Dr Vino's wine blog

Today’s summer wine factoid: Nomacorc, a purveyor of plastic wine closures that require a corkscrew to remove, was the brainchild of a Belgian businessman who made a fortune manufacturing extruded plastics, including pool noodles. So if you’ve been floating around in the pool this summer and sensed a connection, you’re right.

In related news, plastic closures were the closure that consumers disliked the most by a two-to-one margin over all other closures in our recent poll.

SIPPED: X-Ray vision for wine lists?
The above image comes from wondertonic.tumblr.com

SIPPED: satire
HoseMaster continues his discussion of Carbon Footprint wines, including “Creeping Deforestation” & “Screw the Ozone” [HoseMaster of Wine]

SIPPED: dug up from the cellar
“Perth Pink….This is not a wine for drinking, this is a wine for laying down and avoiding.” An old Monty Python wine sketch that had fallen through the cracks!

SPIT: convenience
Alcohol has been “too accessible to the people of Ontario,” so the LCBO will respond by shuttering retail stores and limiting the rest to 12-3 on Saturday. [This & That; cbc.ca]

SIPPED: natural wine humor
“So far only insufferable hipsters in New York and San Francisco talk about natural wines but they proselytize so much over the internet that we may pick up another 50 or so drinkers in the next few years.” A new new robotic sommelier video.

SIPPED: glass cleaning tip o’ the day
Don’t use the same sponge to clean wine glasses that you just used to clean the waffle batter bowl.

Recently, my seven-year-old son dug up some worms, made a sign, set up a table on the street and sold them for ten cents each. “Great for your garden! Great for fishing!” ran his pitch. He made $9, including tips. That’s almost better than wine writing!

On a somewhat related note, check out the profile of Brett Ottolenghi–alternately known as “the truffle kid” or “Hamleg”–in the current issue of the New Yorker (subscription req’d). When he was 13, Ottolenghi started selling white truffles online and later ran the business from his dorm room. Now 25, he “specializes in the small run, the vaguely regulated, the hard to come by, and the near-banned,” which includes foie gras, truffles, caviar, saffron, vinegars, cinnamon, oils, salts, and ham. He sells them to the 375 Las Vegas chefs he claims to know on a first-name basis.

This week’s big story is the dramatic, emergency-slide resignation of JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater. Following verbal abuse from a passenger, he took to the PA system to let everyone on board know that he’d had enough, popped the inflatable emergency slide, threw down his carry-ons, grabbed a couple of beers from the drinks cart, and then slid down to the tarmac and walked to the employee parking lot at JFK.

Working in a restaurant is also a high-pressure situation (though fortunately, there’s not TSA screening for diners). So, turning this incident to the wine world: What would it take for a sommelier to shout expletives at diners, hit the fire alarm, grab two fave bottles, and run out the back door?

I put the question to Jean-Luc Le Dû, who was in the restaurant business for 20 years, the last ten as chef sommelier at the acclaimed Restaurant Daniel. (He now runs his own wine shop, Le Dû’s Wines, in the West Village.) It turns out that he actually did walk out of a job once! And I also asked him which two bottles he would have grabbed from the famed cellar at Daniel if he had made a dramatic exit.

I also asked the Twitterati (follow along). See all the replies after the jump! And add your own thoughts in the comments. Read more…

SPIT: “imbibing idiot bias”
Job applicants who partake in alcoholic drinks are perceived as less intelligent and hireable according to a new academic study, dubbing the phenomenon an “imbibing idiot bias.” In the actual experiments, the subject ordered a glass of “house merlot,” so perhaps the conclusion is valid. But what if the subject ordered a glass of hipster wine, such as pineau d’aunis or Txakoli, or a back vintage something good? Maybe that idiot deserves a job after all. [Reuters]

SPIT: clarity
In the hope for clarity, French authorities propose to rename AOC Bourgogne Grand Ordinaire as Côteaux Bourguignons. You’d think they ordered the house merlot! [thedrinksbusiness]

SIPPED: more imbibing idiots?
Coca-Cola has been sued over the health claims of vitaminwater. Its defense: “no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking vitaminwater was a healthy beverage.” In and of itself, it’s not wine related, but it does remind me of Fred Franzia’s defense in the case of Napa Ridge (not sourced from Napa fruit) that nobody expects Hawaiian Punch to come from Hawaii.

SPIT: cartel action
Nine sherry producers have been slapped with a $9 million fine from Spanish competition authorities according to Decanter. Their breach of the law: colluding to set minimum prices for private label sherry to supermarkets. Blogger Oliver Styles would be fine with the price collusion though, writing “Wouldn’t that stick a lump of deep shag in the supermarkets’ pipes? And they’d have to smoke it.”

SIPPED: The Doon of a new way?
Randall Grahm places a two million dollar bet on a new vineyard grown from grape seeds (as opposed to cuttings). And not just any seeds: he will crossbreed his own hybrids, thus making essentially new grape varieties, the seeds of which will give rise to the 90 acre vineyard in San Juan bautista. Of note, he calls the project a form of “viticultural philanthropy.” [SFGate.com]

SPIT: overpriced wine lists
Eater has a run-down of four wine lists, all obnoxious in their own way, which they dub the Hall of Shame. One question: are plaques available for purchase?

Site reader Supertunaman sent in this label shot (about the quality of most UFO sighting photos) with the comment, “LOLOL!”

What’s so funny? If Miller is the Champagne of Beers, perhaps this is the Champagne of White Zinfandels?

Actually, since a 2005 bilateral accord between the US and the EU, the term Champagne cannot be used on new labels of American sparkling wine. So this Barefoot wine (now owned by E. & J. Gallo) must have been approved sometime prior to that as existing labels at that time were grandfathered. Also of note: the last time I checked, there were zero hectares of Zinfandel vines in Champagne.

I keep meaning to do a comparative tasting of wines made from the mencia grape. But every time I get a bottle, I drink it!

Case in point: D. Ventura’s Vina do Burato, 2008 (about $19). Weighing in at a spare 12% alcohol, this is a great summer red, perfect for chilling and serving dining outside. It’s reminiscent of a cru Beaujolais, although a tad darker in color, but with that same lively acidity, bright fruit and scoring highly on the drinkability scale.

Last year, Eric Asimov of the NYT explored the winemaking renaissance in Ribeira Sacra, the vertiginous region in northwestern Spain where this wine came from (check out the story and the gorgeous photos that make you want to book your tickets there right now). The maker of this wine is Ramón Losada, a full-time veterinarian descended from generations who have toiled the terraces in the region to make wine. He told Asimov “I make money on the wine, but not enough to live on, which gives me the freedom to make wine however I want. Some urge me to change, but I won’t.” Excellent!

Thanks to a tip from Chris Barnes at Chambers Street Wines, I tried a bottle of Godello from the region too. The Almalarga 2008 from Pena Das Donas ($22) was also low in alcohol (12.5% on the label). It was a Goldilocks wine–not too hot/cold, big/small, comfy/not comfy–it was, “just right.” The 80-year-old vines produce a wine with pleasant acidity and some stoniness of a Chablis and good richness thanks to aging on the lees. The only things holding this silky, drinkable wine back from white wine world domination are the presumably limited quantity of production and the slightly high price.

We haven’t had any meat in our impossible pairings series since the bacon explosion. Generally, meat is too easy for us all to pair. So cranking up the degree of difficulty, today we present you the challenge of the pulled pork sandwich.

At the base level it’s not all that hard: a shoulder of pork is smoked (or a whole hog is roasted in eastern North Carolina) and then chopped, shredded or sliced. Then comes the question of sauce. In most places outside of the Carolinas, a sweet barbecue sauce is generally stirred into the meat, forming a gloopy, orange mass of sweet meat that is then plopped on a bun. The haute BBQ places will actually let you add your your own sauce and slaw…which is where it gets tricky.

Some regional variations favor a mustard based sauce. Others have a thin sauce based on cider vinegar while others add a dash of tomato and a dash of sugar. Still other styles have brown sugar or molasses. Finally, there’s the sweet, think mass that is KC Masterpiece.

And the slaw that can go on top presents its own challenges: shredded cabbage, grated carrot, dunked in a sauce of mayonnaise, cider vinegar and sugar.

So make your sandwich the way you like it. And suggest a wine pairing, if it’s not…impossible!