Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City among other works of fiction, has been named WSJ wine columnist according to a tweet from Ray Isle, wine editor of Food & Wine magazine.

McInerney wrote a monthly wine column at House & Garden until Condé Nast shuttered the magazine in 2007. His columns were compiled in two books, Bacchus & Me (amazon, aff) and The Hedonist in the Cellar (amazon, aff). So here’s one wine writer who was able to find a job again!

In 2006, he married Anne Hearst. With that kind of financial fusion, perhaps he will buy his own wine instead of the Journal picking up the tab?

McInerney will replace John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter who ended twelve years as wine columnists in December. Their popular column had a populist slant, periodically reviewing white zinfandel, wine on cruise ships, at Disney World and their annual, participatory “open that bottle night.” By contrast, McInerney, whose punchy column ended before the recession took hold, frequently wrote about fine and collectible wines.

In 2006, Parker’s assistant, Joan Passman, told a New York Times reporter that Parker purchased bottles “on occasion” but that “by far the largest portion” of wines he sampled were free samples. (Parker publicly dismissed her assertion, saying she had “no clue as to whether I spend a dollar or a million dollars on wines to be tasted.”) In the related article, Marvin Shanken admitted that the Wine Spectator, which has many more subscribers and much higher revenues than the Wine Advocate, was dependent on free samples. “It’d be economically impossible to buy all those wines, especially the ones that are $100 to $300 to $500 a bottle,” he said. During the Miller/Squires flap, Parker seemed to suggest that shouldering the travel expense could lead him to “sacrifice” coverage of some areas. If that travel cost is too much to bear, it certainly seems reasonable to wonder if Parker is really buying as much wine as he claims.

To find out what the Wine Advocate spends on wine according to the stated policy, I crunched the numbers from the December issue, #186, which included 3,067 reviews of wines from Napa, White Burgundy, Australia, Champagne, Greece, Cyprus, and Portugal. The newsletter conveniently provides price information on many wines; however, some rated wines received no price information, often on the basis that they are not-yet-released samples from barrel or bottle. Despite the fact that some of these wines (e.g. Hundred Acre, Colgin, Staglin) will retail for hundreds of dollars per bottle, I coded these as barrel sample (BS) and assigned a price of zero. Such BS accounted for 304 of the 3,067 wines reviewed, or about 10% of the wines reviewed. It is also worth noting that the Wine Advocate generally does not list wines that have received scores of less than 85 points. It seems reasonable to assume that at least several hundred wines fall below this threshold each year.

The total value of the wines listed in Issue 186, excluding those categorized as BS, is $210,168. Parker publishes six issues a year; extrapolating from Issue 186, The Wine Advocate reviews $1.2 million worth of wine every year. If Parker is indeed buying 60 percent of the wines reviewed, he is spending in excess of $700,000 per year on wine for review. Related to this discussion, it is worth noting that according to self-reported figures on Parker’s site, The Wine Advocate has 50,000 subscribers (the current rate is $75 a year making $3.7 million a year in revenues). Unless Parker decides to release audited figures, there is no way of knowing whether or not he is buying “more than 60 percent” of the wines that are reviewed in The Wine Advocate. I just thought it might be useful, in light of the discussion concerning this issue, to try to come up with some numbers.

Interestingly, although Issue 186 included tasting notes for almost 1,000 wines from Napa valley, two iconic producers Chateau Montelena and Dunn Vineyards, were not reviewed. These omissions sparked a lengthy discussion on erobertparker.com, and in response to concerns raised by some participants, Parker chimed in with this comment: “I wanted to taste Dunn and Montelena with other Napa cabernets in October…they were invited to participate..I even called Montelena several times as I love their wines and own quite a few vintages(Dunn as well)…but for reasons they only know, they did not want their wines tasted in the company of other Napa cabernets..I respect that….” By “invited to participate,” Parker was presumably saying that Montelena and Dunn had been invited to submit samples. In response to his remark, one commenter noted that he could have purchased the wines in order to include them in his tasting. Parker did not reply.

SIPPED: musical chairs
Jay Miller publicly states that he will no longer be reviewing Australian wines for the Wine Advocate. In other news, Wolfgang Weber, a senior editor at Wine & Spirits magazine and Italian wine critic, has announced that he will be leaving the magazine to join a boutique wine sales and marketing firm. In neither case has a successor been officially named. UPDATE: W&S Editor and Publisher Josh Greene writes in to say that he will be resuming the role of Italian wine critic for the magazine. UPDATE: Lisa Perrotti-Brown, based in Singapore, will be reviewing the wines of Australia (and New Zealand) for the Wine Advocate.

SPIT: blogging
John Mariani, a longtime wine and food writer, predicts a rise in vapid wine blogs. Sigh. We’ve seen this movie before. A more bold and original prediction would have been: The quality of blogs increases as journalists have fewer outlets. [Bloomberg]

NOT SIPPED: Johnny Apple’s wine
Betsey, widow of legendary NYT reporter Johnny Apple, will put his wine collection up for auction. The story repeatedly mentions his “enviably enormous expense account.” To which a former NYT executive editor says: “Johnny Apple would be impossible today, unfortunately.” Gawker reacts.

SPIT: alcohol
A buzz without inebriation? Instant sobriety? Such are the claims of an alcohol substitute being developed by Professor David Nutt, sacked as the UK government’s drug adviser last year. Should wine be threatened? Not if it is considered a food! [Telegraph]

SIPPED: kind words
The Winnipeg Free Press included this blog in their year-end roundup of notables. And my book, Wine Politics, receives a strong review in the current issue of the food journal, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. See the review here or more reviews on the new book review page.

That was how John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter concluded their column in today’s WSJ. They don’t elaborate on their future plans; No editor’s note appears to indicate what will happen with wine coverage at country’s highest circulation newspaper.

When John and Dottie, as they were known to their readers, started writing the column, both came from news sections of the paper as opposed to wine, food or criticism. They asserted their independence from the trade, purchasing wines for review at retail and tasting them blind at home, with dinner over several nights. They rated wines on a scale of “Yech”, “OK”, “Good”, “Very Good”, “Delicious” to “Delicious!” Their column was often very personal, touching on wine in their family experiences, such as vacations on cruise ships or at Disney World. Indeed, their final column is a clarion call for how context influences the wines we drink.

But their signal contribution to wine writing was Open That Bottle Night, encouraging readers to pull a symbolically significant bottle from their cellar and open it just for the heck of it on the last Saturday in February. Readers then sent in letters with their experiences that John & Dottie rounded up in a subsequent column. It was inspired and interactive. And it won them legions of fans.

Best of luck to them in their future endeavors.

SPIT: binge drinking; SIPPED: wine tasting
An elite girls’ school in England has a new approach to tackling the problem of binge drinking: wine tastings. “We want to introduce the girls and their friends to good wines and their complexity, and educate them to develop an interest in the making of the wines rather than them seeing wine as something that you knock back in the summer holidays without thinking.” Revolutionary!! [The Indepdent; ht @candidwines]

SPIT: closures
Francis Ford Coppola’s winery produced a wine dubbed “encyclopedia” in a carafe-shaped bottle. The custom, oversized screwcaps leaked and ruined 55,000 cases of the wine, the winery alleges in a lawsuit filed against the screwcap’s manufacturer, Vinocor. [Bloomberg]

SPIT: pre-selling wine
Some California wineries are going all Rioja and consciously holding wines back for bottle aging–sometimes a decade or more–at the winery. [NYT]

SPIT: “me-too” wines
The New Zealand wine industry faces challenges, as bulk exports rise and prices fall. The NYT writes that the country’s vintners are “desperate to avoid the fate of neighboring Australia.”

During a meeting with several flavor professionals in New Jersey, I compared a flavor chemist’s ability to break down the structure of a soft drink to the skills of Robert Parker, the wine critic. I was quickly corrected. “That’s kind of like hocus-pocus,” one of them said. “Parker may say that a wine has a nutty note or is oaky, but a lot of things can be behind that, and I don’t think he’s matching aspects of the flavor to a chemical compound and going, ‘O.K., this note here, it comes from methyl isobutyrate.’ ” And yet controlled experiments show that, no matter what a person’s professional vocabulary or expertise, aromas remain a blur: the average person, with minimal training, can perceive about three or four distinct components in a given aroma; professional flavorists-without leaning on their chemical knowledge of particular types of food-can do no better.

The article also provided a primer about sensory perception and brain function, noting that unlike sights and sounds, smells bypass the thalamus. So maybe our hard wiring is why we will never be wine-tasting robots, with pesky things like emotions and context getting in the way.

Smells, for the most part, are fed directly from the nose to a “pre-semantic” part of the brain where cognition does not occur, and where emotions are processed. The bypassing of the thalamus may be one reason why smells can be so hard to describe in detail, and also why aromas stimulate such powerful feelings. The smell of rotten meat can trigger sudden revulsion in a way that merely looking at it cannot.

Related: “WSJ: wine-rating system is badly flawed“

When Gary Vaynerchuk asked me on the “thunder show” I was afraid. Not of him even though he’s an entrepreneur, wine retailer, dynamo, and internet phenom. No, I was afraid he would make me eat dirt. (As he made Conan do.)

In the end, that didn’t happen and there was nothing to fear. Not only is Gary a very nice guy, we had a fun conversation too. So if you have 33 minutes that you are wondering what to do with, check out the segment where we talk and taste three wines. (Or see it on his site.) Gary also has a couple of books out, 101 Wines and a business book called Crush It. If you don’t know about Gary you can check out profiles of him in Slate and NYTimes.com.

Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments as well as your answer to The Question: will you be pouring a magnum on Thanksgiving?

The author, Leonard Mladinow, wrote a book last year called “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules or Lives” (amazon; aff). In it, he has a brief section on inherent subjectivity and variation in wine descriptions and ratings. He points out the importance of aggregating several reviews and then expressing the standard deviation with the final score, as in “90 points, plus or minus 6.” Think that would fly in a sales email? Yeah, me either. But a site of user-generated reviews, such as cellartracker, could easily calculate a mean score and standard deviation from the reviews on any given wine in their database. It may not be ever-so-slightly more difficult to read than a single number but it would be a big score for accuracy in reflecting user experiences across diverse settings.

Anyway, check out the article. Here’s one quote for the candor file, from the publisher of a magazine that uses scores: “It is absurd for people to expect consistency in a taster’s ratings. We’re not robots.”

“A Hint of Hype, A Taste of Illusion” WSJ
(Image: a reduced size crop of an image credited to Chris Wadden that ran with the story)

SPIT: double standards
Speaking of the FTC, Blake Gray, former wine columnist for the SF Chronicle, has a lengthy post decrying the fact that the new FTC regulations come down harder on blogs than they do traditional media. [Gray Market Report]

SIPPED: funding freer trade
Frustrated by interstate shipping laws that thwart the ability to purchase wine out of state for 47 states? Consider bidding on wine lots in an auction to benefit the Specialty Wine Retailers Association, which fights legal battles for freer trade.

SIPPED: red wine
Chocolate milk, of all drinks, tries to muscle red wine out of the health news headlines: According to recent research as reported in the NYT, “flavanoid-rich cocoa” found in chocolate milk appears more effective at reducing inflammation that leads to atherosclerosis than regular milk! But the effects still aren’t as pronounced as with red wine. I can see it now: the choco-cabernet smoothie!

SIPPED: symbolic pricing
Joe Montana’s 500 acre estate that spans the Sonoma-Napa county line, is up for sale. The former 49ers QB, who also has a wine label, listed the property at $49 million. [WSJ]

SPIT: symbolic pricing
7-Eleven, the chain of 15,000 convenience stores, has announced their own wine label, Yosemite Road. Instead of pricing it at $7 and $11 a bottle for symbolic purposes, it will retail for $3.99. Aha! Maybe this will be the home of the choco-cabernet Slurpee? [AP]

SIPPED: another city winery
Hong Kong eclipsed New York City as the wine auction capital of the world this year, that we know. But this just in: Hong Kong has had a winery in the city limits since 2007. [CNN]

SIPPED: web voting
The website Foodbuzz recently distributed some blog awards and this blog won the category “blogger you would most want to be your personal sommelier.” Thank you for your votes but my question is, true to blogger stereotype, does that mean I have to pour wine in my pajamas? [Foodbuzz]

Written by NPR contributor Daniel Zwerdling back in 2004, the story starts at a tasting with Riedel stemware, which the attendees loved and bought $1,000 worth of the crystal afterward. Then the author reviews some scientific studies about taste and olfactory analysis of wine in different vessels, which clashed with the what he had seen at the Riedel demonstration. So the author put the question to Georg Riedel. Click through to see Riedel’s reply.

The article then turns to a fascinating and important discussion about perceptions and wine, much of which we have discussed since 2004 in various ways here and elsewhere. The now-available article is an oldie but a goodie and well worth the read if you haven’t already seen it.

Related: “Shattered Myths” [Gourmet]
“Varietal stemware: genius or hucksterism?”
“The Tongue Map: Tasteless Myth Debunked” [LiveScience]
“Wine’s Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head?” [NYT]

Instead, the logjam crushed Amazon (AMZN). Late Friday, winebusiness.com ran a story that Amazon was putting its wine retailing business on hold, citing correspondence between amazon and wineries. I contacted members of the AmazonWine team for comment and they were either away on vacation reply or said that they could not comment. The Wall Street Journal got through to a spokesman who confirmed the wine trial was over.

The intractable logjam was the interstate shipping laws that govern interstate wine shipping. You can get 200 pages or so on it in my book Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink. Or you can check out Tom Wark’s post for a more concise background on the logjam known as the three-tier system. Further, California law on unlicensed “third parties” may have affected the group’s plans.

I look forward to the final analysis of how exactly Amazon attempted to achieve a different structuring of interstate wine retail and why, sadly, it flopped. While AmazonWine kept program was kept under wraps, conventional wisdom is already blaming the bankruptcy of New Vine Logistics, which put the domestic wine component in jeopardy (imported wines were also to be available).

Given the economics of shipping wine, the company may have been targeting higher-priced bottles. In that regard, the economic backdrop didn’t help the plan as high-end wine sales have softened in the past year even though overall consumption of (lower-priced) wine is slightly higher.

In other news, Forbes.com ran a piece late Friday piece entitled, “Must-read wine blogs.” It’s a must-read itself and will give you some tips on some more blogs to add to your feed reader, if those good ones mentioned are not in yours already.

“I went back and I was a big fan of 9 and 8 and 3. And then I think 13 and 14 are right up there…I can’t forget eight and nine. I had six wines that blew me away tonight: 1, 3, 8, 9, 13, and 14.”

To recap from the other post, those wines were Le Gay (9), L’Eglise Clinet (8), and Pape Clement (3) as his top three wines of the night, followed closely by Lafite (13), Troplong-Mondot (14), and Pavie (1). I’ve uploaded my own audio recording of the event to the right.

Yet in the e-newsletter, there were some surprises among the ratings. Le Gay, one of his top three wines of the night, received a score of 99 points, certainly outstanding but, oddly, only fourth that evening. L’Eglise Clinet received “99+ points.” But two wines scored 100. One was Troplong-Mondot. And the second was La Mission Haut Brion, which was not among the six wines that “blew him away” that evening.

What makes a wine worth 100 points? A couple of years ago, Parker told a Florida newspaper the key to difference separating a 100-point wine from a 99- or a 98-point wine. He said, “I really think probably the only difference…is really the emotion of the moment.”

Obviously, anyone could and perhaps should be influenced by emotions during a tasting of excellent wines. But doesn’t it undermine the pretense of (psuedo-)objectivity that scores represent? Isn’t scoring wines meant to “call it like you see it” and dispense with extraneous information such as labels and context?

How can a professional taster explain such a change in rankings from a public event to subsequent write-up? In the case of 05 La Mission, the wine clearly did not send a chill up Parker’s spine that evening since it was not in his top six. In a thread that emerged on his site about the discrepancies, Parker concluded one of his comments with a plea to “KEEP IT REAL.” Indeed.

* * * * * *
The wines as scored in the “Inaugural Edition of the eRobertParker.com Monthly Newsletter” (note: there are some minor errors in the popular vote totals as Parker reports them, e.g. Montrose got two points, not 30; Ducru got 30, not 57 etc.)

1. Château Pavie: Rated 98+ from the bottle, and 98-100 in this tasting. I found it to be massive and incredibly impressive. It received a total of 51 points.
2. Haut-Brion: Rated 98 from the bottle, and 85? in this tasting. It received a total of 6 points.
3. Pape-Clément: Rated 98 from the bottle, and also 98 in this tasting. It received a total of 56 points.
4. Montrose: Rated 95 from the bottle, and 96+ in this tasting. It received a total of 30 points.
5. Ducru-Beaucaillou: Rated 97 from the bottle, and 98 in this tasting. It received 57 points (a very strong showing).
6. Angèlus: Rated 98 from the bottle, and also 98 in this tasting. It received 57 points.
7. La Mission Haut-Brion: Rated 97 from the bottle, and 100 in this tasting. It received 43 points.
8. L’Eglise-Clinet: Rated 100 from the bottle, and 99+ in this tasting. It received 38 points.
9. Le Gay: Rated 95 from the bottle, and 99 in this tasting. It received 53 points.
10. Latour: Rated 96+ from the bottle, and 98+ in this tasting. It received 86 points, and won the tasting.
11. Larcis Ducasse: Rated 98 from the bottle, and 97+ in this tasting. It received 28 points. It seemed more backward than I remember it from several years ago.
12. Château Margaux: Rated 98+ from the bottle, and 98 in this tasting. It received 40 points.
13. Lafite Rothschild: Rated 96+ from the bottle, and 97+ in this tasting. It received 28 points.
14. Troplong Mondot: Rated 99 from the bottle, and 100 in this tasting. It received 54 points.
15. Cos d’Estournel: Rated 98 from the bottle, and 94+ in this tasting. It received 31 points.

Author Benjamin Wallace has just sent this public statement to DrVino.com:

This statement is authorized for publication in the U.S. only: It is unfortunate that Michael Broadbent has chosen to blame the messenger, and doubly so that he is blaming the messenger for something the messenger is not actually saying. I have never felt that Mr. Broadbent acted in bad faith, and contrary to his claims, I maintain that The Billionaire’s Vinegar does not suggest that he did. In any case, while I believe that my book speaks for itself, I do want to point out a few things: I was never personally sued by Mr. Broadbent, and I am not a party to the settlement or apology negotiated by him with Random House. Because of the U.K.’s notoriously plaintiff-friendly libel laws and conditional fee system, the company made a business decision to settle with Mr. Broadbent in order to contain its legal costs and exposure in the U.K. Since the claim was always confined to the book’s availability in the U.K., the settlement does not prevent the book from being published anywhere else or require that a single word be changed. So, while Random House has agreed not to distribute the book in the U.K., the book remains available in the United States, where the libel laws provide greater protection for freedom of speech and where British libel judgments are almost never enforceable, thanks to the First Amendment.

But while the online world has clearly changed the way in which wine information is disseminated, the notion that it might fundamentally alter the critic-consumer dynamic was, until recently, mostly a matter of prognostication—everyone agreed it was bound to happen, but at some indeterminate point in the future. What the Parker imbroglio demonstrated is that the future has arrived…

We are moving from a monologue to a dialogue, and this reflects a fundamental truth about wine: It is a matter of taste, and taste differs from one person to the next. There’s still a need for expert opinion, but authority is going to have to be worn a lot more lightly going forward, and it isn’t going to command quite the deference that it used to.

Check it out. And also be sure to check out, if you haven’t already, the lively discussions by the “purged and the disaffected” over on Wine Berserkers!

“We’re All Wine Critics Now: How the Internet has democratized drinking.” [Slate] (Crop of image from Slate)

Well, last week I met that consumer, Robert Kenney (right), whose dogged pursuit of Jay Miller popped the cork on this saga. Kenney purchased 48 bottles of Sierra Carche and has opened 18 of them, “hoping for a good one” but instead has found Jay Miller’s term “undrinkable” a more apt descriptor. I joined Kenney and a dozen other tasters for a blind tasting organized by Daniel Posner, a partner in the wine store, Grapes The Wine Co. in White Plains, NY.

Posner greeted the tasters in his apron as he pulled burgers off the grill outside the store. But his real work had happened well before the tasting even started, coordinating the lineup. He managed to find four bottles of Sierra Carche from two different lots of the wine (astute readers may recall mention of a third lot, #7033, but bottles from that small lot/bottling proved elusive). Posner selected similar wines, including wines rated 93 – 99 by Jay Miller at the Wine Advocate ranging in price from $6 to $150.

It was the worst tasting I have ever attended. Although the burgers and company were good, the wines were abysmal. I’ll spare you the play-by-play (if you want it, see Dale Williams’ funny account–I was sitting next to Dale). Suffice it to say, among the wines, there was one note that kept recurring: “Nasty, VA meets green pepper with a dash of jalepeno overlaying a bed of silage.” Other terms bandied about included burnt rubber, bacterial issues, fermenting/rotting hay, roadkill, and roadkill with burning rubber that ends up in a hog “lagoon.”

Here is the complete lineup:
#1 2005 Sierra Carche (lot 8114) WA 96
#2 2005 Espectacle (Monsant) – about $150 (unrated, but 2004 was WA 99, 2006 WA 96)
#3 2004 Pico Madama WA 93
#4 2008 Edgbaston Pepper Pot (South Africa), $14, unrated
#5 2005 Sierra Carche (lot 8114) WA 96
#6 2005 Pasanau (El Vell Coster) Priorat WA 97
#7 2005 Sierra Carche (lot 8114) WA 96
#8 2005 Mollydooker Carnival of Love WA 99 (17% alcohol)
#9 2007 Emilio Moro, Resalso (Ribera del Duero) WA 90
#10 2007 A1 Mouvedre $12 unrated
#11 2007 Panarroz (Jumilla) $6 (Unrated by JM, but RP gave 2003-2006 all WA 90)
#12 2008 Oriol (Emporda) $12 unrated
#13 2001 Clos Fonta (Priorat) WA 94
#14 2005 Sierra Carche (lot 8113) WA 96
2005 Pico Madama (corked, not served) WA 95+

Someone in the group speculated that the 2004 Pico Madama was the same wine as the 2005 Sierra Carche, both from the same importer. (Marc Clinard of the Well Oiled Wine Co, the importer, was planning on attending the tasting but canceled two days prior with a back injury.)
The labels are similar as the photo shows (click to enlarge back labels). And retailer Gary Vaynerchuk had a bad experience with the 04 Pico Madama on camera (around 14:12), dumping it out and dropping his glass on the table out of frustration. In our tasting, the 04 Pico Madama was not quite as bad and neither wine appeared heat damaged; but neither wine was great and the Sierra Carche exhibited consistently bad notes with a surprising green character. There was something possibly bacteriological in the Panarroz, the worst wine of the day.

The importer’s laboratory analysis of the various lots of Sierra Carche is still pending. Parker tasted one bottle of lot 8114 in mid-August and gave it a score of 90; Miller, another taster, and Mrs. Parker also tasted the bottle and scored it 91, 92, and 93 points, respectively. He also wrote of possibly tasting more bottles on his video blog. In a summary statement, in mid-August, he also wrote that with “over 300,000 wines tasted….bait and switch tactics MAY have happened a maximum 20 times…in reality a lot less I suspect…we only taste with conscientious people in the wine trade.”