Dr Vino's wine blog

Soon enough, and barring a worsening of the blight, ripe local tomatoes will be flooding greenmarkets around the country–if they aren’t already. Which always puts me in the mood for gazpacho!

So easy to make and so fresh: Some tomatoes, a cucumber, a little red onion, a garlic clove, some vinegar…Mmm!

But tomatoes have high acidity and vinegar is wine gone bad, which is always hard to pair with good wine.

Which wine would you pair with a bowl of gazpacho? Or is it…impossible?!?

A remarkable wine story of the past few weeks that has gained lots of media attention is the story of “Banned in ‘Bama.” (click for details)

Interestingly, UCLA law professor, Eugene Volokh, posted about this label and said that it seemed “pretty clearly unconstitutional.” Not that Hahn, the producer of the banned Cycles Gladiator, would want to challenge the decision since they have garnered such a huge amount of media attention: they are making a massive amount of lemonade from these tiny lemons and now is mounting point-of-sales material in other states to try the wine “banned in Bama.”

Which other labels might be in jeopardy of being banned in Bama? Hit the comments with your thoughts.

To get the ball rolling, consider the image to the right that is on bottles of Geheimer Rat, Dr. Basserman-Jordan from the Pfalz (click to enlarge). Not only does the woman have sensuous grapes in her hair, but the screw cap is adorned with some rather sensuous initials.

And while we’re on the topic of judging a wine by its label, be sure to surf over to a site called The Coolist and see their display of 30 cool and clever wine label designs.