Dr Vino's wine blog

Devise a strategy for all that surplus wine! This month in Chicago and New York, I’ll be leading classes on collecting, the wine auction market and how to strategize for investing or enjoyment. Both locations will have tastings of collectible wines.

We’ll do one marathon session at the University of Chicago on Sep 29. (details and registration)

Starting on September 25, we’ll spread it out over three Tuesday evenings at New York University’s Torch Club. (details and registration)

Only five spots are left in Chicago and a few more in NY so sign up now or never! Hope to see you there.

With the sale of wine prohibited in grocery (aka “food”) stores, this is what we’re left with at the A&P, etc. Mmm, “wine product.”

My locker is bigger than your locker. Maybe not. But it is more expensive!

Yes, that might just be the exchange between chef-preneurs Alain Ducasse and Daniel Boulud. As mentioned on this site in March, the wine-y Bar Boulud will be charging $1,250 a month for a three cubic foot locker in the bar. Patrons can store their wine there and uncork at will with dinner.

Not to be outdone, NY mag reports that Ducasse will be opening a wine bar this fall, and “he has enlisted David Rockwell to install such oeno-geeky touches as temperature-controlled armoires and 50 private wine lockers.” Sadly, they did not reveal the price of the lockers. But I doubt he will be outdone by Boulud! One to watch this fall.

More wine bar openings, after the jump. No word on whether they too will join the towel-snapping chefs in the locker room festivities. Read more…

Economists love to point out that there is no free lunch. But there is something else nearly as good: fine dining for lower prices at lunch time.

On a vacation with your partner or family, splurging on lunch can have many benefits, first of which is clearly money. Many top restaurants offer lower prices for lunch than for dinner. Consider Paris, where a quick scan of some top spots shows the spread: Taillevent has a 70 euro lunch compared with 140 or 190 euro dinner menus. At the summer dining room at the Hotel Bristol, there’s a 90 euro lunch menu as opposed to the more expensive a la carte in the evening. And at Pierre Gagnaire, it’s 90 euro prix fixe lunch vs 225 for dinner.

You might have noticed that this is still dropping over $100+ on lunch–and we haven’t even gotten to the wine yet (tax and tip are included, however!). But I chose these high-end restaurants because they illustrate the cost-savings that are available at many restaurants in Paris and beyond.

In New York, reasonable gourmet lunches abound and are a fraction of Parisian prices. Read more…

SIPPED: Nose jobs
Twenty five cops have been trained as sommeliers to sniff out fraud in Italy (reacting to fraud in olive oil, perhaps?). That would make for great TV! “‘The ability to remain lucid is at the core of every undercover activity, without exception,” said one of the officers. [Decanter]

SIPPED: bagged wine
Not as in a blind tasting bag, as in the wine pouch–with handle! [wine.co.za]

Sipped AND Spit: the 2007 harvest
Hottest in 400 years makes it “another 2003”–decidedly mixed to me. But this reporter thinks it’s better: “Fiercely hot, true, for months now, but without that pitilessly dry, hot spring that we had four years ago.” [Guardian]

SPIT: high alcohol wines
A journalist suffers a boozy night and then limps off to taste through Tesco new a line of low-alcohol wines. [Guardian, thanks Mark!]

SPIT: Wine on Bali
An overhaul of the corrupt Customs agency has left this resort island virtually dry. “It is becoming a serious issue,” said Michael Burchett, the general manager of the five-star Conrad hotel and head of the Bali Hotel Association. “Some hotels are reporting a 40 per cent reduction in the number of items available on their wine lists. If something doesn’t happen soon most of the hotels are going to have very serious problems by the end of September.” [FT.com]

SPIT: warm beer
“In the UK, beer lost 5 percent year-over-year, while wine gained 6 percent. Rose wine has enjoyed the greatest sales boom – up 188% since 2005 to hit 49 billion liters this year.” [Sky news]

SPIT: Cipriani
After guilty plea to tax evasion, the NYC restaurant owner who may lose liquor licenses [AP]

SPIT: Punch & Judy closes, ditto for Bourgeois Pig Cafe. See the updated NYC wine bar map.

All right, people. Saddle up them ponies, we’re going on a trip! Thanks to the lobbying from Neil, aka the Brooklynguy, our next meetup will be at Stonehome wine bar in Fort Greene, Brooklyn!

Stonehome has been racking up the accolades recently. Zagat NYC Nightlife says it is the #1 wine bar in NYC. NY Mag praised the outdoor space. All that sounds like we need to see the place for ourselves!

So next Thursday hop on a train to Brooklyn and savor a glass with fellow vino-philes in the latest of our series of meetups. Post a comment or drop me a line if you can make it since the folks at Stonehome would like a heads up on numbers. Hope to see you there!

When: 6:00 – 8:00 PM, Thursday July 26
Who: you – and feel free to bring a friend!
Where: Stonehome wine bar, 87 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11217. Map it!
How: G to Fulton; C to Lafayette; 2, 3, 4, 5, N, R, Q to Atlantic Ave, BAM/LIRR exit.

* Slow Food Westchester: July 25, 6 – 8 PM. I’ll be helping out with the inaugural event for this chapter (convivium). We’ll taste seven great wines that also happen to be some hue of “green.” Plates restaurant, Larchmont, NY. $40, reservations necessary. Call Plates to reserve: 914.834.1244

* New York University: Buying and Cellaring, three sessions starting on September 25. Register here
* University of Chicago: Buying and cellaring liquid assets: one monster session, September 29. Register here
In both of these new classes, we will examine the red hot wine market. We will discuss where to buy wines, where to sell, how to store, and when to consume wines. In the longer, NYU course, we will devise a buying strategy for your budget and storage conditions and I hope we’ll be able to do the same in Chicago, even though the time is more limited. Both NY and Chicago will have tastings of collectible wines so be sure to sign up–especially, since the people enroll, the bigger the tasting budget is!

* New York Unversity: Becoming a Wine Expert. Six Wednesday evenings, starting October 17. Register here
This spring, one participant in the course said that he had waited two years to get into the class — I hope it was worth it! This, my core class, has the enrollment limited to 25 because of space limitations at the Torch Club.

* The Gourmet Institute: New York City, October 19-21. Register here
I’ll be participating on the panel “Eat the Web: Blogging’s Effect on the Food World,” moderated by Ruth Reichl. It’s very expensive (think two iPhones) but there are all those celebrity chefs whose food you can eat!

And I’m trying to coordinate an offline meetup, hopefully for next week…More on that very soon.

OK New Yorkers, time to cry into our Riedel stemware: the new Whole Foods on High Street Kensington in London beats the snot out of Whole Foods Bowery from a wine perspective. Roll the tape from the Financial Times:

“The eating-in aspect of this branch of Whole Foods is much more significant than anything we have ever done in the US because of the relative ease of acquiring a liquor license here rather than in the US where it is difficult in certain states and impossible in others. We simply could not do anything like this back home.” (emphasis added)

Thus said David Lannon, a regional president of WFMI in the UK. But it doesn’t stop there. “On the ground floor, between a large wine department (where not all the wines on sale are organic) and their temperature-controlled cheese room, is a small wine bar where one can sample the produce from either department.” (emphasis added)

Better in-store dining! Free samples with cheese! This New Yorker votes to import London’s laws on wine retailing!