Dr Vino's wine blog

Does a wine from a box taste any different from the same wine in a bottle?

I recently led a tasting and we were able to put this question to the test. I poured the Domaine Grand Veneur, Cotes du Rhone, reserve, 2007 from a bottle (retail: $14) and a three-liter box ($45) and served them blind. (search for this wine)

The assembled group couldn’t really discern between the two wines. While everyone agreed that the wine was a good value, some people preferred one over the other but the reasoning was all over the map. Although this sounds like a non-finding, it is interesting that neither format outpaced the other even though one format is decidedly less expensive per ounce/glass.

I look forward to trying this experiment again but it is difficult to find the exact same wine packaged in two different formats. Domaine des Estezargues, Cotes du Rhone 2007 and apparently there’s one from Washington State; hit the comments if you’ve done a tasting like this or know of other wines in both formats for our further experimentation.

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.

John Gilman, author of the newsletter The View from the Cellar, joins us again for a Q&A. I asked him six questions; he replied with over 10,000 words! So grab a glass of wine, throw another log on the fire, grab a sandwich, channel your inner wine geek, and listen to John opine on the topics of natural wines, zero dosage champagne, some pitfalls of collecting, 2007 vintage for Port and in the Rhone, the nobility of chenin blanc, the Piedmont producer Produttori del Barbaresco and more!

Natural wines are growing in popularity. These include what might be termed “process controls” such as organic and biodynamic farming, favoring indigenous yeasts over commercial strains, as well as the rise of “no sulfur” wines. Are these wines forcibly better? Read more…

SIPPED: disclosure
The FTC has promulgated new guidelines that include disclosure of “material connections” (in cash or kind) for bloggers as of December 1. Should this apply to magazines, newsletters, or online magazines? Why not? As discussed previously, enforcement will be an issue.

SIPPED: more nudity and wine
In Burgundy, 713 people take off their clothes to be photographed among the vines–all in the name of demonstrating against global warming. Randall Grahm had the bon mot on twitter: “Cotes de nue-its?” [greenpeace.fr]

SIPPED: Hong Kong
Hong Kong surpasses London and NYC as the largest wine auction market according to a story on Reuters. The Asian market for wine is “in danger of overheating” while the US is “weak” according to David Elswood, Christie’s international head of wine.

RIP: Gourmet magazine
After a review by McKinsey consultants, Conde Nast has decided to close Gourmet, the venerable food magazine. But if BusinessWeek, which lost $43 million last year, has attracted many bidders, why isn’t Conde putting Gourmet up for sale? Or making Anna Wintour stay at an EconoLodge?

SIPPED: changes in NYC dining
The new Michelin guide NYC comes out tomorrow; Daniel has been promoted to three stars, Alto rises to two stars and Corton debuts with two. Why Eleven Madison Park only gets one star is anyone’s guess. [Bloomberg]

Also in NYC dining, Chanterelle will now be closed permanently. Their long-time sommelier, Roger Dagorn, will now join Porter House according to Off the Presses.

And in NYS, the State Liquor Authority has a backlog of 3,000 applications; a report suggests a bureaucratic overhaul that may include making BOYB easier for new restaurants. [NYP]

SIPPED: Scottish wine?
French chefs have urged President Sarkozy to seal a deal at the Copenhagen climate change talks this fall–or risk ceding some the world’s prime vineyard sites to…Scotland! [independent.ie]

SIPPED: lobbying
The Village Voice looks at the jockeying behind the legislative initiative to allow supermarkets to sell wine.

SIPPED and SPIT: growth (of the viticultural kind)
The AP offers more reporting on the coming harvest “under economic cloud.”

SIPPED: a second life for those OWCs
Wine crates as serving trays.

SIPPED: tree planting
An Australian winery will attempt to offset its carbon emissions by planting up to 10,000 trees worldwide. Let’s hope the trees fare better than those planted for Coldplay! [Perth Now]

SPIT: a tip of the hat
In the recent double issue, NY mag ran a long piece about ethical eating that included a mention of the carbon footprint of wine. Ditto Newsweek in their current double issue.

SPIT: bottled water
Mother Jones has a long article on the making of FIJI bottled water.

The EPA reports that 28 percent of glass packaging was recycled in America in 2007. If you think that’s low, consider the number for wine (and liquor) bottles: 15 percent.

It’s a bit of a puzzle why wine (and liquor) bottle recycling rates are so low nationally. While some municipalities require bottle recycling, many more clearly do not. The consumption pattern of wine is amenable to recycling, it would seem, since it’s consumed in a dining room or restaurant: Unlike single-serve water or soda bottles, corks are generally pulled only a few paces from a recycling bin.

Hopefully this rate can rise. The NYT reported that in April, House Democrats introduced a proposal to place a five cent deposit on all beverage containers. (If that ever sees the light of day, hopefully unreturned wine bottles will not see the deposit go to the wholesaler rather than the state’s coffers.) Even though deposits are small where they exist now, the EPA report indicates recycling rates for glass beer and soft drink bottles are more than twice that of wine (and liquor) bottles at 34 percent.

Meanwhile, wine producers are slimming the weight of their bottles. Jancis Robinson once posted a “name and shame” list of heavy bottles. But now the pendulum is starting to swing the other way, if somewhat slowly compared to other drinks. Overseas, Torres is slimming their bottles. Fetzer Vineyards, one of the largest American winemakers, has announced 16 percent lighter bottles. Why? Not only are lighter bottles cheaper for the producer to buy, but the lower mass means lower carbon dioxide emissions during transportation.

On a related note, longtime readers might be interested to note that the paper that I co-authored on the carbon footprint of wine has been published in the current issue of the Journal of Wine Research.

SIPPED: reusing wine bottles
We like reusing corks. And we previously saw the 13,500 bottle wall house previously. And recently another bottle wall surfaced on reddit (though it may not be wine bottles). If this trend keeps up, a winery may soon make the equivalent of Heineken’s WOBO bottle, a brick masquerading as a bottle!

SIPPED: jugs
Dottie Gaiter and John Brecher recommend jug wines. But little jugs, really, just magnums. No Carlo Rossi. [WSJ]

SIPPED: viticultural sprawl
On Friday, the federal authorities that regulate wine gave the thumbs up to a new American Viticultural Area. And true to our rule, that the bigger they are, the more useless they are, this 29,914 square mile sprawlapalooza, our largest AVA, covers portions of Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois and Wisconsin and will be known as the Upper Mississippi River Valley. The TTB writes in the announcing document (found here as pdf) “We designate viticultural areas to allow vintners to better describe the origin of their wines and to allow consumers to better identify wines they may purchase.”

SIPPED: divine intervention
An Italian priest blamed Holy wine he had consumed at four masses that day when he was pulled over–and arrested–for drunk driving. [Daily Mail]

After uncorking a bottle and enjoying the wine, probably most people throw the cork in the trash. Certainly there’s worse waste: It’s not as if there are junkyards full of corks, and since they are the bark of oak trees, they are biodegradable. But surely we can do better than simply throw them away. Here are ten ideas!

1. Kicking things off, consider this gorgeous “bowling ball” from Minnesota artist Jan Elftmann. We’ll come back to her at the end, but this is a good one to get things, er, rolling.

Read more…

National Geographic has produced an excellent graphic in the May issue about wine’s carbon footprint (unfortunately, no link is yet available but the magazine is arriving in mailboxes and newsstands now). Pablo Paster and I provided the numbers for them based on our joint research on the subject.

We previously discussed the “green line” for wine and how it is more carbon efficient for a New Yorker to raise a glass of Bordeaux rather than a glass of California wine. Well, New Yorkers can now also raise a glass of Australian wine to achieve the same result: holding production method and bottle weight constant, the efficiencies of container shipping from a CO2e standpoint are such that a bottle of wine from Sydney arriving in New York City has a less than a quarter of the carbon emissions as one from California, which had a long journey by less efficient truck. The efficiencies even stretch to Chicago, assuming the bottle went through the Panama Canal to New Jersey and then had the shorter truck journey.

Astute readers will note that this finding was not in our original working paper. This updated version reflects the correction of a typo in one of our source materials (a reader of this site actually tipped us off to that), which, when corrected, made the efficiency of shipping even greater.