Dr Vino's wine blog

Mike Steinberger revives a discussion from earlier in the year about current PR approaches that explicitly target women and wine.

For my take and related comments on the ignominy these approaches inflict on male and female wine enthusiasts alike, click here.

Ah, how quickly a love affair can last on Wall Street. Just three months ago it appeared that the stars were aligned for the world’s biggest wine producer, Constellation Brands, with rising profits and an even more quickly rising share price. Although the management wasn’t quite able to pull off what would have been a stunning takeover of Allied Domecq, they could dry their eyes on their stock certificates, which were now to be included in the S&P 500 average.

After announcing their earnings last night, the shares traded down almost 6% today to close at $23.43. Yes, quarterly sales were up 15% year-over-year to $1.19 billion but those numbers now include Robert Mondavi, which the company acquired in the fourth quarter of last year. Without Mondavi, sales were up only 3%.

The company announced last week that it is making a $900 billion bid for Canada’s leading winemaker, Vincor, whose management rejected the bid. These share price jitters should be giving Constellation’s management pause in pursuing their acquisitive strategy.

Last quarter I wondered how much farther could the shares go when they were at $30. This recent pullback has taken the froth of the shares (now a PE of 18, down from 25), which are still up 9% for the year. But the Street will likely want the company to digest its acquisitions better before going back for another round.

Disclosure: I don’t own any shares of Constellation.

Eliot Spitzer, the gubernatorial frontrunner for 2006, is leading a probe into New York’s wine liquor industry. “We are looking into illegal pricing practices in the liquor industry,” said Spitzer spokesman Marc Violette. Such no-nos include whether certain retailers have received illegal gift certificates, cash, trips and discounts from wholesalers. Although such incentives may be commonplace in other industries, the liquor laws have deep roots to the time of the repeal of Prohibition.

Spitzer’s not naming any names at this point. But he is promising further investigation of any threats that retailers may receive from wholesalers. The Buffalo News broke this story of infractions several weeks ago and Spitzer is clearly not satisfied with the recent hearings into the matter at the state legislature, nor with the oversight of the NY State Liquor Authority. It will certainly be interesting once more details of the investigation are made public since at least the discounting to big buyers is commonplace in the wine trade.

Stay tuned to this Untouchable.

tags: wine | New York | Eliot Spitzer

It’s Friday and you might be wondering what sort of wine events are available near you tonight. LocalWineEvents.com is an excellent resource for checking out what’s happening near you be it at a wine shop, bar, or other locale.

Started five years ago by the affable Eric V. Orange, the site has listed over 50,000 wine events. And a new site redesign last month has added more content and made the navigation easier and better looking (though it is still dense text). In fact, there are so many events listed, a search tool sorting by neighborhood or by wine theme may soon be necessary.

It’s also a useful way to find out what’s going on in other cities. Whether you’re jetting off to Tulsa (yes there actually are two events in Tulsa) or Cape Town (23 events) you can use the site to scope out the wine scene before touching down. Or if you want to feel proud of your local wine scene or cofirm your suspicion that it needs a vino infusion, you can also see where your city stands in the global rankings. Right now, New York City is leading the charts with 146 events, Los Angeles second with 106, and Chicago third with 77 events.

The best part might just be that it is free–for both consumers and event organizers. I recently had an event in Chicago and one in New York and many attendees had come through the localwineevnts listings. A free, action-packed database? Now that’s some technology we can all raise our glasses to!

In a high-octane story, French wine is being distilled into ethanol as a fuel additive. That’s certainly one way to mop up excess production and keep fuel prices down at the same time. I have been meaning to write a posting on this for weeks but Craig S. Smith in the NYT beat me to the punch. Here’s the link.

Georgia isn’t the first place that leaps to mind when discussing wine. And, oh yeah, I’m talking about the troubled Caucasian republic, not the state that grows peaches and peanuts.

Grape growers in the country are being hit by low prices that are half of last year’s already low levels and many are contemplating uprooting vines as a result. But it isn’t oversupply that has driven grape prices down: it appears to be fraud.

A Reuters story reports that “According to GWS [Georgian Wines & Spirits, the country’s largest winery that is controlled by Pernod-Ricard–TC], Georgia can produce a maximum 900,000 bottles of its famous red wine ‘Khvanchkara’ a year, but somehow 15 million bottles are sold in Russia.”

Counterfeiters have been making “wine” with “raw alcohol, special dyes and chemical additives” that apparently are detectable “only to professional tasters.” Whoa. Talk about a trend toward higher alcohol wines.

”Unfortunately in recent years the term ‘wine without grapes’ has taken root here. Many winemakers…don’t see the need to buy grapes to produce wine,” one source said in the story. The local industry and regulators clearly have tough work ahead. There are interesting parallels to the development of the industry in France and America –let’s just hope they can find some good terroir.

UC Berkeley’s law school, Boalt Hall, is offering “the first full-semester wine law course presented in the United States.” Richard Mendelson, a practicing attorney in Napa and a winery owner will be leading 45 students through “topics ranging from Prohibition and 21st Amendment jurisprudence to regulatory systems, wine labeling, appellations of origin, land-use planning and international trade policy.” They’ll also taste his Pinot Noir and learn about the harvest and other aspects of wine making.

Hey, sounds like wine politics to me! I’m glad the field is growing.

The quarterly World of Fine Wines, an expensive ($139/year) newish print magazine that has a sparkling editorial board, has started a debate about terroir. However, since the magazine has only a promotional web site, Jancis Robinson has poached an interesting discussion about terroir away from what could have been on their message boards.

As readers of this blog know, I am running stories on terroir (see first) from various industry participants in the run-up to the UC Davis conference on terroir in early 2006. (Jancis also raises the stakes on the timeliness of terroir since she says that that current potential MW [Master of Wine–TC] candidates have to write is ‘What and where is Terroir?’) Well, I guess I should have asked Hugo Rose since his article in Issue 7 (dated July 25, 2005) of WoFW has generated lot of comments on Jancis’ site. The web teaser describes his article as:

Terroir on the Rocks. Hugo Rose MW tests the traditional notion of terroir and proposes a new paradigm that rests more on cultural and historical perspectives.

David Schildknecht who now covers German and Austrian wines for the group blog Wine Advocate, has made an impassioned reply. Since the discussion on Jancis’ site requires a password, I will only excerpt his first two paragraphs here and flag it for those with full access.

Granted, “terroir” may be one of the most irritatingly vague and slippery words in the wine growers’ and wine critic’s vocabulary. But it won’t remedy this to adopt Hugo Rose’s “dynamic definition of terroir” (The World of Fine Wine, Issue 7, 2005) ­ nor indeed the (very!) “broad” view advocated by Jonathan Swinchatt and David Howell (in this same issue) because, once one includes “cultural and historical perspectives” ­ let alone human decision making along with physically-describable situation, soil and microclimate, one is left with a concept so all-encompassing that it fails to mark any significant distinction.

That terroir, as Rose asserts, “is not a theory” appears too obvious to deserve mention, but that hardly warrants his conclusion that “terroir is, when you get down to it, just a story, nothing more.” It is not a theory any more than is “nature” (as opposed to “nurture”). But, like “nature”, it can mark an illuminating distinction, in this instance between anything that impinges on the flavour of a wine as a result of human decision or intervention in the course of that wine’s annual growing cycle, and all else. That “all else”, I submit,­ conspicuously excluding human volition, culture and history, comes down to weather (day-by-day meteorological variation) and terroir. Put a slightly different way, we want to distinguish between two sources of influence on the flavour of any given wine. On the one hand, there is the share of responsibility for resultant flavours that can be directly traced to human action, intentional, coincidental or accidental. On the other, there is anything that impinges on flavour over which the human agents who assume responsibility for growing and vinifying had no influence. The latter can be further subdivided into vintage-dependent meteorological conditions and “all other”, which is to say, “terroir”…more