Dr Vino's wine blog

From a reader:

So we went nuts and had breakfast for dinner. Poached eggs for the wife, fried eggs for me. Hash browns, turkey bacon. A little tomatillo salsa for me, on the eggs.

Let’s rule out champagne or mimosas. What wine do you have with breakfast, when you’re not eating it in the a.m.?

It’s an interesting question. But I find this pairing to be driven more by what’s on the plate than by the time of day. So why rule out Champagne? It might just make this…possible! Hit the comments with your thoughts!

Image: istockphoto with permission

We saw the still version before but now we’ve got a four minute video clip from the outdoor, communal spas in Japan where you can take a bath in red wine, sake, coffee, green tea and even chocolate! (Do them all to complete the cycle.) The wine and coffee baths reputedly have anti-aging properties. A pale British reporter has the story–and provides a brief scare when he threatens to get in the bath himself.

(reading this in a feed reader? Click here for the video.)

“It’s no wonder Britain’s middle classes are getting wasted,” Trish Groves, of the British Medical Journal, told the BBC.

Why? Could it be the economic slowdown? Posh & Becks living in America? The fact that the Grammy for best album went to Herbie Hancock instead of Amy Winehouse?

No, it’s the 750 ml bottle!! “It’s all too tempting to finish the bottle there and then to avoid waste,” Ms Groves continued. Those frugal Brits are plunging themselves into the abyss just so they don’t waste 250 ml of wine. Someone airdrop them some of those vacu-vin stoppers!! And just keep them away from magnums!! Or giant bottles on the street!

Related: “Big wine glasses make you drink more: poll”
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Sixty-year-old, dry farmed Riesling vines at Stony Hill Vineyards, Napa Valley

“We make a red wine.”

Normally that’s not the sort of statement that raises an eyebrow in Napa Valley. But when one vintner told me that at dinner one night last week, I had to taste it for myself.

The vintner in question was Peter McCrea who owns Stony Hill. While most Chardonnay in the region receives lavish oak treatments and has high alcohol levels, Stony Hill Chardonnay is aged in 40-year-old (and therefore neutral) barrels and has 13 percent alcohol. His other two wines, a Gewurztraminer and a Riesling, roll in at 11.24 and 11.65 percent alcohol respectively. And at $21 a bottle, the wines stood out for another reason from the Napa wines.

Not your average California whites. Which is why I jumped in a car with another wine writer and drove up to the winery the next day in pursuit of the red nobody has ever tasted outside of the winery: Stony Hill Syrah. Read more…

SIPPED: French wine sales
Sales of French wine rose seven percent in 2007. Is the 2003 Iraq-induced hangover finally over? [IHT]

SIPPED: French wine sails
Belem, a three-masted barque first launched in 1896, will begin transporting 60,000 bottles of wine by sail from the Languedoc to the British Isles in an effort to reduce wine’s carbon footprint. Will gerbils power the refrigerated containers? [AFP]

SIPPED and SPIT: climate change and wine
A big shindig in Barcelona attracted some cult winemakers to discuss global warming and wine; although Al Gore could only make an appearance via satellite, wine bloggers Alice Feiring and Catavino were on the scene.

SPIT for SIPPING: Nicole Kidman
Nicole Kidman caused an uproar because she mighta, coulda had a glass of wine during the Oscars last Sunday. Unlike Gisele who caused a stir by sipping wine at the Super Bowl, the big deal with Keith Urban’s wife was not the wine selection itself; rather, she is pregnant. Kidman’s agent has defended her client, denied the allegation, and called the accuser an “idiot.”

Related:
-“Knocked up: expecting moms and defying expectations”
– All abord the Tesco barge
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This was sent in from a reader (identity to be revealed later, with gratitude). Where in the wine world was he with that red earth?

Hit the comments with your thoughts. And send in a photo from your travels if you think you can stump us!

UPDATE: Here’s the commentary from Beijing Boyce: Read more…

Did you know you can store your wine label images in a separate folder on your iPhone? When you are stumped in front of a sea of bottles at your wine store, you can flick through and see ones that you’ve enjoyed before. Or, if you can’t remember which wine you had with dinner last night (ahem), just snap a pic and store it for jogging the memory later. You could even download label images as a wish list!

Scroll through for a brief photo tutorial. I’m sure you can get something similar to work on other phones too, if you have to. How do you store your label images? Read more…

Bill LeBlond, head of food and wine books at Chronicle Books, spoke at the wine writers’ shindig I attended last week in Napa. In a panel about book publishing, he explained that publishers only have two catalogs a year, spring and fall, and that a book only gets one shot at a full page in the front of the catalog, in the season it is released. Thereafter, it is relegated to the back of the catalog, or the “backlist” with a small cover image sometimes called a “tombstone” (ouch!). Some trendy books have a pop and then head to an early grave. But the best titles sell well from the backlist and represent the publisher’s (and author’s) gold mine. The long tail, if we can apply an internet term to the publishing medium that preceded it.

Publisher Clarkson Potter must be thrilled about the success of Vino Italiano by Joseph Bastianich and David Lynch. I’ve got a hardback edition from 2002 and it is still going strong in paperback and has a new buying guide to boot (the boot of Italy?). It’s easy to understand why: divided into regions, each section starts with a brief, scene-setting overview that includes history and topography, has a map, and then moves on to a discussion of the grapes and wine styles, a list of some leading producers, some travel references, and then food pairings by chef Lidia Bastianich.

This comprehensive and readable reference has sold so well and it’s easy to understand why: if you want to learn more about Italian wine, this book is a great place to start. I met David Lynch recently and he told me that he has a book coming out this fall written with David Kamp (United States of Arugula): the Wine Snob’s Dictionary–sounds fun and full of zazz.

Head on over to McDuff’s Food and Wine Trail since he selected this book for us to review. From there we can see the roundup of what other bloggers had to say about this book in the inaugural edition of the Wine Book Club. Or post your thoughts about this book here or your favorite guide for learning about Italian wine!

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