Dr Vino's wine blog

In a surprising setback for selling wine online, the New York State State Liquor Authority ruled yesterday that the sale of wine by third-party “advertisers” violates its code. Some online sales and marketing companies, such as wine clubs and Lot 18, sell or market wine online without a New York retail license, instead rely on a licensee to process or fulfill the orders. Read more…

Climate change threatens to redraw the wine map over the next few decades. That we know. A new paper suggests that the establishment of new vineyards in cooler areas will endanger the habitat of animals ranging from grizzlies to pandas.

The findings seem to be structured to grab headlines and cause alarm–who would ever want to hurt pronghorn elk or pandas in the quest for a glass of pinot noir? Sure, the wine industry might need a prod to improve water management or reduce pesticide use. But are there concrete examples where vineyards have threatened habitats and how the potential conflicts were resolved successfully or not? In the absence of such concrete examples, it seems a bit like a bogeyman. I visited vineyards in Constantia last year, right up against the Cape of Good Hope nature preserve, which has abundant biodiversity and the vintners there spoke of living with baboon raids on grapes and how there was little they could do about it.

The paper largely ignores practicality and politics. If the climate is changing, wouldn’t there be other (e.g. housing) development pressure in cooler areas? Would other shifts in the environment of the wildlife alter the habitat more than a fenced-in vineyard? And what about preservation efforts–land use regulations in Napa, for example, essentially rendered hillside vineyard development impossible over a decade ago. And pointing to the declining vineyard area of Algeria is a red herring since it was once administratively part of mainland France at the height of French wine consumption, only to have the market removed after independence.

The map of the world’s vineyards will indubitably include new lands 50 years from now and it’s good that the paper again brings this into the popular discussion. New vineyards should be developed in a responsible way, using policy and including consideration for wildlife. But if we’re all drinking grand cru Montana in 2050, we’re going to have a lot more to think about than wine–and so will the grizzlies. Read more…

Drew Barrymore, wine curator, comments on her wine label to KSBW:

“I love pinot grigio. I’ve been a pinot grigio drinker most of my life–after 21, of course.”

“It has beautiful notes and it is lacking in acidity but full of fruit.”

“Women love rosé and pinot grigio and sauvignon blanc. And we like to put ice in it.”

Discuss! Here’s a reaction from Twitter to kick things off: “she threw all the ladiezzz tasting wine back by about 20 years.”

In a surprising move, Amazon did a volte face a while back: instead of fighting collecting sales taxes, which was creating an image problem, the online retailer decided to collect taxes and move its previously isolated warehousing closer to metropolitan areas. So, in 2014, Amazon will open a mammoth fulfillment center (one million sq.ft.) in New Jersey as a staging ground for fulfilling orders both to the Garden State and NYC.

Will anyone in NYC who orders books, breakfast cereal, or basketballs from Amazon care that they first touched down in New Jersey? No, it makes no difference. Would New York authorities prohibit those products from being delivered to NY residents? No, they would have no cause to discriminate against those products that started the last leg of their journey to consumers in NJ; Amazon surveyed the competitive landscape and chose to build its warehouse in Jersey.

The New York Post had a story yesterday about a scary bill that has reappeared in Albany that has parallels for wine enthusiasts to the amazon warehouse. The story reports that Empire Merchants LLC, a large wine and spirits distributor, is trying to grease the wheels to pass a state law mandating that all wine delivered to NYC must stay “at rest” in an NY warehouse for 24 hours prior to delivery.

Clearly, this is absurd, and it serves no-one’s purpose other than a large distributor such as Empire. As with Amazon, most of the small and mid-sized wine distributors have chosen to warehouse in New Jersey. To force that warehousing to NY would create jobs–always appealing to politicians–but it would doubtless raise the cost of business to the small and mid-sized distributors, likely raising prices for consumers or forcing distributors to trim their portfolios. The worst case scenario is that they would go out of business. Ironically, the 2005 Granholm decision on direct wine shipping could be invoked since this law discriminates against out-of-state products, violating interstate commerce.

New York City is currently the greatest wine city on the planet. And it’s not the big distributors who make it that way. So go make some noise, write your state senator (here’s text from last year) and tell them you are opposed to S3849-2013, known as “at rest.” The bill’s sponsor is Senator Jeff Klein who, the Post points out, received $33,000 in contributions from Empire over the past four years.

Related: “Wine company ‘buys’ NY bill – that could cost you $7 a bottle!” NY Post
“Put “at rest” to rest in NY” DrVino.com

Wine writers and members of the wine trade descended on Bordeaux this week for tasting samples of the 2012 vintage, which was a difficult vintage. Even though the malolactic fermentations have barely finished and the final blends are nowhere near completed, the Bordelais pre-sell each vintage (en primeur) two years before it is actually released.

The events set off a clusterschnook on Twitter about whether en primeurs are simply marketing at this point. Guy Woodward, former editor of Decanter, expressed his pleasure at not having to attend the “increasingly futile” and predictable events for the first time in a decade. He described the process thusly: “Critics taste unfinished wines (non-blind) earlier than ever but only one verdict counts; producers feign humility & refuse to discuss price…Don’t doubt most critics’ good intentions, but is now primarily a marketing exercise.”

Howard Goldberg’s tweet sparked the longest and possibly most productive wine thread to ever appear on Twitter: “Britain’s wine-writing Establishment is again plunging headlong into en priemur to play willing handmaiden marketing advisor to chateaus.” Read more…

What would happen if a California winery uprooted Cabernet Sauvignon to plant hipster grape varieties–only to find the critic who championed Cabernet is…baaaaack?!!?

The above “Downfall” video by Red To Brown Wine explores these real-life themes (for those who haven’t followed, Parker has resumed reviewing current releases of Northern California wines for the WA).

Thanks for the interest and comments in our survey results posted last week. I was on a family vacation so having those preloaded provided me a brief respite–especially when I discovered I inadvertently left my laptop at home!

Channeling my inner Nate Silver, the results of the survey were pretty interesting, so I thought I’d provide a bit more detail. The 29 participants were asked to name the top five most influential people in the NYC wine world today as they see it from their perch (the email stated that the top five could include people living or dead or who resided outside of NYC as long as their influence today was strong). Measuring influence is an amorphous thing so I asked them to define it as they saw fit from their perch, whether that was moving cases or shaping minds, or a bit of both. The reason I asked for the top five was to make respondents focus on submitting five names of people who really matter. Here were the top five, again: Read more…

The most influential person in the New York City world of wine is Eric Asimov, chief wine critic of the New York Times. This is according to our survey of industry elites, where Asimov was the lead vote-getter by a wide margin.

A graduate of Wesleyan University, and a nephew of Isaac Asimov, Eric Asimov has been at the Times since 1984 as both an editor and a columnist. In 1992, he created the “$25 and under” restaurant reviews and gained a wide following. He segued into wine writing toward the end of Frank Prial’s career, becoming the chief wine critic at the paper in 2004. His wine column alternates biweekly between wine reviews resulting from panel tastings and columns without recommendations per se that explore producers, regions, or aspects of wine culture. He writes in his 2012 book “How to Love Wine” that wine has become an “exercise in anxiety” for many and he seeks to ease that in the book that is a “memoir and a manifesto.” The book is nominated for an award from the James Beard Foundation for best wine and spirits book. Asimov will also be inducted into the “Who’s Who of American Food & Beverage” from the Foundation.

While his column generally moves wine, one shop owner told me that–consistent with the following of his erstwhile “$25 and Under” dining column–his annual “best wines under $20″ was the column that sent readers to the shop, printout in hand.

Congratulations to Eric Asimov on winning the poll’s top honor!