Dr Vino's wine blog

Picture yourself at a wine trade tasting: there are hundreds of wines to taste but you have to juggle a bulky tasting notebook, a pen, and a wine glass while swirling, spitting and dodging fellow tasters who may be heading to the spit bucket. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if you could see the tasting book on your smart phone, sort by style or wine region, and take notes in a profile?

That’s what I did yesterday Read more…

Do you want a self-serve tank that dispenses low-priced wines in a store near you? Apparently a ton of people do as lots of non-wine sites linked to a recent post here, hundreds of people commented via twitter, and over 5,250 people “liked” it on Facebook.

The reception was very positive with many comments akin to “I am moving to France–TOMORROW.” or “I want one of these in my kitchen.” Perhaps the ultimate compliment came from New York magazine which put the tanks on their approval matrix in the “highbrow-brilliant” quadrant in today’s magazine. The only thing more brilliantly highbrow was the Paris Review putting their entire archive of author interviews online! (Good thing they didn’t see a subsequent here about pairing wine with bacon doughnuts–oh wait, that dish came from them!)

Why do you think this post resonated so much, particularly outside of the wine world? I think that part of it had to do with the fact that Americans are really getting into wine but can certainly do with out the pompousness. Also, it is kind of a Nirvana to find a fountain of good, cheap wine. There’s certainly the environmental angle too. And then it is also just a little bit zany.

But for whatever reason, the enthusiasm for the posting shows an appetite for such dispensers in the US. Who will be the first to implement this here–Whole Foods? Trader Joe’s? Safeway? Binny’s? Whoever it is (and one person in the industry tells me he’s working on it), they can certainly be assured a lot of media coverage.

You just brought home a mixed case of wine from the store. Already, things are looking good. But what if you could scan each bottle as you unpack it and have the information appear in a database for managing your inventory? Or just for keeping all your tasting notes handy and organized?

To find out if it’s time for wine lovers to belly up to the barcode, I tested two newish products that claim to zap and upload: the IntelliScanner mini and the new version of Cor.kz, an iPhone app. Read more…

Google has rolled out a cool new feature called Google Goggles that allows search by sight–take a picture of an object with your cameraphone Android phone and it will tell you more info on it. TechCrunch reported from the demo yesterday in Mountain View:

The example that Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra showed on stage involved taking a picture of a particular bottle of wine. When he ran it through Google Goggles, the result showed that the particular bottle has a hint of apricots.

Awesome! The only issue is that if he picked up the bottle of Argentine Malbec depicted in the images above that would be a major FAIL. (Maybe the system just didn’t take “saddle leather” as a serious descriptor. Or maybe he had a different wine on-stage–come on TechCrunch, we need the wine intel!) The technology may have a few bumps but this sort of optical label and character recognition could potentially revolutionize wine shopping and managing wine cellar inventory. (hat tip, Eric)

Via goodgrape, we learn of the impending release of a new The Sims-like computer game called Wine Tycoon. The producer’s description:

Create the vineyard of your dreams in 10 of the most important wine regions of France. Commanding operations from your very own French chateau, build your winery, plant and tend your vines through all four seasons of the year, and hire staff to harvest and process your grapes. Produce 50 French wines such as Bordeaux, Burgundy, Pinot Gris and Champagne from more than 40 different grape varietals, all in the ultimate goal of becoming a wealthy wine baron!

Reactions:
* In this age of Wii and PS3, people still play PC games? If it’s going anywhere, it had better be massively multiplayer!
* Does naked pigeage count as a plus or a minus in the game?
* Who stirs the Biodyanmic preparations?
* Do the vignerons-tycoons have to learn about selling into the three tier system in America?
* And don’t forget the goal of wine making: become rich as Croesus! But I thought you had to start with a large fortune to make a small one in the wine biz…

One of my friends told me that he recently was looking to get three bottles of one Chateauneuf du Pape. He found it online for $47.99 at a store in New Jersey, coincidentally, near where his mother lives. So he called the store and asked them to hold three bottles for his mom to pick up. But when confirming the transaction, the clerk told him that the wine was $58 a bottle.

My friend replied that it was actually $48 on their web site. The clerk said that was a web-only price and the price via phone and in-store was actually $57.99.

So he hung up and placed the order on the web for in-store pick-up. Read more…

A new series of wines from Indiana (search for “Slender” wines) claims to be sugar free, using a non-caloric sweetner instead for all their wine sweetening needs. As their press release states, “even though [the sweetner] has the identical flavor spectrum as sugar, it has no side effects because it cannot be metabolized by the human body.”

Mmm! Nothing says good times like putting indigestible things that you put in your mouth–or a Chenin Blanc rosé (?!?) or a glass of sweet Rubired, the rosé and the red in the lineup of so-called Slender wines. Just to crank it up a notch, they also note that it “prevents tooth decay.” And, people, we might have a new finalist for this year’s worst wine label contest!

But since most of wine’s calories actually come from the alcohol in it, perhaps the ultimate diet wine is a dealcohlized wine with some indigestible sweetner?

Site reader James wrote in with the tip and side order of outrage: “It’s got a Splenda nose! A real Sweet ’N’ Low note on the finish. AAAAAHHHHHHH. File it under Wine of the Apocalypse.”

Riffing off the famed late harvest wine, I’d have to go with Trockenbeerensaccharinelese. And you?

We’re back with Part Deux of our interview with John Gilman, author of the newsletter A View from the Cellar (part one is here). John has offered a free issue from his backlist to any Dr. Vino reader so surf on over to his site and check it out. In this part of the Q&A, I had intended John to give a quick thumbs up or thumbs down on a number of hot-button issues in the wine world today as well as some things that I’ve heard him express unusual views about. In case you thought you were done gorging during the holidays, you can now feast on John’s 7,000+ words in this second part. So buckle up and get ready to hear his thoughts on what’s wrong with Riesling from Austria and Australia, screwcaps and their problems, the Loire, California cab then and now, indigenous yeasts, roto-fermenters, small oak barrels, wines over 14% alcohol and why he uses scores!

German Riesling
To my mind this is clearly the most singularly misunderstood and underappreciated region for great wines in the world. Read more…