work in the long run. We hope not.

Yeeow! Check out the whole article for more, including the ones they actually liked. “U.S. Chardonnay Has No Bargain Bin“

First up in this virtuous summer, Alabama banned an 1895 reproduction of a bicycling nude nymph on a wine label. Now, Maine will prohibit children from “observing” wine tastings as of September 12.

An amendment to a new law included this language: “Taste-testing activities must be conducted in a manner that precludes the possibility of observation by children.” But if they close their eyes, is it permissible to hear slurping and spitting?

The law penalizes small wine store owners as well as customers with families. One shop owner says in a story in the Kennebec Journal (via Fermentation) that she will have to install draperies to be in compliance so that no children passers-by on the street would be able to see in-store tastings happening.

The story elaborates that the author of the amendment claims it was a mistake: “There was supposed to be an exemption for small retail stores. (The negotiations) were quick with several people weighing in on how it was to be and a drafting error was made. We wound up with language that inadvertently scooped the wine shops. We’re working as fast as we can to fix that.” But the legislature doesn’t reconvene until January.

Other highlights in the state’s history of alcohol regulation:
1849: Maine enacts a law that ”punishes by imprisonment any person not licensed who should sell during any cattle show or fair any intoxicating drink.”
1851: After a long fight, led by Portland’s Mayor, Neal Dow, Maine becomes the first state to outlaw the sale of all alcoholic beverages, except for ”medicinal, mechanical or manufacturing purposes.”
1973: NOW achieves the end of sex discrimination in taverns

SIPPED: money back wine
The NYT reports on a new ad campaign from Blackstone, a Constellation wine brand, that is emphasizing “trust.” “We’re so sure you’ll enjoy the taste of Blackstone wines that if you don’t, we’ll pay you back,” the ads declare and even include a “money back guarantee“! Yes, the wine is $9.99 excluding shipping and handling charges. Call now! Operators are standing by! Actually, not all consumers can “relax, unwind, and uncork a flavor bomb,” as the Blackstone Winery web site suggests since the offer is not available in states such as California and New York. And it expires nationally on 8/31/2009.

SIPPED: Chateau Plastique
The LA Times reports on the rise of plastic wine bottles. While PET bottles are lighter and therefore welcome from a carbon reduction perspective, it bears mentioning that plastic can’t effectively be recycled (from plastic bottles to plastic bottles), only “downcycled” (from plastic bottles to park benches). [See comments for update]

SIPPED: rise of byob
A piece on theatlantic.com praises Philadelphia’s culture of BYOBs. But then adds this kicker: “For serious BYOBers, the only problem with this arrangement is that they’re better off purchasing their wine in another state.”

SIPPED: responding to critics
After Jeremy Parzen called reporting about Brunello on decanter.com “egregiously disinformational,” Decanter handed the their most recent update over to Parzen and his co-blogger Franco Zilliani. Check out the latest on “Operation Mixed Wine.”