Dr Vino's wine blog

Value wine stories: they’re even hotter items with wine writers these days than grower champagne or skin fermented sauvignon blanc! So here’s another two cents–or two under $20–from me.

One of my neighbors with a cellar particularly strong in California wines that he bought when he lived there in the 1970s, has been convening a monthly wine tasting of enthusiasts for a few years now. Unfortunately I’m not often able to go because of a scheduling conflict with my teaching, but last week was an exception so I joined the convivial gathering with the theme of currently available Bordeaux under $20.

Despite the fact that some 500 growers a year in Bordeaux go out of business, Read more…

David Lett, the pioneering “Papa Pinot” of Oregon’s wine country, died last week at the age of 69 from heart failure. [AP, The Oregonian]

I had the occasion to meet him only once, which was in July at a fabulous, legendary retrospective tasting that included every top pinot noir made at his Eyrie Vineyards from 2006 all the way back to 1970. I was a tad late in arriving at the winery because it is not where the vineyards are in the Dundee Hills–it is actually on the edge of the town of McMinville! By some stroke of luck, in the packed room I found a seat still open right next to Diana, David’s wife, and two seats over from David (pictured with his son Jason, the current winemaker at Eyrie, in the background).

The wines have been controversial since they are classically styled, as the Letts eschewed new small oak barrels, extraction and commercial yeasts among other things. I sent a friend a cameraphone pic that day of the lineup in front of me and he wrote back, “Eyrie–the ultimate anti-Parker wine!” Read more…

SIPPED: Columbus Day
I sat down with Eric Arnold of Forbes (and First Big Crush) to taste through a Columbus Day showdown of Spanish and Italian wines. In the video, we taste two excellent, old-school wines, the Lopez de Heredia 1999 Tondonia (find this wine) and the G. Mascarello, Monprivato, Barolo 2003 (find this wine). Check it out! [Forbes]

SIPPED: prognostication
US News called with questions about wine in France and America; I answered them in a Q&A on their site. [US News]

SPIT: strong dollar
Despite the dollar now at a 14 month high against the wine producing area known as the eurozone, French producers are starting to lament the global credit crunch and its effect on wine consumers. Oh, and in Australia too.

SIPPED: bling wineries
The WSJ has a slide show of all the fancy new wineries by international architects in Spain. Will they be able to heat them in this age of declining consumer confidence? Ack, fear and bling in Rioja!

SIPPED: free wine as water!
A plumbing switcheroo in an Italian village makes wine briefly come out of faucets instead of water! But was it made from authorized grape varieties? [timesonline.co.uk]

Crises–they’re everywhere, not just the financial markets. In France, the low-end producers have been in crisis for some time with adjustments in global demand and European policy. And for appellation wines, theoretically high-end of the quality pyramid in France, the crisis is that the system is now approving bad wines while squeezing out producers who dare to be different. I explore these issues in my book, Wine Politics, and Mike Steinberger offered his own recent broadside against the AOC system in discussing the celebrated case of Jean-Paul Brun’s 2007 Beaujolais. In a nutshell, the wine tastes great and was denied the appellation while truckloads of insipid wines were given the green light since they were deemed “typical” in an AOC taste test.

In a series of posts, I’ll be exploring some of the producers who have decided for whatever reason to make their quality wine outside of the appellation system in France.

And one of my favorite such producers is the super-naturalista and heirloom grape cultivator Thierry Puzelat in the Loire. I’ve been reluctant sometimes to pour wines made from the hipster grape variety to an audience of non-wine geeks. But I poured his Pineau d’Aunis (about $20; where to buy?), at a recent at a recent event in Chicago but it rocked the house.

But the wine for today is La Guerrerie (about $20; where to buy?). Since it is bottled as the lowly administrative category vin de table, it can’t state grape, place nor vintage. Thus it is simply La Guerrerie, which I thought was some sort of cheeky name riffing on “war” (la guerre) for the struggle with the authorities. But it is not so. I queried the wine’s US importer, Joe Dressner, who replied:

Guerrerie is a site, about 68.37% Côt [malbec] and 31.18% Gamay. Folklore has it that the spot was where the ancient gangs of the area used to rumble, or something like that. But no one is certain. Nevertheless, that is the name of the plot on the map. It doesn’t have the AOC because the wine took a long time to finish and it was not in a tastable form when the AOCs were evaluated.

The wine, with only a dash of sulfur added before bottling, is dark in color with great aromatics, particularly a grind of pepper. The wine has some fruit, lively acidity and a fun level of tannins that make it substantial and extremely rewarding–a perfect red for fall weather since it’s got more heft than a straight gamay but not as much as, say, a barrel-aged cabernet.

For more on the Puzelat brothers, including photos and why he has to maintain to wine making facilities 50 years apart, check out a very thorough post on Bertrand’s Wine Terroirs. And don’t forget how well Thierry Puzelat did as the Cinderella in Wine Madness!

Frank Bruni, restaurant critic for the NYT who also moonlights as presidential debate analyst, has an expose in today’s paper about unequal treatment of men and women in restaurants. Is it chivalry or chauvinism, he wonders. To the tape:

Because men can generally put away more food and alcohol, “men spend more, women spend less,” said Steve Dublanica, author of the recent best seller “Waiter Rant.” In addition, he said: “Men eat and leave. Women eat and stick around.” So a server attending to women may have to wait longer “to turn the table over, get another group, get more tips.”

In a follow-up blog posting, Bruni added this tidbit too from a restaurant veteran: “When drunk,” she told me, “men fight, and women vomit.” (Except for Jermain Dupri who vomits in his girlfriend’s (Janet Jackson) lap after which she squealed and had her driver high-tail the Maybach outta there.)

Do you encounter different service at restaurants, particularly when it comes to wine service such as ordering and sampling the bottle? If so, is it supremely annoying or entirely appropriate?

Come spend a night at the museum! I can’t promise that Ben Stiller will be there or that the dinosaurs will come alive but hopefully it will still be a good show.

As a part of the launch to their new exhibit “Climate Change: The Threat To Life and A New Energy Future,” I’ll participate on a panel at the American Museum of Natural History about wine and climate change on October 28. Gregory Jones, a leading researcher on how climate change affects wine growing regions, will be flying in from Southern Oregon University. I’ll be talking my own research findings about the carbon footprint of wine. And Evan Springarn of David Bowler Wines, an importer and distributor, will talk about the various shades of eco-wines. Best of all, he’ll be bringing four such wines for us to taste!

Head on over to the AMNH web site to book your tickets ($20) now and prepare to stimulate the mind and the palate.

Master of Wine Charles Curtis joined Christie’s auction house this summer as head of the Wine Department in North America. Trained as a chef, he entered the wine trade in 1994 and most recently was with LVMH. I caught up with him via email.

Christie’s Wine Department had $71 million in sales worldwide last year, the bulk coming in Europe. On November 29, they will resume live auctions in Hong Kong. For the complete calendar, see the Christie’s Wine Department web site.

1. How is the financial turmoil affecting the fine wine market?
Like all industry leaders, Christie’s is watchful of the unfolding situation in the financial markets, Read more…

The Wall Street Journal recently got in the act of selling wines. Now Playboy doesn’t want to be left, um, behind.

The magazine has collaborated to put “iconic images on a new limited-run collectors’ wine series,” according to a press release. Limited runs of wines will be “hand-chosen” by “credible master wine sommeliers who also were tasked with selecting the magazine cover that they feel best represents the flavor and taste profile of each wine.” Yikes, what an assignment!

But these are old wines in new, airbrushed wine skins with about 60 percent markups: The Schug Heritage Reserve Cabernet 2003 is easily available for under $50 (where to buy?) but with their label it is $86; the St. Supery Dollarhide Cabernet Sauvignon 2003 (where to buy?) is available for about $70 but with their label it is $112.

Their label for the Schug is particularly, erm, revealing; how did they get this by those dour, green-visored regulators at the Treasury Department? The “peel away” label no doubt helped. And to think that 1993 Mouton label by Balthus, a line drawing, was too much for them to approve.

After the jump, if you dare, click through for a comparison of the banned Mouton label with the current one from Playboy wines! Read more…