Dr Vino's wine blog

This week I give you “friend’s price” — two reviews of value vino!

Casa Castillo, Monastrell, Jumilla, 2003. $10 Find this wine

Falesco, Vitiano rosso, IGT 2004. $9 Find this wine

Click here for the write-ups.

BONUS: the Honig Cabernet Sauvignon 2002 would make a great wine for any Valentine. It has wonderfully rich aromas and flavors of blackcurrant, leather and faint vanilla, but such soft tannins that it is ready to drink. A serious wine. And at $30 it’s less than the roses. (find this wine)

tags: wine | tasting notes

Would you pay $89 for a 3L box of wine? Customers are doing it with style in Chicago–even if that kind of a markup is more like Manhattan!

Avec, the chic and sleek Mediterranean restaurant on West Randolph (so chic they don’t even take reservations), is pouring the wine from a bag-in-a-box. It’s $10 for a quarter-liter carafe, $31 for the bottle sized 750ml, and $89 for the 3L box (see the wine list). The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

Eduard Seitan, Avec’s co-owner and wine buyer, likes the wine so much he keeps three boxes on display at the bar.

“I’m very proud of it,” he said.

This actually is a great idea, particularly because the wine in question is the yummy Cuvee de Pena 2003, which I have previously recommended as excellent value vino. A $10 carafe of good wine is an idea whose time has come in America. Maybe more restaurants will start to drink inside the box?

tags: wine | food & drink | boxed wine | Chicago dining

Wine in today’s mainstream media:

Gallo has made their $10-a-bottle Ecco Domani a staple with New York fashionistas who drink “eccotinis”–pinot grigio served in martini glasses with two grapes on a skewer. [WSJ $]

Just how much 1945 Lafite is floating around? “There were more 45s sold and drunk in 1995 than had ever been made,” says Serena Sutcliffe of Sotheby’s on the “horrifying increase” in wine auction fraud, reports Decanter.

The NYT panel reviews Malbecs from Argentina and France and finds them “two-dimensional, narrow-gauge, simple. Nothing wrong with those words, but not very many thrills among them.” [NYT] The Tikal, their favorite is great–and it makes an excellent gift wine with its “wow that’s heavy” bottle. More from me on Malbecs soon…

tags: wine | wine auctions | malbec

If we had underwater photos of a shipwreck from today, it’s unlikely that there would be much wine on board. But that wasn’t the case in 350 BC off the coast of ancient Greece. Excellent new hi-res digital images of the wreck are now available thanks to a team of researchers using an automated underwater device. From the MIT press release:

The AUV scanned the scattered cargo and created a topographical sonar map while collecting thousands of high-resolution digital images, without ever physically touching the shipwreck. In all, 7,650 images were collected on four dives. Woods Hole ceanographic Institute archaeologists and engineers are assembling those images into mosaics that depict the minute features of the shipwreck with unmatched clarity and detail…

Much of the true value in cargo ships such as the Chios wreck is the information they provide about the networks that existed among the ancient Greeks and their trading partners. The wreck is “like a buried UPS truck. It provides a wealth of information that helps us figure out networks based on the contents of the truck,” said (MIT professor David) Mindell.

Thanks, BoingBoing!

tags: wine | ancient Greece | amphoras

The wine auction market is red hot with sales of at least $166 million last year. This year looks even hotter with the $12.2 million Naples, FL charity auction breaking its own record last month as well as the $10.6 million auction of a single collector’s wines at Acker Merrall in New York. The highest price lot was six magnums 1971 Romanee Conti Domaine de la Romanee Conti for $136,275.00 (that’s $448.27 AN OUNCE!).

One potential cloud is looming over the booming auction market: the droit de suite.

The buyer pays this resale right on auctioned art, which entitles the artist or the artist’s heirs to a percentage of art’s hammer price, sometimes as high as 4%. It has been common in France and several other continental countries for years and is new to the art market this year in the UK. Even though the tax will be phased in between now and 2012, it is expected to drive art sales to US auction houses.

While wineries might like the idea of getting residuals on trophy wines that perpetually change hands at auction (DRC would have gotten $5,451 from Acker’s priciest lot), it’s not likely that wine will ever fall under the droit de suite. For one, wine isn’t hit by the droit anywhere in the world. Further, droit often applies only to art over euro3,000 ($3,600). While it is impossible to break up a Modigliani, a magnum, or a wooden case of Margaux, many wines could be broken up into lots with lower values.

While Chris Ofili stands to benefit from the new law, it’s doubtful that Screaming Eagle ever will.

tags: wine | wine auctions | droit de suite

If you watched the State of the Union address (I personally used it to catch up on some episodes of the Daily Show and Colbert Report on Tivo), you may have noticed that the president cast the net wide in looking for alternative fuels when he mentioned a prairie grass: “We will also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips, stalks, or switch grass.”

We should be lucky that the teetotaler-in-chief didn’Â’t include wine on the list.

With oil at $68 a barrel, raising the price of gas, governments all over the world are looking for alternative fuels to stretch the existing supply. Wine, usually bulk wine of generic character, can be distilled into ethanol.

In France such a fate has usually been reserved for the wines of the Languedoc and in the 1930s wine even figured into a government plan to be a “national fuel.” But last year for the first time, appellation wines from Bordeaux were sent to the boiler, destined for gas tanks.

Just don’Â’t call it vin diesel.

That’s because it’s not just a European wine lake anymore as the Australians are grappling with a similar glut with 1 billion liters of unused wine in storage tanks. Up until as recently as October 2004 the government provided tax incentives to plant vines. Now there are morotoriums on plantings in some areas, uprooting in others, and have been contemplating distilling wine into a fuel additive. An industry summit with the Minister of Agriculture is set for March 3.

tags: wine | wine business | ethanol

In his column in today’s Times, Eric Asimov writes about Penfold’s St. Henri, a $50 $35 “sibling” of Grange (find this wine).

It’s the first time he’s written a column about Australian wines since August 18, 2004 when he favorably wrote about Australian Rieslings.

An excerpt from that column might explain the absence:

“Tankerloads of Australia’s soft, fruity, inexpensive reds are consumed around the world, and other regions are scrambling to match Australia’s easy-drinking style.”

Hey, I’m no fan of the hedonistic fruit bomb but it’s interesting that the NYT columnist has had so little to say about the wines of Australia, the biggest exporter of wine to the US.

tags: wine | Eric Asimov

On the subject of sports, 26 year old French woman Amélie Mauresmo clearly has poise on the court winning her first Grand Slam singles title at the Australian Open yesterday.

And clearly she has good taste off the court:

“I have a special bottle of wine I kept for my first Grand Slam title,” Mauresmo said of her Château d’Yquem 1937. “It’s at home waiting for me very quietly in the dark at the right temperature.” [NYT]

And at $3800 a bottle (find this wine) for this nectar-like dessert wine, she must be thinking how sweet it is! (Thanks, Skip!)

Hopefully she upgrades the stemware

tags: wine | Mauresmo