Dr Vino's wine blog

Football playoff season is upon is. The last college game wrapped up last night with the BCS championship and this weekend the NFL playoffs kicks off.

So we need to pair this viewing with some food. Since we have previously tackled wings and chips and salsa, this time we round out the viewing with something heartier: seven layer dip!

For those of you who haven’t enjoyed the dish, imagine a layer of refried beans imbued with chiles or other seasoning, then slather on a couple of ripe avocados (or guacamole), smother that in an inch of sour cream, then add an inch of salsa, some lettuce, cheese and possibly olives. Scoop it out with tortilla chips. Although it may sound gross to the uninitiated, it has an amazingly magnetic effect on those in the room.

So what would you pair with seven layer dip–or is it impossible?!?

Back in 2008, the prediction about 2009 was that wine consumers would opt for less expensive wine or stop drinking wine in favor of beer, vodka or shoju (actually, nobody said shoju).

So now that the book is closed on 2009, how did your wine buying and consuming change, if at all? Did you deplete your existing stock? Only buy wines on closeout? More dining at home? Hittin’ the Carlo Rossi?

Have your say in the poll and comments.

[poll id=”10″]

SPIT: controlled storage
James, who has taken a couple of classes of mine in the past year, wrote that he recently pulled the cork on a 1974 Heitz, Martha’s Vineyard for his 50th birthday and it was drinking fabulously. I asked him when he got the wine and he replied, “It was stored in a number of different environments since I had the wine since college in 1978. It was stored in my dormitory, then in my parents basement, then in my apartments, then in a controlled storage facility, and finally in a wine storage cooler. And it still turned out to be the best wine I have ever tasted.” Most excellent!

SIPPED: musical chairs
Jay Miller publicly states that he will no longer be reviewing Australian wines for the Wine Advocate. In other news, Wolfgang Weber, a senior editor at Wine & Spirits magazine and Italian wine critic, has announced that he will be leaving the magazine to join a boutique wine sales and marketing firm. In neither case has a successor been officially named. UPDATE: W&S Editor and Publisher Josh Greene writes in to say that he will be resuming the role of Italian wine critic for the magazine. UPDATE: Lisa Perrotti-Brown, based in Singapore, will be reviewing the wines of Australia (and New Zealand) for the Wine Advocate.

SPIT: blogging
John Mariani, a longtime wine and food writer, predicts a rise in vapid wine blogs. Sigh. We’ve seen this movie before. A more bold and original prediction would have been: The quality of blogs increases as journalists have fewer outlets. [Bloomberg]

NOT SIPPED: Johnny Apple’s wine
Betsey, widow of legendary NYT reporter Johnny Apple, will put his wine collection up for auction. The story repeatedly mentions his “enviably enormous expense account.” To which a former NYT executive editor says: “Johnny Apple would be impossible today, unfortunately.” Gawker reacts.

SPIT: alcohol
A buzz without inebriation? Instant sobriety? Such are the claims of an alcohol substitute being developed by Professor David Nutt, sacked as the UK government’s drug adviser last year. Should wine be threatened? Not if it is considered a food! [Telegraph]

SIPPED: kind words
The Winnipeg Free Press included this blog in their year-end roundup of notables. And my book, Wine Politics, receives a strong review in the current issue of the food journal, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. See the review here or more reviews on the new book review page.

We started with five days of your nominations for the wine person who most personified the decade 2000-2009. (Although if you read Frank Rich or Paul Krugman, you might not exactly want to epitomize this decade, the Naughties.) Wine lovers had an optimistic analysis for the decade as they chose from eight finalists who personified different story lines. And in the end, after 2,842 votes were cast, the winner was clear: Eric LeVine, founder of CellarTracker.com!

Second place in the voting was Gary Vaynerchuk, a wine retailer and internet phenom. With nearly 850,000 followers on Twitter, would Gary summon the VaynerNation to do his bidding? Eric and Gary crossed champagne sabers here and on various of the wine forums. Here’s a taste from Twitter:

Gary: @cellartracker hey are u whipping my butt 😉 LOL congrats bro …have a great new years!
Eric: Happy New Year’s to you too! You could whip me in 1 sec if U wanted. Love the Misha [Gary’s daughter] pic, daddy!

Wow, they are at each other’s throats!

If you are not familiar with CellarTracker, check it out or feel free to review all the comments on the previous thread. For your convenience, since some might say that CellarTracker is Zagat to the single critic’s Michelin, here’s a summary of what people said:

“CellarTracker…represents the rise at the beginning of this century of the power of the consumer critic…The fact that the users have essentially created an instant database of every wine under the sun is astonishing. The value and power of it will only increase as more people use it…Not only has he provided a well thought out system for tracking one’s wine experiences, it can be free (if you choose not to donate), it records tasting notes from thousands of different palates (not just one, i.e. Gary), and it has changed the way I purchase old and new wines…a game changer…CellarTracker changes the way wine is stored, appreciated, reviewed when it first appears, and reviewed as it ages. Eric gets my vote…My grown kids laugh because the site is my “home” page…it represents what’s right about the web…I can say unequivocally that I would not be the wine drinker I am today without CellarTracker…I would be lost if you took my CellarTracker away!…Long live CT! … And Eric LeVine is one the most rational and most interesting commentators on wine boards.”

Well done, Eric! The early betting shows that you are the one to beat for next decade’s title as well.

While some of you might take the post title to have other meanings since it is new year’s eve, we are being quite literal. Check out this photo…where in the world are we?

Hit the comments with your thoughts. The big reveal will follow soon!

Dear Dr. Vino,

I just discovered that champagne grapes are really tasty. I bet they would pair well with champagne…

Do they make Champagne or is that a marketing thing?

Paul

It’s a marketing thing. Those sweet, pea-sized grapes that usually appear as a garnish (or in soft focus on greeting cards next to cheese and a glass of wine) are actually black Corinth grapes. When dried, they produce something confusingly called Zante currants.

Champagne almost always comes from Chardonnay and/or Pinot Noir and/or Pinot Meunier grapes. And it comes from the Champagne region, which, as far as Dr. Vino operatives have ascertained, has zero acres of black Corinth grapes.

SIPPED: upgrading label info?
No disgorgement date, no review: Antonio Galloni, who reviews Champagnes for The Wine Advocate, announced in issue 186 that if nonvintage Champagne doesn’t come with a disgorgement date, then it will not be reviewed. (Discussion ensued over at wineberserkers whether there was a loophole in the statement.) With this information, consumers can have a better handle on the freshness of such wines.

SPIT: bling champagne
The economic downturn has started a bull market in columns about the bear market in Champagne! Alice Feiring got a jump on the competition with her WSJ. magazine piece from September (“Bubbles takes a bath”), a WSJ Europe reporter followed up with another piece this month (“All That Fizzes Is Gold“), and the wine columnists at the NYT and the more spendy Slate.com join the fray with recommendations, with nonvintage bargains under $40 and overall bargains under $100 respectively.

SIPPED: solitude
Ray Isle of F&W escapes the holiday madness of midtown at the Garden Wine Bar at the Four Seasons hotel. There he finds solitude and some more-intriguing-than-usual hotel bar selections. [Tasting Room]

SPIT: business as usual
Eric Asimov serves up a meaty post on the shuffling of the Bordeaux wine trade. [The Pour]

SIPPED: Bordeaux
Driven by sales of red Bordeaux, which country saw a fifteen-fold increase in imports from France during 2002 – 2008? Okay, it’s China. But you’ll need to click through for the importer stock pick in the story! [WSJ]

SIPPED: looking back
Good Grape and La Otra Botella review memorable moments in wine blogging from the past year.

“This is our 579th—and last—”Tastings” column. The past 12 years—a full case!—have been a joy, not because of the wine but because we had an opportunity to meet so many of you, both in person and virtually. Thank you.”

That was how John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter concluded their column in today’s WSJ. They don’t elaborate on their future plans; No editor’s note appears to indicate what will happen with wine coverage at country’s highest circulation newspaper.

When John and Dottie, as they were known to their readers, started writing the column, both came from news sections of the paper as opposed to wine, food or criticism. They asserted their independence from the trade, purchasing wines for review at retail and tasting them blind at home, with dinner over several nights. They rated wines on a scale of “Yech”, “OK”, “Good”, “Very Good”, “Delicious” to “Delicious!” Their column was often very personal, touching on wine in their family experiences, such as vacations on cruise ships or at Disney World. Indeed, their final column is a clarion call for how context influences the wines we drink.

But their signal contribution to wine writing was Open That Bottle Night, encouraging readers to pull a symbolically significant bottle from their cellar and open it just for the heck of it on the last Saturday in February. Readers then sent in letters with their experiences that John & Dottie rounded up in a subsequent column. It was inspired and interactive. And it won them legions of fans.

Best of luck to them in their future endeavors.