Dr Vino's wine blog

Jancis Robinson floated a novel idea on her website last week: what if critics, who descend on Bordeaux shortly to taste 2010 barrel samples, withheld their scores until the Bordeaux trade had finished their pre-sale campaign (known as en primeur)? The logic is that high scores for what is already an extremely hyped vintage would only drive prices higher.

Predictably, Robert Parker of the Wine Advocate and Tom Matthews of Wine Spectator poured cold water on the idea, as republished on Jancis’ site. Given that this is a classic prisoner’s dilemma, if Jancis admirably remains silent while other critics publish, it only hurts her since she loses influence. The embargo would only work if all critics agree to remain silent, which is not tenable in the real world, where there’s an incentive for each critic to publish first, getting his or her views circulating, and driving the discussion. Suckling often did that when he was at Wine Spectator getting in to tastings before the crowds of the en primeurs tastings and publishing his report more or less immediately (Parker’s report usually comes out after en primeurs, at the end of April).

Although it’s unworkable, would an embargo from critics serve to bring en primeur prices down? Perhaps, especially in less anticipated vintages such as 2008, which was also being pre-sold during an economic meltdown. Although still an important part of the Bordeaux sales machine, critics’ scores may not as important as brands themselves as this Liv-Ex analysis shows.

Wine Library TV has kicked the Jets bucket!

After 1,000 episodes of Wine Library TV (I had a good time with him on episode #771), Gary Vaynerchuk has decided to hang up his signature Jets bucket. Well, sort of. Many of his fans had wondered if one day Gary might leave the wine world entirely to jump to other, more lucrative pursuits such as public speaking, social media evangelism and promoting books from his 10-book deal with HarperCollins. Instead, Read more…

There’s a new order at the Wine Advocate. Last month, Robert Parker announced editorial changes at the publication he founded in 1978. The moves notably included promoting Antonio Galloni to a greater role, as Galloni took over reviewing California wines from Parker himself as well as adding coverage of Burgundy (ex-Beaujolais) to his beat that already included Champagne and all of Italy.

To get to know Galloni better, I recently emailed him a few questions on a wide range of topics. He took a break from tasting in Burgundy, where he is now, to respond. His unedited replies follow below. Read more…

Google reshuffled its proprietary algorithm recently to favor quality and penalize “content farms” that were gaming the system, producing content optimized for search engines, rather than humans. The NYT had a discussion of the changes, and here’s a list of 25 sites severely affected. (Arianna Huffington should count 315 million lucky stars these changes came just weeks after she sold her site to Aol.)

When I read about this development, I wondered what would happened to Snooth.com, the wine web site that seems to be a champion of SEO, ranking high in the organic search results yet providing so little useful information that they were found to be scraping cellartracker.com content since 2007 to populate some pages. For web ad sales, more page views can mean higher ad revenues.

I searched for a few specific wines and the results returned a few snooth pages in the top ten so I thought they hadn’t been affected. But according to quantcast, their (directly measured) pageviews have slid significantly over the past week. I guess time will tell the fuller story.

SIPPED: baton passing
Robert Parker has announced editorial changes at the Wine Advocate, including the fact that he will no longer be reviewing the wines of California. Antonio Galloni will assume those duties and add the Cote d’Or and Chablis to his bailiwick that already includes all of Italy and Champagne. And who said criticism was getting more regionalized?

SPIT: recession
The drinks division at LVMH reports a 19% rise in revenues to €3.3 billion. Dom Pérignon and Krug were standouts. [Guardian]

SIPPED: creative shipping
Maryland wine consumer can’t have wine shipped to them. So many have it shipped to friends in Virginia or offices in DC (remember how DC is the thirstiest non-state in the nation?). It’s a miserable inconvenience and the Maryland law should simply be changed. [WashingtonPost.com]

GULPED: Trenta
Good to know: the Starbucks “trenta” size can also serve as a decanter. [cockeyed]

Happy Friday! A little light programming for your today. Yesterday, I spotted a meme on Twitter using the hashtag #indecisivemusicals that included such suggestions as “Rent … no maybe we should buy.” With the Andrew Lloyd Webber wine auction coming up this weekend, I wondered on Twitter if we needed some #winemusicals? I proposed “The Full Monte Bello” and “Gentlemen Prefer Brunes et Blondes.” Here are some of other chuckle (or groan?) worthy suggestions:

“Oaklahoma!” @ablegrape (by Rolland & Hammerstein?)
“My Fair Lieu-dit” @ablegrape
“Sunday in the Park with Nuits Saint Georges” @felixsalmon
“Guys and Dolcettos” @howardggoldberg
“St Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” @davidwlamb
“The Musar Man” @Tri_pops

Search for more and add your own in the comments or on Twitter. And let us know if you hear of the opening of any of these shows, presumably well off-Broadway.

“I do it on the web for free.”

A fellow blogger and I once joked about putting that on a T-shirt. Blogging is not a path to riches. Especially for wine. While a tech blogger might earn a decent living from Google’s Adsense or the Amazon affiliate program, such a path is not really open to wine bloggers. For one, Google considers wine ads to be for an “non-family safe” content. So in order to allow wine ads on a site, a publisher using Adsense has to allow adult content which could be opening Pandora’s box in more ways than one. Similarly, the small percentage that Amazon offers affiliates may go a long way on if the blog reviews plasma TVs and digital cameras. But wine books and corkscrews? Not so much.

However, there are some ways to make money in wine writing. Read more…

Occasionally, “memes” get started on Twitter: someone starts a hashtag such as #lessambitiousfilms and people chine in with their ideas, such as “The Sounds of Muzak,” “Being John Stamos” or “Saving Private Ryan 15% on his Auto Insurance by Switching him to GEICO.”

Now the meme has spread to wine with people tweeting about #lessambitiouswines. Suggestions include, “Châteauneuf-du-Pabst,” “Henschke Hill of Poise,” and “Humble Mountain Vineyards.” I suggested playing it both ways with “Bronze Oak #lessambitiouswines Gold Oak #moreambitiouswines.”Howard Goldberg has been on a roll offering “Geworstraminer,” “Pinot grease,” and “Defite-Rothschild.” Hit the comments if you have other ideas.

And if you are poking around on Twitter for some chuckles, there has been a raft of anonymous accounts offering up spoof tasting notes to inside-baseball sommelier talk. As they say at the finest tweeting establishments, #enjoy.