Dr Vino's wine blog

Have you ever felt badly for the makers of Silver Oak (whose Napa wine retails for $100 a bottle)? Well, now is your chance. The winery has been relegated to a lowly “fifth growth” status in a new “classification” in the British magazine Wine International.

Simon Woods has drawn up the classification, modeled on the 1855 classification of wines of the Medoc, using price as his guide. If, wondering into your local wine store, you didn’t realize that a Colgin Herb Lamb Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon ($420) cost more than the Silver Oak, then I’m not sure that this classification is going to help you since it is determined solely on price (and what’s with the apparently random price breaks?)

For me, the fun in finding wine and writing about it is that the market mechanism has such a hard time with quality when it comes to wine: simply reading a bottle’s price tag is not always indicative of what’s in the bottle. That’s why I spend my time finding value vino, the juice that falls between the cracks in the market.

Anyway, here is the classification…

First growths: $300+ (£171+)

Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley – £1,225 (£697)
Bryant Family Pritchard Hill Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley
Dalla Valle Maya, Napa Valley (also Cabernet Sauvignon)
Grace Family Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley
Colgin Herb Lamb Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley (also Tychson Hill Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon; Cariad)
Harlan Estate Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley (also The Maiden)
Blankiet Estate Paradise Hills Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley
Abreu Madrona Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley

Second growths: $175 – $300 (£100 – £171)
Barbour Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley
Schrader Beckstoffer Cabernet, Napa Valley
David Arthur Elevation 1147 Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley
Shafer Hillside Select Cabernet Sauvignon Stags Leap District, Napa Valley
Pride Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve, Napa Valley (also Claret Reserve)
Hourglass Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley
Araujo Eisele Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley (also Altagracia)
Gemstone, Yountville, Napa Valley
Bond Vecina, Napa Valley (also St Eden; Melbury; The Matriarch)
Peter Michael Cabernet Sauvignon Les Pavots, Knight’s Valley
Beringer Bancroft Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley (also the Cabernets from Chabot Vineyard; St Helena Home Vineyard)

Continue…

The New Yorker’s food issue is now on newsstands. It seems that the magazine is doing a food issue every summer now with one appearing each of the last three (or is it four?) summers.

What’s interesting for wine geeks is that wine has gotten such short shrift in the pages of the New Yorker. In the annual food issues, there has been only one article having to do with wine, Calvin Trillin’s piece from a few years ago that suggested wine drinkers couldn’t differentiate between red and white wines by taste alone.

Couple that absence with Adam Gopnik’s wide-ranging review article last summer, which suggested that wine writing and wine appreciation vocabulary are a mere fig leaf for justifying getting drunk, and one might suspect an anti-wine plot at the magazine. Does editor David Remnick think wine is frivolous? Or uninteresting? Or even unpalatable? One would think that wine is a perfect match with the magazine’s readership. Nobody would expect a piece about wine and food pairings from the New Yorker, but there are plenty of interesting stories about, hmm, say, people in the industry or the business and politics of wine.

Why not have a little feed with your drink? RSS feed that is. Now you can know instantly when I post on this blog and not wait around for my comments to get a little age on them (which, unlike Bordeaux, may or may not be a good thing).

There are (at least) three ways to get these updates, or feeds. If you use My Yahoo, you can add this blog to your Yahoo page by clicking the MyYahoo button on the top right column. My headlines would be honored to nestle alongside Reuters or your local paper’s headlines. I have been finding Yahoo slow to update though.

Or you can aggregate the latest from Dr. Vino along with other blogs that you like to read in a NewsReader. Some leading ones are bloglines, newsgator, and SharpReader. Click on the orange “feed” button on the top right column for the feed URL.

Finally, Mac users with the new Tiger OS can add this site’s feed to the bookmark bar. Firefox users can also add a “Live Bookmark” by clicking on the orange button at the bottom right of the browser window while on this page.

And if all this is too confusing, then kick back and have a glass of value vino and check the site regularly for updates.

This just in from the California bureau (OK, it’s actually from last week, but still interesting nonetheless)…

The vapors lost during the fermentation process are known poetically as the “angels’ share” as the wine releases to the heavens. Well, EPA officials have a new word for it: smog! The LA Times reported on Monday that the San Joaquin Valley, the heart of American industrial wine production, has worse air quality than LA or Houston. Of course, auto emissions and “cow flatulence” play a part too but winemakers may soon have to make expensive fixes to wine making to reduce the angels’ share…

A successful, middle aged San Francisco couple plans to build a new Napa winery. Doesn’t sound like much of a story–except that the couple in question is Nancy and Paul Pelosi. Is this a hobby for Rep. Pelosi, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, or is it a plan for retirement?

And free trade in wine may be coming to California. Although the state has allowed shipping wine into the state, a bill that is headed to Gov. Schwarzenegger’s desk would remove the two case a month limit. The bill would also remove the requirement that states have open trade with California as a prerequisite for Californians to order from them, which could make California a diverse wine market for consumers. I’ll raise my glass to that!

When you think of all the things growing in New York City, grapes are hardly at the top of the list. But now they are actually on the list. A one-acre vineyard was planted in Queens in 2004 and the fruit is now ripening on the vine. The first vintage for wine production will be next year, the NY Post reports today.

Contrary to what you might think, this diminutive vineyard is not nestled in between some non-descript apartment buildings. It’s actually on the 47-acre Queens County Farm Museum, which dates back to 1697, claiming to be “New York City’s largest remaining tract of undisturbed farmland and is the only working historical farm in the City.” Good that they finally added vines then.

The Post story quotes the Farm Museum’s director as saying that they have high hopes for quality for this new terroir: “We don’t want to sell a jug wine just for the novelty of it. Obviously, we can’t expect to be world class the first year. It’s going to take a lot of trial and error.”

He also admits that they haven’t named it yet. Do you have any suggestions? Here are a few to get the ball rolling:

Bottega di Laguardia (LGA)
Hommage a John F. Kennedy (JFK)
The Wine-ing New Yorker
Flushing Wine
I love New York Queens

Wine is getting a full dose of “reality”–programming that is. As readers of the site know, I am running a “reality” project, The Real Wine World, on my web site following a wine producer, an importer, and a wine shop for a year.

In early 2006, wine will hit the TV screen with a new reality show airing on PBS. The San Luis Obispo Tribune reports that “The six-part series follows five people from varied backgrounds who will compete for a chance to launch their own wine label.”

Too bad because that was an idea that I had a few months ago for a reality wine show! Pity that I don’t know any TV producers 🙁

Maybe I could be a contestant?

When can you fudge your age? You can if you’re

a) a movie star
b) a California wine

Sadly, the second case is on the cusp of gaining more fudge-factor. Wines in America currently require only 95% of the grapes to come from a given vintage. The Wine Institute is now pushing for a reduction in that level to 85%, further diluting information on the label (although a compromise in the WI led to their request just applying to state, county, or multi-county areas; see story in NapaNews.com).

This is clearly headed in the wrong direction since what consumers need is greater truth-in-labeling, rather than less. You can see the proposed regulation change on the Tax and Trade Bureau’s site here, and also can post a comment here before the comment period ends on August 30.

Adam Gopnik, who wrote the Paris Journal column for the New Yorker for several years and is author of Paris to the Moon, likes France but does he like (French) wine?

In a story on the woes of France this summer in the current New Yorker, he slips in a gratuitous reference to French wine makers:

“The European idea had been at the heart of both right- and left-wing policy for almost fifty years and, by every rational accounting, has always benefited France more than any other country, from the huge subsidies that pour in every year to French farmers and winemakers to the directing role it has given France in controlling German expansionism and energy…”

Unfortunately this presentation just reinforces perceptions in the English speaking world that French wine production is massively subsidized (there is no disputing that it is subsidized but it is the declining number of vin ordinaire producers who gobble up most of the public funds). Consider these figures from the Times of London:

“French winegrowers received £213m in subsidies from Brussels in 2002 out of the overall £6.75 billion allocated to French agriculture.” (3%)

Couple this with his scathing article from last year about wine criticism and one might come to the conclusion that Monsieur Gopnik does not even enjoy the fruits of the vine. Quel horreur! A sample from last year’s article:

What they rarely seem to be about is drinking wine. Remarkably, nowhere in wine writing, including Parker’s and Echikson’s, would a Martian learn that the first reason people drink wine is to get drunk…For it is not wine that makes us happy for no reason; it is alcohol that makes us happy for no reason. Wine is what gives us a reason to let alcohol make us happy without one. Without wine lore, and wine tasting, and wine talk, and wine labels, and, yes, wine writing and rating—the whole elaborate idea of wine—we would still get drunk, but we would be merely drunk. The language of wine appreciation is there not because wine is such a special subtle challenge to our discernment but because without the elaborate language—without the idea of wine, held up and regularly polished—it would all be about the same, or taste that way.