Dr Vino's wine blog

Where can you find a growing area called “show your ass”: Santa Barbara, Barossa, or Burgundy?

If you guessed Burgundy, you’re right! The Bourgogne Montre-Cul (or Montrecul or en Montre-Cul) vineyard/appellation lies at the north end of the Cotes de Nuits, near Marsannay. According to legend, the slopes were so steep that when the women pickers bent over to pick the grapes, they gave everyone below a bit more of a view than just the hills. While this may sound like Hugh Hefner’s vineyard playland, the women were likely of somewhat sturdier stock than those you’d find at the Playboy Mansion. (Montre Cul really does sound like it’s something out of the French equivalent to John Cleese’s Hungarian phrasebook. Diner: “Je voudrais un Montre Cul.” Sommelier: SLAP.)

I learned of this appellation while tasting Sylvain (“The Sylvainator”) Pataille’s tasty 2007 red wine from the region. There are not many acres of vineyard left in the tiny region, which has largely been engulfed by Dijon. As you can see to the right, his label is a little less artistic than other depictions.

The Whole Foods Market in Winston-Salem, NC, sells wine grapes by the pound. $2.49 a pound for “Organic Red Granache (sic) Wine Grapes,” “Organic Green French Colombard Wine Grapes,” and “Organic Black Carignane Wine Grapes.” Taste the difference, pre-wine! Or maybe it is another DIY wine thing?

Even though the store sits on the edge of the fastest-growing wine region of the country, the grapes are from California.

Thanks, Mark, for the cameraphone pic!

SIPPED: spiked juice
The good folks at Gizmodo sacrificed their own palates by turning Welch’s grape juice into, well, fermented grape juice using a product called Spike Your Juice. Just don’t let the WSWA know that underage might be able to get ahold of this for cheaper than wine.

SIPPED: wine book for kids
An illustrated book for children that details the life of the vine and wine’s history back to Roman times will be appearing soon–in France. It’ll keep them away from the fermented Welch’s, no doubt! (But then again, when you have self-serve wine tanks, why would you ever need to ferment Welch’s?)

SPIT: shopping for wine with kids
A Tesco in the UK refused to sell a dad a bottle of wine with his groceries. Why? Because he was with his eight-year-old daughter and she didn’t have valid ID. [Mirror.co.uk]

SIPPED: Bordeaux & Asia 1
After having his wine mentioned in a Drops of the Gods spin-off comic, a small Bordeaux vintner has withdrawn his wine from the market in the hope of preventing speculation and escalating prices. He’s now screening buyers and still offering the wine at €18. How long before there’s a secondary market for Château le Puy? [Guardian]

SIPPED: Bordeaux & Asia 2
A sequel to the popular Chinese TV show, “Cherish Our Love Forever,” is now shooting on location in Bordeaux. Inquiring minds wonder if it will do for Bordeaux in China what Sideways did for pinot noir here? [AFP]

SPIT: Bordeaux & Asia 3
The Economist has a short piece on wine in Hong Kong. They cite prices for Château Lafite Rothschild, the market leader, have roughly doubled in the past six months; “Sniff its bouquet,” they write “and the wine boom has hints of tulip mania.”

Do you want a self-serve tank that dispenses low-priced wines in a store near you? Apparently a ton of people do as lots of non-wine sites linked to a recent post here, hundreds of people commented via twitter, and over 5,250 people “liked” it on Facebook.

The reception was very positive with many comments akin to “I am moving to France–TOMORROW.” or “I want one of these in my kitchen.” Perhaps the ultimate compliment came from New York magazine which put the tanks on their approval matrix in the “highbrow-brilliant” quadrant in today’s magazine. The only thing more brilliantly highbrow was the Paris Review putting their entire archive of author interviews online! (Good thing they didn’t see a subsequent here about pairing wine with bacon doughnuts–oh wait, that dish came from them!)

Why do you think this post resonated so much, particularly outside of the wine world? I think that part of it had to do with the fact that Americans are really getting into wine but can certainly do with out the pompousness. Also, it is kind of a Nirvana to find a fountain of good, cheap wine. There’s certainly the environmental angle too. And then it is also just a little bit zany.

But for whatever reason, the enthusiasm for the posting shows an appetite for such dispensers in the US. Who will be the first to implement this here–Whole Foods? Trader Joe’s? Safeway? Binny’s? Whoever it is (and one person in the industry tells me he’s working on it), they can certainly be assured a lot of media coverage.

Robert Parker had some comments about a BYOB restaurant in Philadelphia that were picked up on philly.com. Here’s an excerpt:

I loved everything about this place…Add the BYO and no corkage….and better yet…no precious sommelier trying to sell us some teeth enamel removing wine with acid levels close to toxic, made by some sheep farmer on the north side of his 4,000-foot foot elevation vineyard picked two months before ripeness, and made from a grape better fed to wild boar than the human species….we all know the type-saving the world from drinking good wine in the name of vinofreakism…

Site reader Anderson Farris sent in this suggestion for our series: a bacon doughnut.

The particular bacon doughnut in question is from the NYC restaurant Traif. A chef described the dish thusly to nymag.com:

“…The bacon doughnuts with dulce de leche and coffee ice cream are, like, so fucking good. It’s a sugary doughnut with bacon fat in the batter and rendered bacon pieces in the doughnut itself. With the dulce de leche and coffee ice cream, it’s pretty kick-ass.”

Wow, that is a whole lot of dulce, with a bit of fat and salt. Are we even allowed to pair that with wine? Or is it…impossible?!?

Image: reduced size crop of photo credited to Melissa Hom at nymag.com

I’ve wanted to sell the above line to Wines of Chile for some time. But I found another use for it: this article on natural wine by Mike Steinberger on Slate.com. It really advances the discussion. An excerpt:

Yet when you strip away all the rhetoric and dogma about “natural wines,” what are you left with is essentially just a slogan, used by a group of people to champion some wines that happen to please their taste buds and/or sensibilities…I think “natural” advocates ought to ditch the “natural” label, which is hopelessly tendentious and polarizing, and should instead put the focus where it really belongs, on individual wines and winemakers…Call them good wines, call them distinctive, soulful, or funky wines—just don’t call them natural wines.

Marcel Lapierre, the vigneron of Beaujolais, is a grandpappy of minimal intervention, “natural” wine. And Thierry Puzelat in the Loire is a leading, young naturalista. In fact, Puzelat has credited the beauty of Lapierre’s wines as the inspiration for choosing the path to making such wines.

Each of them made a reasonably priced gamay in the acclaimed 2009 vintage; I bought each for about $12 at Astor Wines and then tasted them head to head. Turning to the master first, Read more…