Dr Vino's wine blog

Tis the season to pre-buy Bordeaux. The chateaux have decided to price their wine lower on the whole, with Mouton and Margaux reducing prices by about 30% from the 2011 vintage this week. That’s generally prudent since the vintage is considered of lesser quality and it’s against the backdrop of a soft economy.

Yet perhaps the most notable item about the en primeur pricing so far is that the prices have been released before the Wine Advocate scores (due out any day) have been published. It could signal an end of an era–one US trade buyer told me that the chateau were consciously trying to break away from having prices intertwined with the Wine Advocate scores. But it also could be that some other properties are trying to get a jump on what may be bad news. Which explanation do you favor? Either way, it will be interesting to see what happens to the price of those that have been released after the Wine Advocate scores are released tomorrow.

Bucking the trend of lowering prices, two right bank producers, Pavie and Angélus, have raised their prices by 30%. Both the properties were promoted to “Grand Cru Classé A” in the reclassifcation of St. Emilion wines last year. Apparently, there have been crickets for these wines as James Molesworth tweeted “And I’m hearing after their prices increases Pavie and Angélus are moving about as much of their ’12s as Latour did… #getit?”

Chateau Latour stopped selling their wines as futures last year.

Amtrak is known for many things but jovial passengers is not foremost among them.

Last Friday, a train from NYC to DC was waylaid with problems, causing a six-hour delay. One of the passengers was Paul Goldschmidt, owner of the right-bank estate Chateau Siaurac. Goldschmidt was on his way to a tasting at a DC wine store. When it became apparent that he wasn’t going to make the event, he uncorked his wines and started pouring them for the passengers in an impromptu tasting. By the end, the passengers were singing “La Marseillaise.” And all this transpired in the quiet car!

Here endeth the feel-good story of the day.

“Delayed Passengers Treated to an Impromptu Wine-Tasting on Broken-Down Amtrak Train” [Washingtonian]
A brief passenger video appears on Facebook.

It’s pretty common to post pictures of which wines you’re drinking on Instagram or Twitter. If you’re drinking really great stuff, I suppose it’s a little douchey (although those photos do get the most “likes,” etc).

But what if you pre-post a lineup of 34 magnums you will be tasting over the next few nights? That’s what Bob Parker did for the Wine Advocate staff (and owners? Note “SECOND” office reference.) meetings this week. Seems to cross the line–especially in a “blue-collar city.” Maybe they are drinking out styrofoam cups? Also, are these wines are worth a detour, let alone a journey from Singapore? Have your say!

Big time in the blue-collar city of Baltimore….the entire staff is arriving today, including our three new full-time writers which will be announced in the next 48 hours….the team from the SECOND office in Singapore, and we hope to put in place some very exciting plans…I am playing sommelier, and pulled the following wines out of the cellar for the three nights of *%^@#%$#&*&%^^$$….

Tonight-all magnums as there are 16-17 of us Read more…

Twelve distributors. Their fifty best wines. Sounds like a throw down. But it’s actually a fundraiser.

Michael Skurnik, Polaner, Winebow, David Bowler, Verity, Wildman, Martin Scott and others are each pouring their fifty best wines at a public tasting to benefit Sandy recovery. So that’s 600 wines–yikes! The $50 entry goes to the Mayor’s fund to advance NYC – Hurricane Sandy relief. May 1 – 6:00 PM

Get tickets here.

Howard Goldberg tweets: “I wonder what wines @drvino, the Combo King, would recommend for Claes Oldenburg’s fake food on display at MoMA.”

Aha! Good question. Which wine to pair with fake food–perhaps some fake wine? Maybe Bill Koch still has one of those ’21 Pétrus magnums…

From the aisles of California retail, a site reader sends in news of perhaps the ultimate closeout–wine for a penny a bottle.

What’s interesting is that this special offer, only available to CVS cardholders who also purchase a 18(!)-pack of Bud or Tecate (do they mean orange wine?). Incentivizing wine purchases through beer. Soft economy be damned–we’re going to boost that rise in per capita wine consumption going one way or another! Read more…

It’s no secret that malbec has been on a tear in recent years. I had fun researching a piece on Argentina’s adopted grape for wine-searcher magazine. Check it out to read snippets about the transformation of the Argentine wine industry, the rise of malbec there and in export markets, and why Miles from Sideways may have helped open the door to malbec.

Argentina has been on a tear internationally this year with the new Pope, Lionel Messi’s passing and scoring acumen, the gracious Ángel Cabrera coming one putt away from a second green jacket, and malbec. One thing that’s perhaps not as well known here is that Argentina’s economy is suffering what The Economist calls a case of “gaucho blues.” In the face of high inflation–the unofficial rate hovers just under 30%–the government of Cristina Fernández has been trying to impose capital controls and mandatory schemes to boost exports by offsetting imports. But they’re not working: while the official exchange rate with the US dollar is 5.1 pesos, a side market for “blue dollars” currently is about 9 pesos to the dollar.

For the piece, I spoke with Ed Lehrman of Vine Connections, which imports estate wines from Argentina. He told me that for the first time in a decade, his growers have raised prices to him–some two or three times in the past year simply because they have to pay their workers 30% more than they did last year to keep even with the eroding purchasing power. Lehrman is working with his US distributors to maintain key prices points for his wines as best he can. But he said two things are happening in light of this inflation: more malbec is leaving the country in bulk to be bottled closer to points of consumption and more malbec is being exported at higher price points.

Malbec sales in the US have thus far weathered the economic storm in Argentina by posting strong growth in Nielsen data last year. But if prices rise or quality falls, will this be the year that malbec’s decade-plus run in the export markets leads producers to sing the gaucho blues? And, speaking of inflation, given malbec’s skew toward retail over restaurants and associated reliance on point scores, does point inflation also pose a threat to the category? What is your anecdotal experience with malbec recently?

Malbec: the whole nine yards

A jury in Manhattan sided with Bill Koch in his lawsuit over 24 counterfeit wines. The collector extraordinaire and energy magnate had sued Eric Greenberg, a wine collector who at one point had a cellar of 70,000 bottles, for selling him the counterfeit bottles. The jury awarded Koch $379,000 in damages to cover the fraudulent bottles and will reconvene this morning to see consider punitive damages.

Bloomberg has the full story including some of Koch’s comments after the trial:

“I absolutely can’t stand to be cheated. Now we got one faker so we’re marching down our hit list of fakers. This is just a start.”

“Millions if not tens or hundreds of millions of counterfeit wines are sold every year. The counterfeiters don’t want anyone to know, for $100 they make it and mark it up to $15,000, I myself paid $100,000 for a counterfeit wine. To me the whole industry is corrupt.”

“What Greenberg did was treat me and Zachys the way you treat mushrooms–kept in the dark and fed manure.”

“I’m thirsty, I want a glass of wine,” Koch said before repairing to restaurant Daniel. “And if it’s not a good bottle, I’m going to sue them.”