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.”

And who are these bloggers anyway and, more important, what is their motivation? It would be comforting to find that they are altruistic wine lovers who see their purpose as bringing insight and valuable information to like-minded consumers. But the image that presents itself is of bitter, carping gadflies who, as they stare into their computer screens and contemplate their dreary day jobs, let their resentment and sense of personal failure take shape as vicious attacks on the established critical media.

I’m sure this is a condition that could be quickly remedied by the appearance at their door of the FedEx man bearing multiple new release samples.

Here’s a copy of the letter I sent to Mr. Dias Blue via email.

Mr. Dias Blue,

I saw your editorial in the July issue of your magazine, The Tasting Panel.

As the “blogger barbarian” who asked the questions of Robert Parker and Jay Miller, I thought I should clarify a few things for you.

Your use of “allegedly” significantly underplays the reality of press trips at The Wine Advocate. Squires by his own admission took a press trip to Israel and later divulged that he has taken five such trips to Portugal and Greece. Miller refused to provide a substantive reply to my specific questions about his travel to Argentina. A few phone calls and emails later, I triple verified that he had been to Argentina on two trips, paid for and organized by Wines of Argentina. The head of Wine Australia USA later told the Wall Street Journal that they had paid for and organized Miller’s trip to Australia. He put the price tag on that trip at $25,000.

Robert Parker built his reputation on independence. A key part of that independence involved distance from the trade and accepting no freebies. There had been a divergence between the actions of contributors to the publication and the stated policy.

And just to underscore the importance of this issue, I was not the only one asking questions since the Wall Street Journal also ran a story on the issue.

On my blog I have a statement of ethics. Do you have one in The Tasting Panel magazine?

I notice that part of Blue Lifestyle includes the organization of many promotional events for the wine trade and press. Further, I have personally received invitations from Blue Lifestyle for events with wine producers of Brunello, Walla Walla, Vintage port 2007, Wines of Navarra and E&J Gallo. How do you reconcile your promotional work with your editorial work?

Also, how do you reconcile the ads for 13 spirits brands in the current issue and the ads for eight wine brands with the independence of the editorial? Indeed, two of those advertisers also received editorial coverage in the same issue.

Mr. Dias Blue, I did not “cast aspersions” about Robert Parker and Jay Miller as you suggest. I asked them questions and when their replies were not forthcoming, I found out the answers and then gave them a chance to respond. That is called journalism. And as I stated in the pieces that I have tremendous respect for what Mr. Parker has achieved.

The invective that you present in your editorial, by contrast, pays scant regard for the facts and uses charged rhetoric to cast many aspersions writ large about wine bloggers. How do you expect to earn the respect of your readers by presenting such an unbalanced, overheated view? Instead, it sounds precisely like the form of writing that you decry.

Sincerely,

Tyler Colman, Ph.D.
www.DrVino.com

* * * *

After the jump, details about his pay-for-editorial “exposure package,” a further point about bloggers, and a reply from Anthony Dias Blue.

Since sending the letter, I became aware of how there was crossover between the editorial and advertisement: in The Tasting Panel media kit, there is the option of advertisers buying an “exposure package.”

MONTHLY “EXPOSURE PACKAGE” SPECIALS
• Full Page Ad in THE TASTING PANEL Magazine
• Feature Story in magazine
• 30 minute radio show sponsorship of “Happy Hour” Show KFWB 980 AM
(includes on-air interview, orpportunity [sic] to showcase brand)
• Price $13,500/month

PREMIUM PACKAGE
• Full Page Ad in THE TASTING PANEL Magazine
• Feature Story in magazine
• 45 minute radio show sponsorship of “Happy Hour” Show KFWB 980 AM
(includes on-air interview, opportunity to showcase brand)
• Price $8,000/month

Mr. Dias Blue makes a point about wine blogs being unregulated but the same could be said of wine criticism and wine writing more generally. Blogging is fun, interactive and the diverse participants often bring tremendous passion. In many cases, they have specific knowledge. I’m sure that Mr. Dias Blue came across Franco Zilliani’s excellent blogging on the Brunello scandal of last year, for example. Painting with a broad brush when it comes to wine (or for anything) is almost always a bad idea. Do all the wines of Walla Walla or Navarra suck, for example? Of course not! So why should all bloggers be characterized as “barbarians” or “militants”? In fact, over at the blog for Domain 547, there’s a post up entitled “These Wine Bloggers Are…” with biographical information about some of the people behind wine blogs.

* * * *

Anthony Dias Blue just responded. I reproduce his email below.

Dear Mr. Colman,

Thank you for your temperate email (I have received some communications from bloggers that have not been quite so non-violent).

You pose a number of issues and I will try to respond as best I can. Let’s start with the ethics statement: no, we do not have an ethics statement in the magazine (except for the clarification at the beginning of the review section) but looking at your ethics statement, I don’t see that we substantially deviate from it. Like you, we have an outside company that sells our advertising (Huson in San Francisco). I notice that you are running an ad (via Google) for Mankas Springs Vineyards. What if a bottle of Mankas Springs wine happened to slip into your blind tasting and you liked it very much? Should one automatically assume there is some impropriety involved if you reported favorably about it? No, because you have established yourself as a serious journalist with a track record of balanced reporting. Would it not, in fact, be unfair if you were to omit a favorable rating because they are an advertiser? If we have eight wine ads in our magazine it’s only an indication that our ad sales people are more effective than yours. Frankly, I couldn’t tell you who the advertisers are. I have been employed for more than thirty years by CBS who require adherence to a long and detailed ethics statement (prompted by the payola scandal of the 1960s). I also worked for Condé Nast for 25 years.

I am impressed that you pay for “the vast majority” of the wines you write about. If you taste 1000 wines each year, then you must be paying for 750 of them. That would mean that you are spending in the neighborhood of $20,000 on samples not to mention your grocery bills. I envy your financial independence. I taste about 7,000 wines a year. That would bring my sample bill to well over $100,000. I think I prefer tipping the UPS and FedEx guys generously.

As for the trade events, that part of the business is the province of Allison Levine whom I think you met when you were on a press trip together. I have no input as to whose events we do.

Response to the editor letter you cite has been running five to one in favor. Clearly bloggers need to repair their image. As one of the more literate members of the group, perhaps you could establish some framework or authority that could separate the serious bloggers from the pajama-clad wannabes.

Thank you again for your email.

Regards,

I would be curious how he reconciles the “exposure package” with the ethical standards of CBS Radio (KFWB 980 AM)? Perhaps he will elaborate in the comments here.

Also, since Mr. Dias Blue brings up his employee, Allison Levine, it is worth pointing out that her title is “Vice President, Marketing and Events, Blue Lifestyle and The Tasting Panel Magazine.” Both she and Mr. Dias Blue list the same business address in Pacific Palisades, CA in the signature section of their emails.

His unrepentant email still “casts aspersions” on bloggers of all stripes. Is he not throwing stones from his glass house in Pacific Palisades?

Last fall, Wine Library, the Springfield, New Jersey wine retailer, sent out an email offering for a wine that seemed to be the wine lover’s dream: a fantastic quality-to-price ratio. The wine on offer was the Sierra Carche 2005, a blend of Monastrell with Petit Verdot and Malbec from the off-the beaten path Spanish region of Jumilla. Jay Miller, a critic at the Wine Advocate, described it as “Inky purple, the wine offers an array of scents which jump from the glass… structured wine with gobs of flavor, terrific intensity… It will provide pleasure through 2025.” He awarded it 96 points. The suggested retail price was $40; Wine Library was offering it for $29.99. Robert Kenney, a New Jersey wine consumer, was so enthusiastic upon seeing the email that he ordered several six packs.

But Kenney’s euphoria turned sour as soon as he pulled a cork. He later wrote on the forums at erobertparker.com that “I have consumed 6 bottles already, praying that with each popped cork, a different genie will emerge…so far, no such luck…slapping 80 points on those bottles is generous.”

Kenney describes himself as an “unabashed fan of DrBigJ,” as Miller is known. But Kenney was so disappointed with the wine that he corresponded with Miller and FedExed Miller one of his bottles last fall for him to taste and “see if indeed it was indicative of the wine that he had tasted and scored highly.” Kenney wrote last week that “During a ten month period I had exchanged seven emails with DrBigJ, reminding/imploring him to taste the sent bottle…to no avail.”

Then a consumer in Pittsburgh, Bob Hudak, posted that he had found the wine for $38 at the PLCB, the state-run store in Pennsylvania. On July 5, Hudak wrote of his experience, “Considering that it was a Dr Big Jay 96 pointer in the WA, I figured I buy 6 bottles. I opened my first one this weekend. Big mistake. The wine had virtually no aroma at all. You couldn’t smell a darn thing. With time and air, some stinky aromas that were off-putting became noticeable.”

Kenney chimed in on the thread as did several other consumers with their negative experiences with the wine. (The wine’s scores on cellartracker.com were not all bad although several reviewers took the time to note flawed bottles and one gave it a 74 but the modal score was around 90.)

On July 14, Miller posted to the forum that he finally opened the bottle Kenney had sent him and declared it “undrinkable.” Miller contacted the importer of the wine, Mark Clinard of Well Oiled Wine Co., who replied, “We have had similar problems with this wine and had a meeting in March with the winery to find out what the problem is. There was clearly some substandard product shipped by the winery and we have had to take back a large chunk of this wine from the market because it was rejected by the trade. I apologize on behalf of the winery for this apparent bait and switch. Going forward we are searching for a different winery for this brand.” He posted his cell phone number and asked that those consumers with problems contact him.

Brandon Warnke, Vice President of Operations at Wine Library, posted that anyone who bought the wine through the store could return it to them for a full refund.

Jay Miller then wrote: “this is about the worst thing that can happen to a critic, to be tasted on a fraudulent wine, publish a note, and then have readers spend their good money on a fairly pricey wine only to find out that it’s plonk or worse. Its reminiscent of the furor over Las Rocas a few years ago that nearly killed that brand. It’s a bad situation all around.”

Bruce Leiserowitz, a consumer, then asked specific questions of Miller, who replied:

I’ll do my best, Bruce.
1. The wine was tasted at the usual venue where RMP and I taste with importers, The Oregon Grill in Hunt Vally, MD. Present was Mark Clinard and his partner in the Well-Oiled Wine Company, and Mark Noah, the sommelier who pours wine for Bob and myself. The wine was tasted from bottle; it was not presented as a barrel sample.
2. I can’t respond to this question except that Mark Clinard said that there were three different bottlings of this wine and that some of it was sound. A few people on the Board have given the wine excellent notes while others have had problems. The logical guess is that these discrepancies were due to the differrent bottlings. The wine that Robert Kenney sent me was not defective int he sense of brett, mercaptan, or any winemaking issue. It was just mediocre wine like you might expect in a cheap jug wine. As I said, pretty close to undrinkable.
3. I’ll take the blame for not tasting the wine right away. I just didn’t take it seriously since this was the only complaint that I knew about (until very recently when Bob Hudak and a few others reported their bad bottles).

For some history, go back and look what happened a number of years ago with Las Rocas. It obviously took a while for it to percolate up that there was some bad wine out there. Once it became clear, after being alerted by RMP who received some feedback about bad bottles, the importer Eric Solomon took responsibility. –MrBigJ

He also then added, “I meant fraudulent only in the sense that what I tasted in Robert Kenney’s bottle was a different wine than what I tasted with Mark Clinard at The Oregon Grill.”

This was the first vintage of Sierra Carche, which is owned by Guy Anderson in the United Kingdom. Guy Anderson Wines describes its business: “As one of the UK’s leading brand creators, …. [w]e are constantly researching and learning what people look for when choosing a wine…. We have a strong track record of producing innovative new wine brands…. [B]rands created by Guy Anderson Wines such as Fat Bastard, Mad Dogs & Englishmen and Gran Familia have found success in markets around the world.”

But there was still little known about the actual winery and vineyards producing the Sierra Carche. The importer’s page states that there were 20,000 bottles produced (the above label showed a number out of 16,000). There is scant elaboration on the vineyards.

In the absence of a reply from the Sierra Carche importer, Well Oiled Wine Co., Victor de la Serna offered some additional information. (De la Serna is a Madrid-based authority on Spanish wine and founder of elmundovino.es.) He writes:

I can give some information on this subject. Bodegas y Viñedos de Murcia is not a winery, but the commercial arm of the Casa de la Ermita group of wineries in southeastern Spain. This is a still quite recent (1999) group which began in Jumilla with Casa de la Ermita (DO Jumilla), was expanded with Casa de las Especias (DO Yecla) and Dominio de la Peseta (DO Alicante), three adjoining appellations sharing the same monastrell-dominated terroir, and there’s also, I believe, two more companies, Casa de la Ermita USA and Altos de la Ermita, the latter for upscale wines. The rapid expansion caused the raising of quite a few eyebrows in Spain. The group has been the subject of ‘for sale’ rumors for several years now – but business troubles are unfortunately not uncommon these days among Spanish wineries, so this is certainly not an isolated case.

There have been a couple of other similar cases of lot variation in the past few years involving inexpensive Spanish wines that were highly rated in the WA – always a risk, IMHO, with wines produced by large-scale wineries which can easily increase production of commercially successful brands. Sierra Carche seems to be a different case in that it’s a more expensive wine, but it does come from a very large winery.

Humberto Dorta, a wine consumer residing in Pennsylvania, corresponded with an official at the PLCB about the wine. Here is the reply from the official:

Thank you for contacting the PLCB and bringing this matter to my attention. Please be informed that the Bodegas Murcia Sierra Carche 2005 was not “dumped” on the PLCB as you have described. The importer, Well Oiled Wine presented the wine to my office in the Spring of 2008. As a long time business associate with a new import company. Mr. Mark Clinard of Well Oiled knows the purchasing power of the PLCB. He presented a volume purchase opportunity which we believed at the time would be a great fit for the Chairman Selection program.

As we do with all Premium Collection store proposed wine purchases, my buying team and I sampled the Sierra Carche 2005 which was rated 96pts from the Wine Advocate magazine and quoted with a price of $40.00. We found the wine to be outstanding, in spite of its youth it was showing deep black fruits and some pencil lead. The PLCB price was negotiated to $29.99 for a 700, six bottle, case purchase. The PLCB order arrived in August of 2008 on the first container of this wine to the United States. Only 525 cases of the wine had arrived which went to the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh markets. The Central PA order of 175 cases arrived later and was rejected due to it’s late arrival. The 525 cases sold through at $29.99 without any incidents of excessive customer returns.

Effective July 1, 2009 the wine was given a liquidation price of $18.99. There were approximately 150 bottles remaining at that time. As I stated the PLCB received wine from the first container of this wine to the US. I believe that subsequent shipments of the wine may have contained questionable juice. In the spring of this year, my office was offered the Bodegas Murcia Sierra Carche 2006 which we declined. I will personally pull a bottle from our remaining 2005 inventory to see if there is any cause for concern. Again thank you for passing the information along to me.

An email yesterday morning to importer Mark Clinard seeking clarification about the winery, the three lots, the production volume, and possibilities for customer refunds was not returned. Reached on his cell phone yesterday morning, he said he had no comment at this time.

Late yesterday someone posted to the fourms at wineberserkers.com using the handle BVM winemaker.

We produced a single tank of 180 hl for Sierra Carche 2005 and a sample was submitted to the Wine Advocate for tasting in November 2007. We bottled the full quantity over two days and labeled 20,000 bottles for Well Oiled Wine Co order (lots 8113 & 8114) and we reserved the remnant (3,600 bottles) into clean skin stock (lot 7033). Following the wine’s successful reception among customers and reviewers, we shipped the remnant lot 7033 to additional markets including 1050 bottles to the US. At the request of Mark Clinard at WOW Co following the complaint by the Wine Advocate, we re-tasted the wine and while we found no problems, we also sent samples for analysis at an independent laboratory. We will report the results as soon as they are available. In the meantime, in keeping with our policy on all wines delivered to any customer, BVM will honor any returns of Sierra Carche 2005.

The saga of Sierra Carche is a fascinating and still unfolding tale. One of the largest questions is what protections do consumers have? Have you ever been like Robert Kenney and bought a lot of wine based on a score without trying it? Do you think that wine stores should honor returns of this wine, as Wine Library is doing? (Not all states may allow returns and some may limit the length of time that a shop could return a wine to the distributor.) Although there appears to be nothing illegal with what has happened, and, if real, the “BVM winemaker” has offered returns of all wine so consumers like Robert Kenney can be made whole assuming the three tier system allows it.

Daniel Posner (above, right), owner of the wine store Grapes The Wine Company, drew this review to my attention. The wine in question was the flagship Viu 1 from Viu Manent, a 75 year old winery in Chile. Writing in the Wine Advocate, Jay Miller had dropped the 62 on the 2006 while previous two vintages of Viu 1 scored 92 and 92+ respectively (about $60; find these wines).

So I dropped a line to Viu Manent through their web site and heard back from Jose Miguel Viu, managing director. He wrote: “We are in the process of evaluating the reasons why our wines were so poorly evaluated because, as you noticed, this is very unusual and was further aggravated by the fact that for the first time Wine Advocate decided to publish scores under 85 points…This is not to mention the excellent reception we have always had on other important publications. Viu 1 2006, for instance, became Wine Enthusiast Editor’s choice with 92 points on July’s 09 issue.”

A couple of more emails with Senor Viu established that Miller had tasted the wines at an event in Santiago organized by the Wines of Chile (see photos and a description of the tasting in a piece entitled “Jay Miller: Looking for Pleasure”). Further, Grant Phelps, the Viu Manent winemaker, said that the Viu 1 was “identical in almost every respect” to the 2003, 2004 and 2005, three vintages that he also made. Finally, Senor Viu offered to send me samples of the wines directly from the winery. I accepted.

But I didn’t want to taste them alone so I proposed to Daniel Posner that we could taste them together at his handsome new shop in North White Plains, NY. He then decided to invite his bitter Westchester rival, Max Marinucci (photo at the top; left) who owns the also handsome Wine Connection in Pound Ridge, NY, and one of his customers, Mark Franks, for lunch. It was very good to meet them both for the first time.

We settled into a booth and after a warm up tasting of some Spanish wines (described below) and moved into the Viu 1 vertical. Unfortunately I knew which wine was which but I concealed the identity of the wines from the others. From the heavy, bodybuilder bottle, I poured the opaque, purple/black wine in the glasses.

One person commented, “I’d give them all 62.” He followed up by saying that they are big wines that could be from anywhere and were broadly similar. But there was general agreement that the first wine tasted the best and that the last wine tasted different, more extracted, more dense, and bigger. “The wine that Miller would have liked the most,” as one taster put it.

But it turned out that was the 62 pointer, the 2006. Was it inferior? Sure. But 30 points worse, putting it in the realm of “a below average wine containing noticeable deficiencies, such as excessive acidity and/or tannin, an absence of flavor, or possibly dirty aromas or flavors”? Not to any of us.

As to the Spanish wine, Daniel had corresponded with Nola Palomar, a small producer of Spanish wines based in Andalusia. She had stated that she had trouble having the wines reviewed by the Wine Advocate despite being reviewed by Stephen Tanzer. Of the six wines, the 2008 Veleta Vijirieja stood out as a zippy summer sipper and the 2006 Veleta Noladas, a blend of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, and tempranillo had some interesting complexity; both were good values at under $15. Certainly more than 62 points!

Then we finished our lunch with a 1976 Lopez de Heredia Bosconia and a 1996 Ponsot, Clos de la Roche, split the bill, and headed out.

Reporter David Kesmodel details the divergence between policy and practice at Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate. He acknowledges reporting on this blog that initially raised the questions (see my original correspondence with Parker and critic Jay Miller here and a follow up here).

The Wall Street Journal story adds details that Miller accepted trips to Australia and Chile paid by wine industry groups. I contacted Wines of Argentina last month and their staff in Mendoza verified that they had also had paid for two trips for Miller to visit the country. Other parties verified that he was ferried around the country by private jet on one of those trips.

The WSJ story says that Parker declined to respond to interview requests, as did Miller and Mark Squires who has admitted to taking press trips to Portugal, Israel and Greece. Joining a press trip from a regional or national association is not out of ordinary for wine writers; it’s that Robert Parker laid down ethical standards years ago that state “It is imperative for a wine critic to pay his own way” and “it is imperative to keep one’s distance from the trade.” Parker’s lack of response to the reporter seems odd since not only would it clarify the situation but he encouraged reporters to call him just last month, writing in his forum “Today…most journalists don’t even call if they want to write about me…no sense having me provide a well documented rebuttal that undermines their story line……”

“Wine Advocate Writers Spark Ethics Debate” [Wall Street Journal]

One claim that came up several times in the over 130 comments was that Mr. Miller took one or two trips to Argentina, organized and paid for by Wines of Argentina, a trade group representing over 100 wineries that also receives government funding according to their web site. I contacted Wines of Argentina and they confirmed that they paid for and organized the two trips and several people in the trade there also confirmed them. Robert Parker has also now admitted as well but referred to them as “vineyard tours.” There was apparently more to the trips than just that–multiple sources said that there were lunches and dinner at wineries, and I was also told by several people that Miller was ferried around the country by private jet during one visit.

I alerted Miller yesterday that Wines of Argentina had told me that the trips were comped and asked him for comment. Not long thereafter, Parker posted a message that indicated that Miller would no longer be able to take “vineyard tours paid by Wines of Argentina.”

Parker laid down ethical guidelines years ago–guidelines that are the source of so much of his authority and that have set the standard against which all other wine critics are judged. The divergence between the action of some contributors to the Wine Advocate and the stated policy was (and perhaps still remains) a legitimate and important issue given the power of the publication; if the Wine Advocate was bending the rules, that was something his readers had a right to know.

Over the weekend, on his web site, Parker characterized those of us raising these concerns as the work of “extremists who could care less about the truth.” On the contrary, the truth was precisely what I’ve been after. Perhaps the larger issue then is Parker seemed to resent that people wanted to know the truth. While Parker lamented the state of journalism, the examples he cites of good journalism seem to be anything that speaks well of him.

But journalism is precisely what I’ve been doing all along. I went to Parker and Miller with legitimate questions and they were evasive. I spoke with Wines of Argentina and the truth came out. That’s called journalism. Instead of lashing out with invective (”extremists” or “jihadists” or eliding wine bloggers with the Taliban) at me and others who have raised very legitimate issues, Parker should take this episode as indicative of the respect he commands and the seriousness with which the wine community takes the ethical standards he established long ago.

Since Mr. Parker has shown an affection for ending his interventions with quotes, here’s an aphorism that he might remember from his days as a lawyer: “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.”

Perhaps the most jaw-dropping of the actions relates to wine and the internet. A French court ruled early last year that Heineken’s web site was illegal to display in France, which sparked fears and confusion among wine web sites and Microsoft pulled wine ads. Also, in another decision last year, a court fined the newspaper Le Parisien €5,000 for a champagne review article claiming that it was no different than an advertisement and should run the disclaimer: “Alcohol abuse is dangerous to your health.”

That could never happen here, right?

Well, not entirely. According to this article on ABCnews.com, under new Federal Trade Commission regulations on Consumer Product Testimonial and Endorsement Rules, product reviews on blogs may soon fall under the same liability standard as advertisements. (Given the various claims to the tune of “lose thirty pounds in thirty days,” one might easily be forgiven for not even realizing that there even were advertising standards.) The most obviously affected category would be paid reviews, but those, rightfully, shouldn’t count as editorial anyway.

“It would only affect bloggers who are paid to write reviews but the sticky issue that is raised is what happens if a product is given for free,” an FTC spokesman told ABC News.

That could raise a host of issues for wine bloggers as well as wine journalists whose articles appear on the internet. But whether a review of a free sample wine (as opposed to a purchased wine) could ever be seen as basis for liability, as it might in an infant car seat as the focus of the ABC story, seems like an incredible long shot. The subjectivity of reviews (what, you couldn’t find notes of raspberry and saddle leather?) and the bottle variation among consumers in different states would be two strong aspects running against any enforcement of this FTC act. As they probably say in fine print on the weight loss ads, results may vary.

One way to connect the dots more closely might be if the blogger in question were, say, a wine retailer or a winery who also happens to sell wine. There’s a lot of web content, be it blogs or Twitter or Facebook updates, emanating directly from wine sellers and marketers that might fall under this increased stringency from the FTC.

As Matt Drudge might say, “developing…”