Dr Vino's wine blog

In the classic Bond film, Goldfinger tries to corner the world market for gold. Is Amorim trying to do the same thing for cork?

Already the largest producer of wine bottle corks, ripped from the bark of trees in Portugal, now they want their corks back!

Amorim operates a newish program under the name ReCORK America that claims to keep post-consumer corks out of landfills, a laudable goal. They have already signed up some Whole Foods locations in Northern California and they recently announced the addition of American Airlines Admirals Club lounges. Soon to be heard in taxis everywhere, “Yes, honey, I’ve got the passports but let’s go back and grab the corks and bring them to the lounge!”

Despite language in the press release to the contrary, ReCORK America currently has no specific plans on what to do with the corks they receive other than to store them in a warehouse in Napa, as stated on their web site. Contacted via email to see if their plans had congealed, they only pointed out that their partners pay to ship the corks back to the warehouse.

By contrast, the green building firm in Missouri, Yemm & Hart has collected almost 8,000 pounds (about one million corks) of post consumer corks since 2004. They make them into cork tiles for flooring and are still accepting donations. Let’s hope one day they start making cork iPhone cases!

With 13 billion corks pulled from wine bottles every year by Amorim’s estimate, there are still a lot of corks headed to landfills. Because corks are a natural product, they can also be shredded and used as mulch in the garden or added to compost as a way to keep them out of landfills. And don’t forget cork art!

Things are heating up in the Mosel–and it’s not just global warming. Mike Steinberger posted on Slate about planned demonstrations last Friday to protest a “four-lane, mile-long highway bridge across the Mosel river, a project that threatens a handful of Germany’s most celebrated vineyards.” Manfred Prüm, Willi Schaefer, Markus Molitor, and Erni Loosen were to be in attendance, as will wine writers Hugh Johnson and Stuart Pigott. Check out his excellent overview piece.

Decanter has a wrap on the event in which a Green party member decries the bridge as simply stimulus money. Johnson is quoted saying, “Bridges have been built from nowhere to nowhere, but don’t let that happen. Don’t think that this can’t be stopped.” And to top it off, the bridge as depicted in the above rendering is an anodyne collection of matchsticks, not even a soaring Calatrava creation!

The bridge would shorten the commute from Belgium and Holland to the Frankfurt-Hahn airport. Opponents of the bridge say it would shave only 30 minutes of the journey. The state of Rheinland-Pfalz seeks to turn the airport into a cargo hub. But it already is a hub for Ryanair, the low-cost carrier that even charges for printing boarding passes, collecting lost and found, and threatens charging for on-board toilets!

If this burns you up, Stuart Pigott, for his part, previously was reported to have supported the burning of a puppet representing the state prime minister of the state of Rheinland-Pfalz, Kurt Beck, in effigy. (Where does one get a good effigy these days?) But if you want to try another, less-combustible approach, you could try writing to the Chancellor. We received a somewhat cheesy sample letter here today, which is reproduced after the jump. Read more…

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…

Perhaps this holiday season you will get the $5k winepod to make wine at home. For my birthday a few months ago, I got a gift that gave me the ability to make something a little less exciting: water.

Well, not exactly make water, which, of course is free from the tap. But I received a carbonating contraption known as SodaStream that adds some sparkle to your H2O. Fill a one-liter bottle with water, twist onto the nozzle, press button three times and voila! Sparkling water! Just like an old-fashioned seltzer water maker. After making probably close to a hundred liters of such water now, I find it to be very good (though it is best to carbonate immediately before consuming) and convenient (no running out of sparkling water).

And, of course, it’s low carbon footprint! As an offset to my wine consumption, I gave up bottled water almost entirely last year and it was the sparkling water that I missed most. Now it’s great to have it back on my table. In fact, since grape fermentation produces both alcohol and carbon dioxide, I’ll be looking out for the first carbonation cartridge that comes from captured fermentation CO2!

As to the pricing, it’s about $100 for the Fountain Jet model that I got with two cartridges and a refillable bottle (but having extra bottles helps since you can just keep them full in the fridge; UPDATE–enter code SODAGIFT to get $25 off a new soda maker for the holidays). At 50-60 liters of carbonation per $15 cartridge, or $0.25 a bottle, it’s neither as cheap as tap water nor as cheap as I would like, but it’s less expensive than bottled water–and lower carbon footprint, clearly, without the trucks hauling glass bottles and water from Maine or the Alps.

Now if only I can get the courage up to try carbonating still wines, then I’ll really be undercutting the market price for bubbly!

Come spend a night at the museum! I can’t promise that Ben Stiller will be there or that the dinosaurs will come alive but hopefully it will still be a good show.

As a part of the launch to their new exhibit “Climate Change: The Threat To Life and A New Energy Future,” I’ll participate on a panel at the American Museum of Natural History about wine and climate change on October 28. Gregory Jones, a leading researcher on how climate change affects wine growing regions, will be flying in from Southern Oregon University. I’ll be talking my own research findings about the carbon footprint of wine. And Evan Springarn of David Bowler Wines, an importer and distributor, will talk about the various shades of eco-wines. Best of all, he’ll be bringing four such wines for us to taste!

Head on over to the AMNH web site to book your tickets ($20) now and prepare to stimulate the mind and the palate.

Thanks so much for the reactions to my op-ed, “Drink Outside the Box,” in Monday’s NYT. The interest astonishingly drove it to the #1 most emailed story on nytimes.com! (And then some guy named Mikhail Gorbachev came along and knocked me off the list.) With the interest has also come reactions and I thought a post was in order to respond to some of the many important issues you raised both on the previous posting on this site as well as in the comments section on the Times’ site.

One point I’d like to underscore is that by far the majority wines in the US are consumed, oh, about an hour after purchase. There’s a joke in the wine trade that we Americans do have wine cellars–they’re called the back seat of the car.

Another important point is about freshness. Wine bottled with cork closure can be with oxidized or, worse, plagued by TCA, also known as cork taint, which afflicts annoyingly high percentage of wines–nobody knows for sure, but one bottle per case is certainly a plausible guess. Do you really want to donate eight percent of your wine budget to spoiled wines gods? For box wine, this is not an issue since there is no cork.

Finally, I’m really excited that nine out of every ten respondents in the poll say they would try good wine in a box. I think wine consumers–or a strong subset of consumers–are really ahead of the trade on this issue. With good wine, box wine’s longtime stigma can be used as a counter-culture sign of hipsters!

Okay, let’s roll with your questions and comments about recycling, aesthetics, wine picks, and more!

How is putting wine in a plastic bag with a plastic spigot more environmentally friendly than using recyclable glass?
— GG, Minnesota Read more…

An $18 bubbly showdown! Well, it was and I didn’t even plan it. Some friends came over recently and we each had a bubbly ready to go. So what are wine lovers to do? Why, open them both, of course!

First up, from the Loire was Thierry Puzelat, naturalista wine maker who made it through to the quarterfinals in the Wine Madness tourney back in March. I was ready for Thierry to bring the shazam since I am a fan of his wines. But the cork on the Vin Pétillant de France Naturel Non-dosé released with a whimper rather than a bang. The mousse–the foamy part–was weak! This pétillant did not have the gas (literally) to keep it frothing! Upon tasting, it was more like cider than Champagne–that non-dosé stuff can be tough to make. A bummer! One person dumped her glass! (Ahem!) Puzelat, upended! Shades of Wine Madness all over again!

Then it was on to the Strohmeier…I mean come on, who’s ever heard of Strohmeier? They’re an Austrian producer founded in 1990, which is practically a New World time frame. And it’s not even from the esteemed Wachau–it’s from Styria! Some southern part of Austria that has produced, among other things, the Governator! And the grape in this Schilcher Sekt nonvintage–Blauer Wildbacher? Let’s get serious! Now to the pour: major mousse! Frothing all over the place. Bright pink effervescence in the glass! Now on to the taste. Oooh, it’s got hints of strawberry, it’s juicy, it’s got good acidity–in short, a delightful summer sipper on the deck! No glasses dumped on the geraniums! Strohmeier takes home the trophy in this spontaneous $18 bubbly showdown!

Find the Puzelat petillant
Find the Strohmeier Schilcher Sekt nonvintage

Hot weather. Cold wine. And patchouli.

That’s the subject of a short piece that I did for the new Hearst website, The Daily Green. Well, OK, I didn’t get to mention any patchouli. Click through and see the six “natural” wine producers that I did mention!

Actually, here, I’ll spare you the click through and list them here. But you still have to click through for the pretty slide show and descriptions! One day I’ll learn how to do a slide show here…

Clos Roche Blanche, Touraine, sauvignon blanc 2006 (about $14, find this wine)
Albert Mann, cremant d’Alsace (sparkling pinot blanc; about $20 find this wine)
Ocone Falanghina del Turbano, 2007 (find this wine)
Cooper Mountain, pinot gris 2006 (about $15, find this wine)
Porter Creek, Fiona Hill Vineyard, Russian River Valley, pinot noir. (about $39, find this wine)
Chateau Oupia, Minervois, 2006. (about $10, find this wine)

I had a wine that came from a nest today. The vineyard manager would probably call it basket or even ampelies. But to me it looked like a nest. Granted, I was only looking at a photo–if only I could have arranged a field trip to the vineyard.

Blown to bits by a volcano in 1640 BC, the sliver of a Greek isle that is today Santorini has many old vines. They struggle. They cling to the earth. And the vineyard workers prune them into these next/baskets intentionally to help them against the elements, notably the near-constant wind blowing over the treeless slopes. The other element is water. The vines survive the scorching summer days by collecting moisture in the nests at night when the fog rolls in. Sounds quite dramatic and I’ll have to check it out with Mrs. Vino one day. And the sunsets. And the food. But back to the wine!

Domaine Sigalas, Assyritiko-Athiri 2007, $16 (find this wine)
This dry wine has a nice creaminess on top of good acidity that makes it extremely user friendly. The importer, Ted Diamantis, told me that it’s the Athiri grape that gives it that richness. The Domaine farms organically.

For wine geeks, the other wine, a straight assyritiko varietal wine (find this wine), has some off-the-charts briney qualities with a faint smokiness and minerality–the gout de terroir of Santorini, no doubt. Ted suggested pairing it with shellfish with high iodine-levels, like oysters. Sounds like a plan.

In lieu of their own winery website, here’s a link to Domaine Sigalas on the useful site All About Greek Wine.
Check out a nice pic of a Santorini vineyard over here.