Dr Vino's wine blog

Back in January, we ran a poll after a rough patch in the markets asking about how a downturn would affect your wine purchases. Ah, what a different era that seems! Everyone was saying that the economy was fundamentally sound (oh wait, for some that was also just a few weeks ago), we barely knew a sub-prime mortgage from a prime one, and billions of dollars had not yet been pumped into non-vinous liquidity.

How will all this financial turmoil affect your wine consumption? Let’s run the same poll now that we did back then and see if attitudes have changed. If only I could make this poll scientific then I could sell it to Gallup. Hit the comments if you have further, more nuanced thoughts. Or hot stock tips.

poll now closed

If VOS Selections were a wine consumer, the company would just be allowed to drink. The boutique wine importer and distributor, based in New York City, is celebrating its twenty-first year. I dropped by their trade tasting on Monday and sat down with president and founder Victor Owen Schwartz to ask him four questions. What follows are his juicy thoughts on the dollar and wine prices, strikes, the summer from hell, Greek wines, the word of the day (“autochthonous”), and why he’s drinking rosé all year long.

What are you most worried about this fall? Read more…

Two Buck Chuck, the celebrated wine that debuted at Trader Joe’s several years ago will never have a British equivalent, Two Pound Chuck. Why? Taxes.

The duty on a bottle of wine under 15 percent alcohol in the UK is £1.46. Throw in VAT at 17.5% and you can see why it is essentially impossible. Even wines under £4.99 have a distinct aroma of taxlicious since 40% of the price paid at the register ends up going to HM Treasury.

That’s one of the things I learned writing a short piece about wine politics for The Guardian & Observer guides to wine, which appeared on Saturday on news stands in the UK (a second part of the guide will follow shortly and I have another piece in that). Fortunately, since I can’t pop down to a WH Smith and pick up a copy, the full contents of the section are available on the Guardian web site. Be sure to check it out for more fascinating articles by Jancis Robinson, Steven Spurrier and others.

“You think Champagne prices have risen a lot already? Just wait til the holidays when the prices will go up again.”

That’s what a leading NYC sommelier told me a few months ago. When I heard it I went out and bought two bottles of champagne as a feeble hedge against the impending price rise. (But I drank them already though!)

Prices of many wines have indeed gone up. Last spring, I managed to find in my office the 2007 and 2008 catalogs of the same importer’s tasting. Prices were higher across the board, ranging 15 percent and went up as high as 40 percent. I should have alerted Ben Bernanke since that is several times the overall rate of inflation!

But recent developments have me wondering if the sommelier’s prophecy might still be true. Read more…

If you decided to get a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence for you restaurant wine list, what would you need? The answer according to Robin Goldstein is $250 and Microsoft Word. Restaurant not actually required.

Goldstein, the author of The Wine Trials, has a posting up on a new web site describing how he invented a restaurant name, Osteria l’Intrepido, a riff on “fearless.” Then he typed up a menu (“a fun amalgamation of somewhat bumbling nouvelle-Italian recipes”), put together a wine list, and submitted both to Wine Spectator–along with the $250 fee. The list was approved and given an Award of Excellence (see screenshot).

Then Goldstein decided to add a twist. To the tape:

It’s troubling, of course, that a restaurant that doesn’t exist could win an Award of Excellence. But it’s also troubling that the award doesn’t seem to be particularly tied to the quality of the wine list, even by Wine Spectator’s own standards. Although the main wine list that I submitted was made up of fairly standard Italian-focused selections, Osteria L’Intrepido’s “reserve wine list” was largely chosen from among the lowest-scoring Italian wines in Wine Spectator over the past 20 years.

Click through for the list complete with WS annotations and scores.

Reached by phone today, Goldstein said that he also presented this information at the annual meeting of the American Association of Wine Economists in Portland over the weekend.

“I didn’t have any empirical evidence of the quality of the restaurants other than my own impressions,” he said. “I wanted to see what the standards of the Awards of Excellence were. The results speak for themselves.” His experience will be part of an academic paper he is working on about standards for wine awards.

In 2003, Amanda Hesser explored the Wine Spectator restaurant awards in a piece in the Times entitled “A Wine Award That Seems Easy to Come By.” She concluded that the 3,573 restaurants that year grossed Wine Spectator $625,275. But the annual application fee then was $175 as opposed to the $250 that Goldstein and others paid for their application fee this year.

What $30 would buy in…
1988: Second growth Bordeaux
1998: Fifth growth Bordeaux
2008: Cru Beaujolais
2018: Vinho verde?!?

A new wine made from certified organic Malbec grapes will soon be available in the United States. But instead of a bottle, the wine will use lightweight packaging known as TetraPak, traditionally associated with juice boxes, in the name of lowering its carbon footprint.

Matthew Cain, regional sales director for fine wine importer Kermit Lynch for nine years, will be importing the wine through his new company, J. Soif. “Over a period of time I came to the realization that the wine business just doesn’t work,” he told me in a telephone interview last week. “Eighty percent of wine is drunk within a week. It doesn’t make sense to put nine liters of wine in a 40 pound box and ship it thousands of miles.” Read more…

Last summer, some Italian police were trained as sommeliers. They have been kept busy.

First, 600,000 bottles of Brunello di Montalcino from Castello Banfi have been impounded because the wine, which should be 100% sangiovese, may have had other grape varieties blended in. Not a big deal, really, but it is in contravention of the Brunello di Montalcino standards.

Now, thanks to a tip from Gabrio, I’ve learned that there is another, more serious adulteration scandal affecting 70 million liters of Italian wine. According to this poorly translated page from L’espresso, fertilizers, hydrochloric acid, sulphuric acid and maybe more have been found in some low-end wines in Italy. The perpetrators cooked up the “hellish cocktail,” apparently, in an attempt to stretch wine by adding water and sugar. Then they used the industrial acids to break the sucrose (sugar) down into glucose and fructose, which are allowable and prevented detection. Yikes. L’espresso calls it “the largest food adulteration ever discovered in Italy.”

Gabrio writes “This is a serious problem that can damage the Italian wines image like the ethanol scandal that happened 22 years ago…That is the reason why I stay away from the mass produced wines.”

Do you think Italy has more fraud than other countries? Or are the authorities just better at sniffing it out?