Dr Vino's wine blog

SPIT: controlled storage
James, who has taken a couple of classes of mine in the past year, wrote that he recently pulled the cork on a 1974 Heitz, Martha’s Vineyard for his 50th birthday and it was drinking fabulously. I asked him when he got the wine and he replied, “It was stored in a number of different environments since I had the wine since college in 1978. It was stored in my dormitory, then in my parents basement, then in my apartments, then in a controlled storage facility, and finally in a wine storage cooler. And it still turned out to be the best wine I have ever tasted.” Most excellent!

SIPPED: musical chairs
Jay Miller publicly states that he will no longer be reviewing Australian wines for the Wine Advocate. In other news, Wolfgang Weber, a senior editor at Wine & Spirits magazine and Italian wine critic, has announced that he will be leaving the magazine to join a boutique wine sales and marketing firm. In neither case has a successor been officially named. UPDATE: W&S Editor and Publisher Josh Greene writes in to say that he will be resuming the role of Italian wine critic for the magazine. UPDATE: Lisa Perrotti-Brown, based in Singapore, will be reviewing the wines of Australia (and New Zealand) for the Wine Advocate.

SPIT: blogging
John Mariani, a longtime wine and food writer, predicts a rise in vapid wine blogs. Sigh. We’ve seen this movie before. A more bold and original prediction would have been: The quality of blogs increases as journalists have fewer outlets. [Bloomberg]

NOT SIPPED: Johnny Apple’s wine
Betsey, widow of legendary NYT reporter Johnny Apple, will put his wine collection up for auction. The story repeatedly mentions his “enviably enormous expense account.” To which a former NYT executive editor says: “Johnny Apple would be impossible today, unfortunately.” Gawker reacts.

SPIT: alcohol
A buzz without inebriation? Instant sobriety? Such are the claims of an alcohol substitute being developed by Professor David Nutt, sacked as the UK government’s drug adviser last year. Should wine be threatened? Not if it is considered a food! [Telegraph]

SIPPED: kind words
The Winnipeg Free Press included this blog in their year-end roundup of notables. And my book, Wine Politics, receives a strong review in the current issue of the food journal, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. See the review here or more reviews on the new book review page.

We started with five days of your nominations for the wine person who most personified the decade 2000-2009. (Although if you read Frank Rich or Paul Krugman, you might not exactly want to epitomize this decade, the Naughties.) Wine lovers had an optimistic analysis for the decade as they chose from eight finalists who personified different story lines. And in the end, after 2,842 votes were cast, the winner was clear: Eric LeVine, founder of CellarTracker.com!

Second place in the voting was Gary Vaynerchuk, a wine retailer and internet phenom. With nearly 850,000 followers on Twitter, would Gary summon the VaynerNation to do his bidding? Eric and Gary crossed champagne sabers here and on various of the wine forums. Here’s a taste from Twitter:

Gary: @cellartracker hey are u whipping my butt 😉 LOL congrats bro …have a great new years!
Eric: Happy New Year’s to you too! You could whip me in 1 sec if U wanted. Love the Misha [Gary’s daughter] pic, daddy!

Wow, they are at each other’s throats!

If you are not familiar with CellarTracker, check it out or feel free to review all the comments on the previous thread. For your convenience, since some might say that CellarTracker is Zagat to the single critic’s Michelin, here’s a summary of what people said:

“CellarTracker…represents the rise at the beginning of this century of the power of the consumer critic…The fact that the users have essentially created an instant database of every wine under the sun is astonishing. The value and power of it will only increase as more people use it…Not only has he provided a well thought out system for tracking one’s wine experiences, it can be free (if you choose not to donate), it records tasting notes from thousands of different palates (not just one, i.e. Gary), and it has changed the way I purchase old and new wines…a game changer…CellarTracker changes the way wine is stored, appreciated, reviewed when it first appears, and reviewed as it ages. Eric gets my vote…My grown kids laugh because the site is my “home” page…it represents what’s right about the web…I can say unequivocally that I would not be the wine drinker I am today without CellarTracker…I would be lost if you took my CellarTracker away!…Long live CT! … And Eric LeVine is one the most rational and most interesting commentators on wine boards.”

Well done, Eric! The early betting shows that you are the one to beat for next decade’s title as well.