Dr Vino's wine blog

Winners of the first-ever American Wine Blog Awards have been announced…and I am thrilled to learn that I have won in two categories!!! I couldn’t have done it without you, dear reader, since after the judges selected the finalists, it was up to a popular vote. So thank you for your votes in the final round!

My wife’s sister asked what would be the prize if I won. When I replied that it would be a 150 x 150 pixel image that I could put on my web site–there was silence on the other end of the phone.

But she didn’t hear about the award ceremony! I went out to Flushing Meadows this morning where I received the image/trophy. At right, you can see the crowds thronging in the background. And, oddly, I had to shave my head to accept the award.

More independent wine picks, wine commentary and other ways to fritter away your precious time will be coming your way in the next year on this site. So consider subscribing to the site feed if you haven’t done so already. And stay tuned to the site itself too since elves are currently hammering out a new look.

Thanks to Tom at Fermentation for organizing the awards and to the other excellent finalists and winners in the other categories. If for some reason you’ve stumbled on this posting by accident and don’t know our humble corner of the internet, you can take in the lay of the land over at wineblogwatch, which includes hundreds of wine blogs sorted by most recent update.

tags: wine | wine blogs

What’s better than simply pairing wine and food? Why pairing wine and food bloggers and a charitable contribution.

For the third year in a row, the culinary community on the web is coming together to offer items for bidding with the proceeds going to the United Nations World Food Programme. Last year’s event raised an amazing $17,000.

This year my offering to the raffle is a new copy of the Oxford Companion to Wine, third edition. Edited by Jancis Robinson, Slate.com has called this “the most useful wine book ever.” It is amazing in it’s depth and breadth of coverage with 800 pages, nearly 1 million words, and 4,000 entries. It deserves a place on every wine lover’s desk. Heck, it’s so big, it could even be a desk! If you went to your local Barnes & Noble, they would hit you up for $65 for this wine knowledge.

I have a personal connection to the volume since I was honored to contribute 1/900th of the words! Yes, I authored the 1,000 word entry on “politics and wine.” But seriously, I’m sure it is the other 3,999 entries that will make you want this book.

You can bid on this prize in $10 increments. Here’s what you have to do (it’s sort of a sobriety test in its degree of difficulty).

Go to this site and click “give now.” You’ll need to enter an amount for your total donation for this prize AND any others you want to bid on in the charity raffle. My code is WB14. Enter this code in the personal message area. So say you want to bid $50 for this book and $50 for something else, donate $100 and put in WB14 and the code of the other item.

There are a lot of innovative and worthwhile prizes including a dinner with Eric Asimov, some B&B packages, and some very nice wines. So surf over to Vinography to check out the other wine items available or to Chez Pim for the roundup of from the food side of the blogosphere.

tags: wine | menu for hope iii

I took time out this week to “get saucy” with David Tamarkin (pictured right) of TimeOut Chicago. Well, I didn’t get too saucy. But we did discuss terroir as well as the business and politics of wine in France and America.

The funny thing is that David hid behind that wine glass the whole time we were talking. It’s a really big glass.

Listen here

tags: wine | podcast

Jancis Robinson wrote over the weekend about the enormous effort it took to update the Oxford Companion to Wine. This third edition tips the scales at a whopping 840 pages, 6.57 pounds and 900,000 words. Many of the entries and material is new as she described in the Financial Times Weekend:

“France’s crise viticole is another quasi political entry and, with a certain neatness for students of the Oxford University curriculum, each of politics, philosophy and economics have for the first time their own wide-ranging entries on their implications for wine.”

Why is this excerpt so important? Because I authored the 1,000 word entry on the “politics of wine”! That’s right, I was honored to contribute 1/900th of the volume!

I haven’t seen the tome yet but there’s lots new and lots fresh in this edition. I’m already carving out a space on my desk–and structurally reinforcing it!

The book’s official release date is Oct 1 but it is available now through Amazon.

tags: wine | wine books | Oxford Companion to Wine

June 29, 2005

New York, NY – What does it take to be a wine producer? Or an importer? Or a retailer? Discover the inside scoop through a “year in the life of” three accomplished wine industry professionals. The new initiative, The Real Wine World, launches today on DrVino.com.

Taking a page from the reality TV playbook, the project will track three industry participants for a year. Susana Balbo makes wines in Mendoza, Argentina. Gregory Smolik of Chicago imports artisan Italian wines. And Patricia Savoie, owner of Big Nose, Full Body, who sells wines from all over the world at its neighborhood location in Brooklyn, NY.

Over the course of the year, the project will track the participants as they make or sell wine. They will offer insight into the industry, whether on technical winemaking questions or what works for selling wine. Further, the two non-producers will serve as an example of how to start-up professionally in the wine industry without owning or working at a winery.

The project is conceived and written by Tyler Colman (Ph.D., Northwestern). Colman is working on a book about the politics of wine in France and America. As a freelance wine writer with articles in consumer and trade publications, he writes about the business and politics of wine. He currently teaches classes on wine and politics at both University of Chicago and New York University.

Welcome to Dr. Vino’s Wine Blog — a new and unprecedented (at least for me) way to waste time on line reading about wine when we should be drinking it.

You can visit my permanent home on the web at DrVino.com for more details, articles and value wine picks under $10. That will continue to be my main web presence for wine but I thought I would give this blog style a whirl. Or perhaps a swirl.

I plan on having this page as place for my reaction on things happening in the wine world. For example, I never got around to commenting on the important Mondavi buyout on DrVino.com. Nor other bits of juicy or timely wine news. So this blog is a good place for stuff that falls through the cracks in the winery floor, as it were.

What I won’t be doing here is boring you with tons of personal information about me or Mrs. Vino. A few juicy drips may leak out, however, such as what types of white wine we use to remove red wine stains or what types of oak casks we use to swaddle baby vino. The style will be informal, hopefully informative, and more real time than the real web site. And I look forward to hearing what you think with the ability to comment! Please do! Now entering the blogosphere…