Dr Vino's wine blog

SPIT: “pinot noir”
Pinot or dunno? The cachet and appeal of the fickle pinot noir has led to a proliferation of low-priced pinots, which, by US law, must only contain 75 percent to state the grape on the label. Decanter reports that French authorities have brought charges against 13 defendants in the the south of France for stretching pinot more than that, selling the equivalent of 16 million bottles worth of cheaper merlot and syrah to E & J Gallo for their $9 Red Bicylcette pinot noir. The court will likely hand down its decision in two weeks.

GULPED: “wine”
The scourge of Scotland is Buckfast tonic wine, caffeinated, sweet drink made by Benedictine monks. Weighing in at 15% alcohol and with the caffeine equivalent of eight cans of Coke, this low-priced drink has been dubbed “wreck the hoose juice” (hoose being the Scottish pronunciation of “house”) or “commotion lotion.” It has sparked a debate on whether to introduce minimum prices for alcoholic drinks in Scotland. [NYTimes.com]

SIPPED: wine in supermarkets
The editorial page of the NYT argues in favor of wine in grocery stores calling the campaign against it “an impassioned but utterly cynical defense of the little guy.”

SIPPED: science!
Have a vineyard fungus? Science has a solution: liquid spray-on glass! All those pears grown in glass bottles, move over! [Telegraph]

SPIT: blogs for young people
Younger Americans, aged 12 – 29, are abandoning blogging in favor or Twitter and Facebook. Why? Too long – LOL! But the study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project does find blogging on the rise in ancient people (over thirty) where more than one in ten maintains a blog.

In 1993 Englebert Prieler, an Austrian vintner, decided for the first time to bottle a single-vineyard wine from the grape variety Blaufränkisch. When it came time to sell the wine, he priced it the same as his better known Cabernet Sauvignon. However, the Blaufränkisch bottles languished unsold until a Swiss collector bought them all as a block. Adding insult to injury, the asking price at the winery was only 20 schillings (about 1.50 euro) a bottle.*

Things have changed. The 2006 vintage of that same wine, a fuller style of Blaufränkisch, now sells for about $130 per bottle in the U.S.

While Blaufränkisch is hardly a household wine term, it has risen from nothing in 1995 to, well, more than nothing. Read more…

I had heard about the fires in Sonoma 2008. But I had never tasted them.

David Hirsch poured me a sample of his 2008 “The Bohans-Dillon” pinot noir at the recent trade tasting of his New York distributor. And guess what: it had a smoky notes swirling around the dark cherry fruit. If you like chipotle or a peaty whisky, and you like California pinot, I predict you will love this wine! (The smoky taste can come in non-blaze years from the “toast” level of barrels.) If you don’t but want to keep it in the Hirsch Vineyards portfolio, then perhaps try one of the 07s, such as the pricier “M,” which is smoke free.

Describing that hot summer when the fires came in July, Hirsch said that “we almost died of asphyxiation.” He added that people like to “drink pinot and talk terroir.” Well, he said, this was the terroir of 2008. By contrast, he said that 2007 was “a blessing.”

Here on the blog, we previously discussed geologists who debunked “minerality” as coming from the soil. But this smokiness in the glass appears to have come from the fires! Putting the “air” in terroir, one might say.

For more on smoke and de-smokifying wines, check out this story in the SF Chron or this one at Forbes.com.

Jason Haas went to Sacramento thinking thin. He came away disappointed.

Although it’s known for belt-tightening of a different kind, Sacramento is not known as a weight-loss destination. In fact, Haas, the general manager at Tablas Creek Vineyards in Paso Robles was attending an enormous wine trade show. He recounts on his blog how set out to find a lighter bottle for his top wine, Esprit de Beaucastel, a red blend that retails for about $50. But, in the end, he wasn’t happy:

It became clear that the bottle manufacturers have been taken by surprise with wineries’ desires for lighter bottles. Most of the lightest bottles that they make still are intended for the lowest-end wines. They look cheap. What we’re looking for is a bottle that looks like a top-end bottle, but weighs half as much. And, somewhat to our surprise, those bottles just don’t exist yet.

Read more…

Tim Harford writes a column in the weekend FT called “Dear Economist: Resolving readers’ dilemmas with the tools of Adam Smith.” This week he takes up the topic of wine thanks to a letter from a student who wants to impress his girlfriend in a restaurant despite being on a budget. Here’s Harford’s advice:

You assume that the price of the wine and its quality can be neatly separated out. This seems reasonable, but is wrong. Price changes the very experience of quality. Neuro-economists have found, for instance, that while placebo painkillers work, they work best if the subject thinks they are expensive. Energy drinks give you less energy if you buy them at a discount. (Yes, really.) And of course, wine tastes better if you believe that it is expensive.

One possibility is to conceal the price of wine from your girlfriend and tell her you’re buying the expensive stuff when in fact you are buying the house red. This is a white lie: many people prefer the taste of cheap wine in blind tastings, and by claiming it is expensive you will quite genuinely improve the way she thinks it tastes.

Perhaps. But buying expensive wine might make the student look profligate. Or like a chump since price is actually an unreliable indicator of a wine’s quality especially as there are so many values in the market today. And, if caught, passing off Prosecco at vintage Champagne prices might deflate more than the bubbles on the table.

In fact, there are other ways for this student to impress rather than price: I say choose a restaurant with a good wine list, order a Zweigelt, an easy-drinking red from Austria that suffers a discount because nobody thinks they can pronounce it, or a lip-smacking, natural cru Beaujolais. After she has tried it and loves it, tell her the wine is a steal. Or go to a nice BYOB and scope out something at a good shop beforehand. You don’t have to be an economist to think that finding a terrific wine value is pretty damn sexy.

What’s your advice?

SPIT: wine reporting!
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie had a “stormy dinner date” with friends (including Alec Baldwin) at Alto restaurant in midtown Manhattan. This story says they had five bottles of wine with dinner, the friends left and then Brangelina exchanged barbs, with him telling her to get therapy and her telling him that she thinks he’s “toxic!” Eeegad. But, really, the most important detail for wine enthusiasts was neglected: which wines did they have with dinner?!?

SIPPED: conflicting opinions
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court decision that had found the wine distribution system in Texas unconstitutional. The lower court ruled that it discriminated against out-of-state distributors and retailers according to the Dallas Morning News. With the recent ruling in favor of free trade in Massachusetts, wine enthusiasts will be watching to see if the Specialty Wine Retailers Association appeals to the Supreme Court.

SPIT: wine tastings
Gideon Rachman bemoans a “new Puritanism” at Davos that has banned the epic wine tastings of previous years. Never fear: he was able to find one organized by Jancis Robinson off campus (at a Zurich airport hotel) with Krug, and Chateaus Cheval Blanc and Yquem.

SPIT: tariffs and taxes
Canadian wine lovers visiting America, someone’s got your back: Charles Schumer! The NY senator is trying to have the 100 percent levy on wines brought into Canada to reduced to stimulate sales from NY wineries. On a related note, wineries that export receive almost full reimbursement of federal excise taxes and he also wants to keep that now-imperiled subsidy in place. [BusinessWeek]

SPIT: drinking national?
Imported wine sales rose in Australia — as well as in the US, where California wine sales fell for the first time in 16 years.

SIPPED: kind words
Vinography posts a favorable review of my book, A Year of Wine.

Fair use is made of a reduced size crop image from hell.ca

John Gilman, author of the newsletter A View from the Cellar, weighs in today with his thoughts on Mayacamas Vineyards. There is some duplication with Evan Dawson’s travel post from yesterday but there is also much new, including John’s tasting notes from Mayacamas Cabernet 2003, 1991, 1985, 1974, & 1968. Let’s turn the floor over to John for his views from the cellar…

Mayacamas Vineyards is one of the greatest cabernet sauvignon producers in the history of California. Read more…

Evan Dawson, who writes about Finger Lakes wines for the New York Cork Report (and who we last saw here), recently tweeted that he was in Napa. I asked him if he wanted to contribute a post from his travels and he suggested his stop at Mayacamas Vineyards. Today we have his thoughts. Tomorrow, John Gilman offers his tasting notes on several decades’ of Mayacamas wines.

By Evan Dawson

Whither Napa Cabernet? The economy dealt a blow to the iconic American wine as consumers started reaching for less expensive bottles. Now, a growing number of critics and consumers, including those in California, are openly wondering if the Napa Cabernet train has come off the rails: commentator Dan Berger, for one, last week dismissed California Cabernet as “little more than a parody of itself.”

High up the side of Mount Veeder one sunny but cool, midwinter morning a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t help wondering if the way back might offer ideas for Napa’s way forward. After all, the Cabernets of the 1970s helped put Napa on the world wine map, so it seemed reasonable to wonder if in wine, as in fashion, the past could provide inspiration.

To find one answer to this question, I had ventured to the Maycamas Vineyards. Celebrated in the 1970s as a leading producer of Cabernet, I was curious if the once-hot style would seem as out of place as bell bottoms or as appealing as Mad Men. After all, not much had changed there. Read more…

Have you ever been in a New York wine store and thought there was something missing? Maybe gourmet cheese? Gift bags? Cigars? No, no–an ATM!

Well, if you’ve ever thought that then you will like Governor Paterson’s latest proposal to allow wine sales in food stores. He tried it last year but the measure was poorly thought out since it just focused on the grocery stores selling wine and not what would happen to current wine and spirits stores. Ultimately, it met resistance, and was dropped.

But it has been re-animated this budgetary year and this time the governor is trying to mollify the opposition by allowing wine stores to also sell Read more…