Dr Vino's wine blog

Sadat X, a niche hip hop artist, has taken up wine reviewing. The segments are concise and involve neither a dump bucket nor stemware. For more videos in the Sadat X oeuvre, head on over to Rockss and Fruit for a compendium.

Everyone’s looking back! The Telegraph kicked things off with an article last week about wine trends of this decade — “the Naughties.” The signal trend highlighted by Jonathan Ray is making pink wine acceptable. He continues to list some other winners and losers in his column.

Over on eBob, there’s a discussion of the best wines of the decade. While which wine was the best remains a matter of discussion, one trend is for certain: there was a steep escalation in prices of the top wines from around the world over the past decade.

What are some of the other trends of the past ten years? Read more…

SIPPED: number crunching
Wineries that advertise in Wine Spectator have their wines score better–but only by less than one point. Such is the finding in the lead article in the new issue of the Journal of Wine Economics. See the whole paper here as pdf or a blog reaction from the journal’s editor or a hard-hitting response from Robin Goldstein. The quantitative study looks only at reviews and does not examine the editorial, art, restaurant awards, or the Top 100 for advertiser bias. WS editor Tom Matthews responds to the research.

SPIT: binge drinking; SIPPED: wine tasting
An elite girls’ school in England has a new approach to tackling the problem of binge drinking: wine tastings. “We want to introduce the girls and their friends to good wines and their complexity, and educate them to develop an interest in the making of the wines rather than them seeing wine as something that you knock back in the summer holidays without thinking.” Revolutionary!! [The Indepdent; ht @candidwines]

SPIT: closures
Francis Ford Coppola’s winery produced a wine dubbed “encyclopedia” in a carafe-shaped bottle. The custom, oversized screwcaps leaked and ruined 55,000 cases of the wine, the winery alleges in a lawsuit filed against the screwcap’s manufacturer, Vinocor. [Bloomberg]

SPIT: pre-selling wine
Some California wineries are going all Rioja and consciously holding wines back for bottle aging–sometimes a decade or more–at the winery. [NYT]

SPIT: “me-too” wines
The New Zealand wine industry faces challenges, as bulk exports rise and prices fall. The NYT writes that the country’s vintners are “desperate to avoid the fate of neighboring Australia.”

In “The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World,” Michael Pollan traces the relationship of humans and four plants: the apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato. When watching the new PBS documentary based on the book, I was surprised to hear Pollan compare pot and wine. To the tape:

Though marijuana is not fully legal [in Amsterdam], it can be sold and smoked in coffee shops, drawing tourists from around the world. You can walk down the street and catch the whiff of marijuana smoke coming out of bars–cafes as they’re called–and you can choose exactly what kind of experience you want. [voiceover from clerk: "More dreamy"...] You look at this scene and you marvel at it. It’s no different than people sitting around and enjoying their glass of wine or cigarettes.

Apparently American elementary schools aren’t the only ones who equate wine and pot. Yes, marijuana and wine are intoxicants. But there are big differences, even aside from one being legal and the other not (well, maybe not for long). Even though there are many varieties of marijuana and one Colorado newspaper may soon hire a marijuana critic, the different varieties all appear (as I found out from some googling, ahem) to create intoxication to a greater or lesser degree, faster or slower.

While intoxication is, of course, possible with wine, it is not always why a lot of wine enthusiasts lift a glass. Imagine a professional wine taster doing a ganbei and that taster wouldn’t make it very far in his career, let alone the day. Or a food-wine pairing that ended with slumping into one’s soup. Wine is not Everclear.

While certainly some wines have dialed up the alcohol in recent years, there has been consumer pushback recently with this style of wine and lower-alcohol wines have become more popular (Kermit Lynch, a retailer in Pollan’s own Berkeley, recently sold a mixed case of wines marketed as lower alcohol).

Pollan is, surprisingly, an unkind bud to wine. I guess he joins Adam Gopnik in the “whoda thunk?” group of food writers in their views on wine. Gopnik once wrote in The New Yorker: “Remarkably, nowhere in wine writing, including Parker’s and Echikson’s, would a Martian learn that the first reason people drink wine is to get drunk.”

Should food writers see wine as food?

SPIT: invitations. SPIT: glassware
All the talk this long weekend was about the White House state dinner. And perhaps to the surprise of wine lovers, it wasn’t about the two typos and at least one disastrous food-wine pairing on the menu! Instead, it was about the “party crashers,” Tareq and Michaele Salahi, who waltzed into the formal dinner without being on the guest list. It turns out there is a winery angle: they are owners of a Virginia winery that has filed for bankruptcy. While various creditors are making claims, the worst offense to one visitor to their Oasis Winery was the plastic cups in the tasting room!

SIPPED: logistics photos! Mmmm!
The Daily Mail published photos of 36 million bottles of wine in an English warehouse. Although their Christmas angle was different, they do note two interesting things: first, that Constellation self-distributes in England, unlike the US; and, second, they ship wine not glass by bottling all the wine in the UK after importing it in 25,000 liter bulk tanks.

SIPPED: ultra-premium wine
Want to upgrade from Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve wines? The Sonoma-based wine group now offers something new: customers who drop $30k get to taste and talk with the KJ head winemaker who will learn their wine preferences and produce a case of wine (12 bottles) with custom labels. Only $2,500 each! [Luxist; ht @ItalianWineGuy]

Photo via Facebook

A few sips form the twitterverse:

jmolesworth1: Counting the empties: 2x NV Krug, mag ‘98 Paul Autard CdP Côte Rônde, ‘97 Montelena Estate Cab. ‘92 Dalla Valle Cab, ‘89 Ridge Monte Bello
MemMW: Good God- 1907 Blandy’s Bual opened 4 wks ago. Simply Transcendant. Beyond Leroy, beyond Krug. Talk about giving thanks!!!!!
EricArnold: Burrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp.
EvanDawson: Food coma: better late than never. http://yfrog.com/35zc5j

And from CellarTracker, the top ten most uncorked bottles yesterday (as of this moment, by producer) were: Turley, Louis Roederer, Marcassin, Seghesio Family Vineyards, Kistler, Ridge, Kosta Browne, Kosta Browne, Gary Farrell, and Wiliams Selyem. See the whole list.

What did you uncork? How did it go?

Right now, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Dr. Manmohan Singh, prime minister of India, is being feted at a state dinner! The Obamas brought in chef Marcus Samuelsson of Aquavit in New York to cook a meatless, Indian-inspired meal for the 320 honored guests. (Get full details at nytimes.com) In a toast, the President hailed the American relationship with India a ”great and growing partnership.”

But cutting to the chase for us wine geeks, are the wines fulfilling a great partnership with the food? One course in particular caught my eye: guests wanting the green curry shrimp with smoked collard greens will be offered the Beckmen, Garnache [sic] from the Santa Ynez. While I haven’t tried the wine, one of Beckmen’s other grenache wines rolls in at 15.6% alcohol, not exactly my recipe for good times with green curry. I might just hold on to that Riesling from the previous course if I were seated next to Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Jhumpa Lhiri, Bobby Jindal or Steven Spielberg tonight.

What would you pair if you were the USA sommelier with this course? (Only American wines are served at the White House.) Full menu selections come after the jump. Read more…

In our recent discussion of wine education for kids, two readers thoughtfully provided translations of an Italian rhyming verse (“Filastrocca del vino”) that is used in some Italian elementary schools.

But we can’t let the Italians have all the fun! You are hereby challenged to come up with some sort of poem–be it a limerick, haiku, rhyming couplets or full-on iambic pentameter–about wine for kids in America. It can be descriptive of the current state of wine education to kids or focused on grapes, wine or consumption. It may be adopted in classrooms across America!

Whatever you choose to do, post your rhyme/poem in the comments below by next Monday. To whet your whistle, there will be a prize: Foodie Babies Wear Bibs, the sixth in a series of children’s board books by none other than Mrs. Vino. Have fun with it! (The winning entry will be the one that makes her laugh the most; prize can only be sent to a US address.)