Dr Vino's wine blog

SPIT: Bling champagne
An unnamed source cites declines of 50-85% in champagne sales with pricey stuff hit hardest. The story by Alice Feiring in this weekend’s WSJ. magazine also suggest price wars may be imminent. (Lack of) Money quote comes from Roberta Morrell, a NYC retailer: “The trouble with dropping prices is how will they raise them?”

SPIT: reporting on Champagne
An article on JancisRobinson.com criticizes recent coverage of Champagne’s 2009 harvest. Main quibble: “After the harvest there will not be masses of grapes left to rot on the vine.”

SIPPED: changes in Chicago
Sam’s Wine & Spirits closed their South Loop location last month and now will close their Highland Park store. Meanwhile, Illinois now has an increased tax on wine, rising $0.13 per bottle to $0.28. As a result, distributor Rocky Wirtz has sued the state. Five other states recently raised taxes on wine.

SIPPED: Binge shopping
Annual wine sales at big box stores in France bring out “legions” of consumers. Carrefour sold six million bottles during its sale last year. [AP]

Remember the saga of Sierra Carche? Here’s a reminder from our earlier coverage: “What happens when a reviewer tastes a good bottle, but some consumers buy what appears to be a completely different product? Think it couldn’t happen? Guess again and behold the saga of Sierra Carche 2005.”

Well, last week I met that consumer, Robert Kenney (right), whose dogged pursuit of Jay Miller popped the cork on this saga. Kenney purchased 48 bottles of Sierra Carche and has opened 18 of them, “hoping for a good one” but instead has found Jay Miller’s term “undrinkable” a more apt descriptor. I joined Kenney and a dozen other tasters for a blind tasting organized by Daniel Posner, a partner in the wine store, Grapes The Wine Co. in White Plains, NY.

Posner greeted the tasters in his apron as he pulled burgers off the grill outside the store. But his real work had happened well before the tasting even started, coordinating the lineup. He managed to find four bottles of Sierra Carche from two different lots of the wine (astute readers may recall mention of a third lot, #7033, but bottles from that small lot/bottling proved elusive). Posner selected similar wines, including wines rated 93 – 99 by Jay Miller at the Wine Advocate ranging in price from $6 to $150.

It was the worst tasting I have ever attended. Although the burgers and company were good, the wines were abysmal. I’ll spare you the play-by-play (if you want it, see Dale Williams’ funny account–I was sitting next to Dale). Suffice it to say, among the wines, there was one note that kept recurring: “Nasty, VA meets green pepper with a dash of jalepeno overlaying a bed of silage.” Other terms bandied about included burnt rubber, bacterial issues, fermenting/rotting hay, roadkill, and roadkill with burning rubber that ends up in a hog “lagoon.” Read more…

There have been a couple of videos about the wine business circulating recently. They both have used a site called xtranormal, which allows users to select a scene, type text, chose camera angles and music to make a short video.

If you have been dying to make your own wine “movie,” now is your chance! Whip up a short video (about a minute) and paste the link in the comments here by next Monday. Then we can vote from short list of finalists next week. Check out the above video for instructions!

Besides the heapings of glory, the top vote getter will win a copy of my book, A Year of Wine! So just when you thought you might get some work done after Labor Day, surf on over and get started at xtranormal.com. (Btw, I found that the editing only worked in the Safari browser.)

Reader Ben writes in:

Floaters in wine.

How do you get them out? A finger? A spoon? Spit out the first sip? You’ve had that experience, haven’t you, of seeing a host of small floating objects on the surface of a glass of wine, usually just bits of cork, but sometimes strange looking pieces of “dust”… Anyway, I thought it could be kind of a funny little thing. And I am frankly curious as to the best approach!

I just swallow them for extra fiber! Okay, not really. I usually either try to drink around any floaties or swirl/tip the glass to get the bit of cork onto the side of the glass and out of play. What do you do?

One dish that we have been making and enjoying this summer is chilled cucumber soup. We’ve used the recipe from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything (buy on amazon), which calls for stock, sauteed shallots and heavy cream to enliven the cucumbers. We replaced the suggested dill with mint, which works well. (Even though we didn’t grow our own cucumbers, we did grow our own mint–long live container gardening!)

So before the summer weather escapes us and our dining is driven indoors, which wine would you pair with cucumber soup? Or is it…impossible?!?

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About half of the wines entered into at least three wine competitions bring home a gold medal. But of those winning a gold, 84 percent win no further medal at another competition. Thus, “winning gold medals may be more a matter of chance than a predictor of quality.”

Such are the findings from a paper published in the current issue of the Journal of Wine Economics. Robert Hodgson (pictured), the paper’s author, is a professor emeritus of oceanography at Humboldt State University. He also co-owns Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt county, which “normally produces about 1000 cases per year. Though small, the winery has earned distinction by winning many awards in state and national competitions.”

In fact, it was his personal experience winning medals and then coming up empty handed that led his quantitative analysis of 13 wine competitions as he told Reuters. The paper says that there are about 29 wine competitions in the United States; for the 13 that he studied, entry fees exceeded $1 million.

Other research has shown that consumers’ buying decisions are slightly but positively influenced by medals, which placed sixth out of thirteen variables (ahead of front labels and shelf talkers).

What do you think explains this disparity: something inherent to wine competitions, the nature of blind tasting, or a lack of consensus of quality wine?

Links to abstract and full paper in pdf