Dr Vino’s wine blog

First time here? Check out the "site highlights," send in a question, subscribe to the latest posts by RSS, daily email, or free monthly updates by email (right sidebar). Thanks for visiting!

SIPPED: French wine sales
Sales of French wine rose seven percent in 2007. Is the 2003 Iraq-induced hangover finally over? [IHT]

SIPPED: French wine sails
Belem, a three-masted barque first launched in 1896, will begin transporting 60,000 bottles of wine by sail from the Languedoc to the British Isles in an effort to reduce wine’s carbon footprint. Will gerbils power the refrigerated containers? [AFP]

SIPPED and SPIT: climate change and wine
A big shindig in Barcelona attracted some cult winemakers to discuss global warming and wine; although Al Gore could only make an appearance via satellite, wine bloggers Alice Feiring and Catavino were on the scene.

SPIT for SIPPING: Nicole Kidman
Nicole Kidman caused an uproar because she mighta, coulda had a glass of wine during the Oscars last Sunday. Unlike Gisele who caused a stir by sipping wine at the Super Bowl, the big deal with Keith Urban’s wife was not the wine selection itself; rather, she is pregnant. Kidman’s agent has defended her client, denied the allegation, and called the accuser an “idiot.”

Related:
-”Knocked up: expecting moms and defying expectations”
- All abord the Tesco barge
(image)

This excellent New Yorker article examines the phenomenon of measuring carbon emissions. The author, Michael Spector, mentions the study on the carbon footprint of wine that I wrote with Pablo Paster. And we were THIS close to a mention! Roll the tape:

Last year, a study of the carbon cost of the global wine trade found that it is actually more “green” for New Yorkers to drink wine from Bordeaux, which is shipped by sea, than wine from California, sent by truck. That is largely because shipping wine is mostly shipping glass. The study found that “the efficiencies of shipping drive a ‘green line’ all the way to Columbus, Ohio, the point where a wine from Bordeaux and Napa has the same carbon intensity.”

It’s good the research is getting out there! The WSJ blog Environmental Capital also mentioned it here and the New York based authors were delighted to raise a glass of Bordeaux to the finding. Foreign Policy also mentioned it in passing this time around but actually did mention it before.

Anyway, if this has made you thirsty for more on the topic, check out a summary of our research findings, my op-ed in the NYT suggesting a local drink, and be sure to come to the March 18 free talk and tasting benefiting The Nature Conservancy! Hope to see you there!

Are you interested in climate change and wine? How about a free tasting of natural and organic wines? Then you need to put March 18 at 7 PM on your calendar and come to West 26th St.

I’ll be joining a panel to benefit The Nature Conservancy. Dominique Bachelet, director of climate change science at The Nature Conservancy, and Scott Pactor, owner of Appellation Wine & Spirits, and I will be on the panel. The wines will be provided courtesy of the excellent importer/distributor Michael Skurnik.

Even though the event is free and open to the public, you’ll need to register because space is limited. I hope to see many of you there!

“Message in a Barrel: Drinking Wine in a Changing Climate.” Details and registration.

In other Dr. Vino green news, there are still a few spaces left in my afternoon seminar at UC Berkeley (but held in their SF SoMa location) on Saturday, February 23. “Red, white and green wine: can you taste the difference?” Image: istockphoto.

Welcome readers of the Wine & Spirits magazine! If you’re looking for some bullet points and discussion of my research with Pablo Paster on wine’s carbon footprint, check here. Consider subscribing to the site feed or the monthly email updates on the right sidebar.

And if you haven’t seen the issue that is hitting mailboxes and newsstands now (but not the web), check out the Syrah extravaganza issue with reporting and reviews from Australia, the US (Santa Cruz), Chile and France. There’s also an interview on the back page that I did with editor and publisher Josh Greene.

While some of it covers familiar ground to blog readers, there’s some new material and great art (I wasn’t Simpsonized)! And I also make a proposal for later in the year: because air freight has such a big effect on a bottle’s carbon footprint and much Beaujolais nouveau is sent around the world by plane, how about saying no to nouveau and making the third Thursday of November a global celebration of local wine? Hit the comments with your initial thoughts on this idea. We’ll come back to it later in the year.

One point of clarification: the story ran a chart from our paper that reflects the various amounts of carbon dioxide emissions for bottles from different places. Napa looks horrible with even more than Australia! What was reflected in the text of the paper but didn’t make it into the chart in this story is that all the bottles were being sent to Chicago via differing modes of transport. The Napa one was sent sent by air. Sending it by truck would bring it down slightly below the CO2 emissions of the French bottle.

My friend Kazuma, whom I met in my NYU wine class last year, gave me a gift of two furoshiki recently. They are traditional, decorative cloths used for wrapping and carrying. They’re popular now in Japan since they are reusable and give you the chance to say goodbye to plastic bags. In fact, the environmental minister made one from fiber of recycled soda bottles to boost awareness of furoshiki. The Ministry even has graphics of suggested foldings!

Kazuma says they can serve as a handy wine tote for two bottles. He sent along this video of him showing how to tie one on, furoshiki style. (If you’re reading this in a feed reader, click here to view.)

Welcome readers of the New York Times who saw my op-ed today. If you’re looking for some bullet points and discussion of my research with Pablo Paster on wine’s carbon footprint, check here. Consider subscribing to the site feed or the monthly email updates on the right sidebar.

If you’re a regular reader and wondering what I’m talking about, surf on over to the NYT where you can check out my op-ed in today’s paper. I suggest drinking local this New Year’s Eve if you are making it a resolution to turn a new, greener leaf in 2008. Local wines have a small carbon footprint because of minimal transportation, which is carbon intensive. And, heck, locavore is the word of the year according to the Oxford English Dictionary, so it’s trendy too!

Be sure to check out my maps of NYC wine shops and NYC wine bars if you’d like info on where to find local wines in the city. If you’re looking to find the Lieb blanc de blancs, click here to find it at stores.

But since it is a big bar night, a few places specialize in local fruits of the vine. The two branches of Vintage New York pour exclusively the wines of New York. Borough Food & Drink, which opened this past summer at 12 E. 22nd St., highlights–you guessed it–food and drink from the Empire State and has about 40 NY wines on its list. Home Restaurant (20 Cornelia St.) is a cozy West Village restaurant focusing on local food and wine and is owned by the couple that owns Shinn Estate Vineyards. The wine list has 30 selections from New York State, including two sparklers.

If you have some favorite places for finding local wines in the City or are a big fan of a certain local winery, feel free to hit the comments. And whatever it is you raise in your glass tomorrow night, may it be a happy new year!

Tesco Merlot, at seven knots
The British supermarket is transporting some wine via barge in canals to reduce emissions. This comes after the retailer started importing wine from Australia in bulk tanks thus “saving 15,840kg of imported glass” per container. Here, here! Did Tesco just became the odds-on favorite for the Dr. Vino green wine retailer of the year? Maybe. Depends how much air conditioning is on ye olde Tescoe barge. [Guardian]

Sideways, the musical?
Wine has conquered the silver screen with Sideways and two forthcoming wine movies. Now our favorite beverage turns its sights on Broadway (well, off-off Broadway). Michael Green, Gourmet wine contributor, is the force behind the interactive production that encourages the audience to “see, swirl, smell, sip, and savor WINE LOVERS — a romance in six glasses.” On their web site, Green says that it’s a send-up of the “theatricality” of wine education–wait, he doesn’t mean my forthcoming class, does he? Limited run, Dec 1-3, 8-10.

Glug, glug: Thanksgiving edition
You know what you poured at Thanksgiving. But what about everybody else? Dr. Debs linked to Cellartracker, a wine cellar management tool, sorted by open date. In my tryptophan haze, I found it a fascinating snapshot of almost 10,000 wines poured. The top six producers were American. [cellartracker]

E-tailer goes bricks and mortar
While most wine retailers struggle to work out selling wine over the internet, Wine.com opens it’s first “bricks and mortar” location, a 2,000 sq ft store, in Berkeley. [PRnewswire]

Today is the day that Beaujolais nouveau (aka NO-vo) is air-dropped on the world. Remember the carbon footprint! Say no to Nouveau for the polar bears.

Some nouveau is sent via ship and the carbon dioxide emissions of that mode of transport are considerably less. Sending a bottle of Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais nouveau by boat to New York creates about 1500g of CO2e. Flying it in creates about 6000g. So if you’re going to say cheers with nouveau, do it after the containers arrive via ship and say cheers tonight with a lovely cru Beaujolais that already is here, via boat.

Even if you wait, you’ll likely still be subsidizing the cost of air freight. The other day a retailer told me that they have to place an order for the all the no-vo they want for the year, say 30 cases. They ask for 10 to be delivered for sale today and have to pay more for those. Then the rest of the order comes later at a lower rate. So consumers pay two rates? No, it gets cost averaged so those who wait underwrite the speed (and carbon) of those who buy today.

And in related news, look what I am turning down, dear reader, in the name of lowering my own carbon footprint! This just in from a PR person:

I am writing you today to invite you and a friend to have the ultimate Beaujolais Nouveau experience. Just in case you have forgotten, this Thursday is Beaujolais Nouveau- a celebration of the first wine of the vintage. Each year our company, which represents the wine-producing region, parties in style with a hop-on/hop-off luxury-bus bar crawl to try different Nouveaus. What’s makes this party even more special is that in-between bar stops we make our way through the city drinking Beaujolais-Village and Beaujolais Cru wines served by fabulous “Beaujoladies” and “Beaujo-Beau.” If you would like to take part in this fun event please contact me directly via email or at (212) xxx-xxxx.

Related: “My beef with Georges Duboeuf: Beaujolais nouveau“

Bonnie, the pun Queen from the excellent food blog, The Ethicurean, posted a comment requesting that we analyze the carbon footprint of her Blanquette de Limoux. She rides her bike to her local wine shop in Berkeley, CA to buy the sparkling white wine from the South of France.

We stopped our carbon analysis at the shop or restaurant and didn’t factor in how people get to the store. But there’s no beating the bike for reducing the carbon footprint, Bonnie!

Since she didn’t provide a producer name, which is fine, I’ve crunched the numbers based on a guesstimate rather than a specific case. Here’s the headline finding: Bonnie’s bottle produces just under 2600g of CO2 emissions, about the same as making and trucking a bottle of conventional wine from California to New York. More on the calculations after the jump. Read more…

My posting last week on the carbon footprint of wine has generated a good discussion around them there internets. But one thing is missing: the wines YOU want to have analyzed!

So, in the comments below, have your say about wines you would like to have Pablo and me pour all over our carbon calculator. Let us know the wine name, winery location and where you will be consuming it. If possible, we would need to know the bottle weight (empty or full–the wine part always weighs the same).

Given our findings that transportation (coupled with glass bottles) makes up such a significant portion of the carbon footprint, it’s hard to say outright that one bottle is worse than another at face value. One of those ridiculously heavy bottles might not be so bad if it were made 50 miles from the winery and then consumed in the winery tasting room. But usually those are sent around the country (world) by air freight, which makes the biggest polluters.

Post here by Friday what you’d like to see us work on. We’ll pick one that seems popular or interesting and we will crunch the numbers over the weekend.

(image: istockphoto)