Dr Vino's wine blog

Aren’t they the little sweet ones? Er, the wines. Barbara and Jenna Bush were spotted sipping dolcetto, the tannic red wine from Northern Italy that literally means “little sweet one,” at Dino in Cleveland Park (Washington DC). The twins may be yin and yang, just like the grape’s description on the wine list:

Delightful: Rich, Straightforward, Friendly, Gulpable
Explosive: Ripe, Juicy, Fresh, Berry Flavors

What’s more interesting than the “star gazing” aspects of the story is the discovery of the restaurant that has an innovative and well-priced wine list, including many wines available three sizes: 3 oz pours, quarter liters as well as regular 750ml bottles. Dean Gold, a former wine and cheese buyer for Whole Foods, opened the restaurant (to somewhat mixed reviews) over the summer and decided to offer wines at $10 above retail. Now for wine geeks (do we count Barbara and Jenna among us now?) that’s worth seeking out!

Technorati tag: wine | Bush twins

In Live and Let Die, James Bond battles Mr. Big’s diabolical plan for world domination: to flood the streets with free heroin and drive out the other dealers. Once users are hooked, the villain can raise the price of smack and control the market.

Slate brilliantly made this analogy to Google’s business model recently. Give them free email, free blogging, in short, free smack for techies, and then they’re hooked on you through sunk costs and lock-in effects.

The reason I bring this up now is because this blog was down for four hours last evening. I run this blog on Blogger.com software, which is owned by Google. And the price of this blog you might wonder? It is free.

But my landlord doesn’t live downstairs and I can’t pound on his door and demand that he turn the blog back on. So I thought I would post a suggestion for people who are thinking about starting a new blog: use Typepad. Yes it costs $10 a month but hey, it’s worth it. Consider these additional features that Typepad has and blogger doesn’t:

1. Recently posted comments displayed on sidebar. Sometimes readers stumble on an older post through a Google search and post a comment but that is lost since it is far down on the blog.

2. Ability to truncate displayed posts. You can get a flavor of a posting from the first paragraph or two and maybe it’s not your cuppa tea (glass of wine?).

3. Categories!! A problem that I had for a long time with the usability of blogs was that they are a chronological spew of information. Typepad offers the ability to categorize postings so if you are only interested in wine recommendations, for example, then view only those. Wine commentary and analysis? Check out a display of those postings.

4. Trackback. Ease of tracking links back to a posting.

5. Technorati. Technorati is a clearinghouse for information in this digital age. It seems that Blogger based blogs have a hard time getting automatically indexed because the feed is outdated.

6. Images are easier and more flexible.

7. Free user tracking.

8. More details about posted comments such as the IP address of the poster and their email address.

And many more I’m sure…This is a hard posting for me to write since not only am I a fan of Google and their legions of clever engineers, there are costs for me moving my blog’s URL. But unlike heroin addicts, I am not dependent on this Mr. Big. If moving the blog means not only keeping the lights on this winter but also getting some of the above accoutrements (consider them blogging equivalents of heat and fresh paint) thrown in as well, then I won’t have any other choice.

PS- While on the subject of technology, I just downloaded the web browser Firefox 1.5 and it is great!

Technorati tags: wine | blogs | blogging | google

Inspired by HRH Jancis who wrote over the weekend about value wines in the UK, I thought I would point out why there will never be a “two buck chuck” (aka Charles Shaw) wine in Britain. Even though many supermarket retailers stock custom labelings for their own brands, taxes in what has historically been a beer drinking country make it hard to find “extreme” values.

Because retail prices include all taxes, it is difficult to find a good wine under £5 (about $10). To wit:

VAT = 17.5%
Plus per bottle flat tax of £1.24
Retailer mark up is 25-30%
Importer mark up is 25-30 % (but retailers can be importers)
Plus transportation costs

So a £4.99 wine thus breaks down something like this:
4.99 retail
4.24 pre VAT
3.00 pre flat bottle tax
2.25 retailer cost
1.60 importer cost
1.40 pre shipping cost
0.99 ex-cellars price, which includes bottling, fixed costs of winery, etc. So that’s about 50 p worth of wine!

Poor things. No wonder the Brits love going to the continent. Buy direct!

(Thanks, Gary!)

Technorati tags: wine | wine prices | United Kingdom

In vino veritas? Move over!

A funny (copyrighted) cartoon from the New Yorker:

check it out

Technorati tag: wine

Put a pushpin where you are!

Wine bloggers
(If you want to put a link back to your site, put in the full URL, e.g. http:// )

And another map for readers of this site! Granted, I’m not sure why anyone would want to do this, but hey, why not?! Google maps are cool.

Technorati tags: wine | wine blogs | google maps

If you’re a wine lover, chances are you’ve thought about diving in a wine lake. Or maybe just splashing some wine aromas on you.

Well that is Christian Delpeuch is hoping. General director at negociant house Ginestet and head of the Bordeaux Wine Council (CIVB), Delpeuch has just launched a new line of wine perfumes. Her “Botrytis” is for Sauternes-ophiles who love the noble rot. “Le Boisé,” a unisex offering for oak enthusiasts, comes in a wood case (natural cross-marketing potential to American Chardonnay lovers). Now smell this, a perfume blog, reports that le boise has a blast of “very strong, very spicy cedar” that dwindles to oak and sandalwood. The perfumes retail for €53 per 100ml (but have been seen on eBay for $8.25 buy-it-now price).

But will she market her Sauvignon Blanc with pi-pi du chat? Or fresh cut grass?

How about the alluring musty cellar? Wet dog? Herbaceous or vegetative? Spin that aroma wheel, baby! A woman’s neck is certainly a more dignified place for surplus wine to end up than a gas tank.

Technorati tags: food & drink | wine | perfume

An AP story out today and a triumphant one in the NYPost report on an economic analysis that claims the wine industry adds $6 billion to the New York state economy. Really?

According to the news reports of the state-sponsored study:

Winery sales: $412 million. OK. With 31,000 acres of vineyards, 212 wineries, and 1,384 grape farms that sounds reasonable.

“…but the state industry’s multiplier impact on the economy came to $3.4 billion in 2004.” Whoa! I gotta get me one of those multipliers!

“That was topped off with $2.6 billion in direct and indirect economic benefits from the wine-and-grape industry in other states and countries.” Whoa-ho!

Talk about value-added!

Technorati tags: food & drink | wine | New York

Robert Parker, criticus maximus, may be known for admiring wines that he calls “hedonistic fruit bombs.” But it is Australian wine writer James Halliday who has launched a verbal bomb at Parker that started a squabble among the world’s top wine critics.

In a speech in Sydney last week, Halliday lit the fuse as Decanter summarizes: “He said the trophy results of the last six Sydney Royal Wine Shows showed that Australian judges clearly preferred wines with finesse, such as Clare Valley Rieslings, to the ‘monstrous red wines so beloved of Robert Parker’, from regions like the Barossa Valley.”

Halliday then turned to Matt Kramer, who writes a column for Wine Spectator, calling Kramer “even more misguided than Robert Parker.”

Parker shot back on his bulletin board calling the style of wine that Halliday likes from Australia to be “Euro-imitations” that are “vapid, innocuous and in truth no better than very minor wines (and much cheaper)of Europe…all made by the formulas laid out by Brien Croser(add acid, then add more acid to denude any texture or trace of a wine’s place of origin).” He underscored his admiration for the “old-vine shiraz and grenache treasures” of Borossa, McLaren Vale, and Clare Valley.

Jancis Robinson then posted the Halliday speech on her site as well as a full-throated defense of Parker by his co-author David Schildknecht. Pierre-Antoine Rovani, another co-author in the Wine Advocate, accused Robinson of not being even-handed (among other things). Robinson has put some of this back and forth behind her paid subscription barrier but there is a free 15-day trial.

Yikes. While Parker does like some odd, almost freakish Australian wines such as the disjointed and unbalanced Connor Park, The Honour, Shiraz, 2002 (17% alcohol, 95 points; find this wine) he also gave 45 Australian Rieslings in his latest newsletter 90 or more points. Will all parties heed a call for balance in criticism of other critics?

**UPDATE
For what it’s worth, I was just doing a review of the NYT and WSJ columnists and was surprised that Asimov had written not one article on Australian wines in the last year while Gaiter and Brecher had written only one (trashing cheap Aussie Chardonnays). Are they steering clear of the Aussie thicket?

Technorati tags: food & drink | wine writing | criticism