Dr Vino's wine blog

After so much discussion of the Parker-Miller-Campo imbroglio (see a thorough recap from Monday here), it’s refreshing to read about the wines of Spain again without thinking of “no pay – no Jay.”

The new book, The Finest Wines of Rioja and Northwestern Spain, made me do just that. Up-to-date, with gorgeous photos, the book is by a trio of writers and tasters, well-known in Spain and possibly outside: Jesus Barquin, a criminology professor and sherry lover whose passion led him to co-found Equipo Navazos, a boutique producer of excellent sherries; Luis Gutierrez who recently started contributing to jancisrobinson.com; and Victor de la Serna, deputy editor of El Mundo, a leading Spanish daily, who heads El Mundo Vino.

Although the book is largely a collection of 85 producer profiles, the authors open the book with several good discussions, one about the grape varieties (they acknowledge the resurgence of indigenous varieties in the northwest) and another about traditional versus modern winemaking. This latter discussion is of most importance in Rioja where modern style has been ascendant. The authors dispute the notion that the modern style of dark, extracted, fruity wines has been a “curse” for the region and are surprisingly accommodating of it saying that the best of the moderns “will in turn become classics.” I guess it would have been a short book if they didn’t adopt a non-partisan, ecumenical stand on the modern-traditional issue. They also admit that their personal collections have many examples of traditional producers from the best vintages.

The profiles bring the producers to light in one to six pages and include traditional producers (Lopez de Heredia and La Rioja Alta), modern (Roda), mixed (Muga) and up-and-coming (Olivere Rivière). They also discuss Txakoli, Albarino and wines from Ribeira Sacra and Bierzo. Throughout the book, they highlight a top wine from a producer with a star; I agreed with enough of their starred wines that I will look for some other of their suggestions to try. They also tuck in a list of restaurants and shops with good supplies of aged Rioja (though how many will be modern?) that would be helpful to travelers to the region. In fact, with its wealth of practical information and advice, I wouldn’t head to the region without it.

If you have 51 minutes that you just don’t know what to do with, you can now check out a video of a talk I gave at the New School recently. Andy Smith, editor of the Oxford Companion to American Food & Drink among many other book projects, had assigned my book to his class, “Drinking History.” It ended up becoming a public talk at the university, filling the room, and even being taped! So here it is, including a discussion of contemporary topics such as the primary source bill in New York. While I certainly don’t challenge Martin Luther King’s legacy of oratory, perhaps there’s a nugget or two of interest in there.

Are you wondering what to get your loved ones for the holidays? Why not get a personally inscribed copy of Dr. Vino’s guide to A Year of Wine: Perfect Pairings, Great Buys, and What to Sip for Each Season. Packed with wine picks and hailed as “witty, lively and loaded with common sense” by the Chicago Tribune, this brand new, mint condition hardback can be yours for $20–lower than the list price!

Orders are fulfilled from the Dr. Vino world headquarters and signed by yours truly. Yes, mortgage documents may have been signed by robo-pen but these books will be signed by my own hand!

Books ship via Priority Mail to domestic addresses; shipping is included. (For international shipping, please inquire about postage.) Use Paypal to send $20 per book with the destination address and recipient name to tyler @ drvino dot com and your order will be ship the next business day. You can use all credit cards on Paypal and it is super easy. So don’t delay for this personalized gift!

You saw the book on GMA. After the jump, see photos of illustrious people holding the book, blurbs, and a fuller description! Read more…

My book, Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink, is now available in a new version: paperback! Not as lightweight as the existing Kindle edition and about the same weight as the Korean translation, the paperback is at least lighter–and cheaper!–than the original hardback edition.

Get background information and analysis on important wine topics such as why French wine advertisements aren’t allowed to show women looking sultry, how appellations can strangle originality, and why it’s easier to ship a case of wine from Bordeaux to Berlin than from Napa to New Jersey.

I’m giving away three personally inscribed copies of the new paperback to three people here! To qualify, leave a comment on this post noting the state or country where you live and if you’re happy with the ability (or not) to have wine shipped to you. Fortunately, books can be shipped to all 50 states but we request domestic addresses only for the giveaway; leave your comment by midnight Thursday to qualify for the drawing of three random winners on Friday.

On this site, we love exotic food-wine pairings. And we often talk about grapes beyond the “big six.” So it should come as no surprise that I am a fan of Evan Goldstein’s new book, Daring Pairings. (In fact, I provided a blurb for the back cover.)

The highly skimmable book starts off with a worthwhile discussion of pairing food and wine. The goal, says Goldstein, a former sommelier, is to turn food-wine pairing from a lengthy, possibly agonizing process to simply picking a wine that will work and then sitting back and enjoying the pairing. The various charts and cheat sheets provide quick help toward this laudable goal. Further, he lays out five important elements of wine (acidity, sweetness, tannin, oak, and alcohol) and elaborates who they will work best with certain foods (salty foods are best with either high acid wines or slightly sweet wines but bomb with high alcohol wines). He also suggests how to tweak recipes to make them more wine friendly (e.g. varying cooking methods or replacing vinegar with verjus–juice from unripe grapes). Any given meal, he writes, will either highlight the food or the wine, which may seem somewhat controversial, but actually could be a great excuse for hosts who are wine enthusiasts to provide simple food.

Goldstein admits that most people start with food and then add a wine pairing. That said, the bulk of the book’s 364 pages discusses 36 grapes, their taste profiles, various winemaker interpretations of the grapes, and which pairings work and which will fail miserably. A recipe from a chef, often well-known, such as Charlie Trotter or Fergus Henderson, also follows each grape and if you have a lot of time and ambition, you can make the recipe that won’t overshadow the wine you’re probably trying to highlight. The mouthwatering photography certainly stokes ambition.

The grapes are probably not all that “daring” to many readers of this site. But I just led a tasting over the weekend that included Gruner Veltliner, Albarino, and Aglianico among others, and, astonishingly, there were people who had never tried these varieties! The book certainly can help casual drinkers who are reaching for a new wine by offering a range of food pairing tips. I like wine recommendations in context; in my own pairings book, I suggested adding seasonality to further round out the picture.

Daring Pairings provides a lot to chew on. Maybe Goldstein’s next book will crank up the degree of difficulty even further–”impossible pairings” anyone?

Jonathan Nossiter’s new book, Liquid Memory: Why Wine Matters, has gotten two major reviews in the first two weeks since publication. One was lukewarm. The other was a kick in the solar plexus.

Even though its themes were widely discussed in the wine world, audiences did not flock to see Nossiter’s 2004 documentary, Mondovino, which racked up only $200,000 in box office gross according to IMDB. (Sideways was north of $100 million, by contrast.) I found Mondovino to be shaky, not stirring.

The first review of Liquid Memory came in the NYT Book Review, written by Jim Holt (who is credited as “writing a book about the puzzle of existence”). He offered this warm beer as criticism: “Nossiter didn’t completely win me over.” Despite this, the book soared on Amazon’s sales rankings.

Now get a hold of Mike Steinberger’s review, just published on Slate.com. He writes that the ”solipsism, self-regard, and preening” on display in the book would make the subtitle “Why I Matter” more apt. He also catches Nossiter displaying faux populism both in Nossiter’s lexicon for talking about wine that (literature) as well as the high prices of the wines that Nossiter recommends (Roumier, Roulot, and Dominique Lafon). And he accuses Nossiter of fighting yesterday’s battles.

A great line line from the review summarizes Nossiter’s regrettable tendency to paint his villains with a partisan brush: “The wine world is certainly no Eden, but at least among the grape nuts I know, there seems to be a tacit understanding that politics should end at the rim of the glass—that arguments over wine are spirited enough without injecting politics into the discussion.”

Ben Carter writes a wine blog from Memphis known as Benito’s wine reviews. In the same spirit as our impossible food wine pairings, his series “Benito vs. ___”, he takes on such crazy foods as cactus or an MRE. Check them out! And while you’re there, you can check out his kind words about my book A Year of Wine–as well as a few words from me since we did a Q&A.

One of the questions he asked me was about a time when I had trouble opening a bottle. Being smoother than Rico Suave with corkscrew, I could only think of crumbly corks as difficult-to-open situations.

But later, Mrs. Vino reminded me of The Rabbit!

I haven’t ever confessed this to you, but The Rabbit and I are not friends. We once brought a celebratory bottle of red over to some friends at their new home. New as in brand new. And freshly painted. They presented me with The Rabbit to open the bottle and I confidently pushed down on the lever in such a manner as to thrust the cork into the bottle and force a geyser of red wine up to the ceiling. Whoops! Fortunately the painter was due back soon. But still, not one of my finer bottle opening moments.

What about you? Do you have any embarrassing moments in bottle opening that you’d like to share?

At the G8 summit in the UK in 2005, reporters overheard Jacques Chirac murmur about the British hosts to some fellow world leaders, “One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad.”

The irony of this comment was not lost on Mike Steinberger. In his new book, after noting that London is now, actually, a great food city, he turns the tables on Chirac, saying, “Where once the mere mention of food by a French leader would have elicited thoughts of Gallic refinement and achievement, its invocation now served to underscore the depths of France’s decline. They’ve even lost their edge in the kitchen.”

Mike is probably best known to wine geeks as the wine columnist for Slate.com. But in Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France, available on Amazon today, he broadens his focus to include food, specifically, haute cuisine in France. Unlike much food writing, which is prone to sometimes excessive praise, Mike takes up the task of analyzing the decline of French food through the lens of a love lost. Imbued with nostalgia and occasional bafflement at the new French ability to turn gold into lead, Mike wolfs down raw milk camembert and praline mille feuilles, talks with leading chefs and restaurateurs, probes the inner workings of the Michelin Guide, cross examines bureaucrats, journeys to Spain, has a glass of water with the head of McDonald’s Europe, meets a struggling vintner who sold his house in order to keep his winery, and contemplates the lack of ethnic diversity in French restaurants with a Pakistani-born chef.

It’s a meaty tale that provokes thought and stimulates the palate: wine and food lovers will want to savor it this summer.

Thanks to Bloomsbury, the publisher, we have three signed copies of the book to give away to readers of this site. To qualify for the drawing, hit the comments below and tell us where you had your best (or at least a great) meal, restaurant and city. If you’re not feeling in an haute cuisine spirit, tell us about your favorite street food experience. Enter by Thursday to qualify; randomly selected winners will be announced here on Friday morning.
UPDATE: Slate has just posted an excerpt about “How the Michelin guide crippled France’s restaurants.”