Dr Vino's wine blog

Mrs. Vino likes sidecars. Ever since Eric Felten stopped by the blog to tell us about the classic cognac cocktail, I’ve been making them at home. I even bought a cocktail shaker. Follow this and you’ll be mixing like a champ: 4 parts of VSOP cognac, 1 part of Cointreau, 1 part fresh lemon juice and shake over ice. Strain into glass with sugared rim.

So when I was invited to a blending seminar with Brian Van Flandern, I leapt at the chance to upgrade my game. Not only was this an opportunity to get some live instruction, but some top-notch instruction at that. Brian just left his position as mixologist at Per Se after three years behind the bar–or “inside a tall chimney-like structure” as the NYT described his workspace.

We tasted through a bunch of the youngest cognacs, VS grade, and I found them to have a kind of sweetness, not a long finish, and a lot of peppery heat, the sort of burn that usually keeps me away from distilled spirits. With Brian’s encouragement, I added some water to my glass and the aromatics intensified (as I had seen in Cognac). He explained that a similar thing happened when making a cocktail using ice: the temperature decreased, obviously, but the melted ice intensified the aromas. A stand-out at the VS grade was the Frapin VS (about $35, find this cognac).

Stepping up to the VSOP grade, I found the cognacs much more sippable, more integrated, with a longer finish. We tasted some very fine XO cognacs too but I’ll save that for a posting of its own next week.

So Brian whipped out his traveling bartender bag with so many gadgets it would make 007 jealous. He said that the key to a good cocktail is a balance of sweet, acid and alcohol. So in the sidecars I’d been shaking at home, the base alcohol, cognac, mixed in with the modifying alcohol, cointreau, with the acid of the lemon juice and the sweet of the sugar on rim.

Brian started pouring things into his pitcher. First went some Hine Rare VSOP cognac (about $50 a bottle; find this cognac).Then some Cointreau. Then some lime juice. Then some simple syrup (sugar dissolved in water) followed by a few dashes of Fee Brothers bitters. He poured that into a cocktail shaker, shook it vigorously for longer than I had been doing at home.

He poured the resulting blend into a martini glass and garnished it with a lime wedge. It was foamy. Then he reached over and ground some fresh nutmeg on top. Perfection! Brian said that he doesn’t need to measure since he knows the ratios from lots of practice. Nor did he have a name for this particular drink.

We tried another round with VS cognac and it was decidedly less impressive. I’m still not sure what to do with VS cognac since VSOP seems the way to go since it is good enough to be sipped or blended. As with so many things, this showed me that better the ingredients, the better the cocktail.

So a couple of days later I picked up some bitters and made some simple syrup. I found some nutmeg and ground it. I added the ingredients and shook it up. I served it to Mrs. Vino in a low tumbler glass. The unnamed cocktail was declared delicious. It was worth taking Brian’s souped up sidecar for a whirl.

MyMixologist, Brian Van Flandern’s web site

tags: cognac | cocktails

Perks
Become a non-executive member of the Board of Directors of UST Corp (NYSE: UST), which owns several wineries as well as Skoal “smokeless” tobacco, and you can get a $5,000 worth of the company’s wine! (That’s 555 bottles of $9 Columbia Crest.) Other officers get a similar allowance and the CEO Vincent Gierer gets a $6,500 allowance “to foster the use of the Company’s wine products at events they host.” Mmm, yummy wine products. Granted, some of this sum goes for “the maintenance and/or installation of security systems” for all that wine booty. But you’d think with his $6 million salary, he could have afforded that anyway. [SEC filings via footnoted.org]

Declines
Constellation Brands (NYSE: STZ), the biggest publicly traded wine producer announced disappointing earnings thanks to “pricing pressures that it blamed on rising supplies of competing Australian wines and reduced consumption in Britain.” The shares fell to a multi-year low on Thursday. [Forbes]

Rises
French wines tacked on two percentage points in the US market–at the expense of Australia, according to an AFP story. “The export figures show that we are going in the right direction. We must advance toward the path of committed reform,” said Louis Regis Affre, managing director of the Federation of Exporters of Wine and Spirits in France (Fevs). [Sapa-AFP]

Fakes
Sir Ian Kershaw, author of an award-winning two-volume biography of Hitler, said he was “immediately skeptical” when reading reports of the sale of an $8,000 “Fuehrerwein” at auction. Was it the fact that Hitler was a teetotaler? He doesn’t mention that but he points out that “a Tafelwein, a low-class table wine, was, even in 1943, not a particularly dignified present, even allowing for Hitler’s scant knowledge of wines,” he said. “Beyond this, an earlier wine bottle carrying a picture of Hitler – or at least a Nazi emblem – had been banned as kitsch.” Indeed. [thisislondon.co.uk]

Let’s get critical
Critical Wine, a new movement that “aims to raise awareness of the potential ills of globalization,” will hold an event April 3-4 in Verona, just after VinItaly. Wolfgang Weber writes “participating wine producers work with indigenous grape varieties, practice organic or sustainable viticulture, and exhibit some sense of their particular territorio.” The marketing of resistance? [Wine & Spirits, no link available]

Cuvee chez soi
Home wine making is on the rise. [BusinessWeek]

Armagnac fights cancer the scientific journal Thrombosis Research reports. No word on the effects of cognac. Or E&J Brandy. [via decanter.com]

Legendary investor Warren Buffett has his own elixir, and it’s not red wine: “The good news: At 76, I feel terrific and, according to all measurable indicators, am in excellent health,” Buffett said. “It’s amazing what Cherry Coke and hamburgers will do for a fellow.” [AP]

The third installment of our NYC wine bar crawl will take place on March 8! Come and join fellow wine enthusiasts as we will be trading our office chairs for the comfortable couches and warming fireplace at Jadis on the Lower East Side. The wine list is strong in value wines from France so get ready to do our part to help drain the French wine surplus.

The format is simply a get-together of a people who read this site. Come, order, chat, drink, munch, pay. Inspired by our attendee from Colorado last time and an inquiry from newlyweds from London who wanted to join us on their honeymoon, I’ll be buying a glass of wine for the person who comes from the farthest away! But even if you’re not journeying from afar, come along to our offline for a happy hour or two.

When: March 8, 6 PM – 8ish.
Where: Jadis, 42 Rivington (map it)
How: F, V at 2nd Ave; J at Bowery; 6 at Spring St.; taxi
Review: Jadis [NY Mag]
on the web: Jadisnyc.com

tags: wine | NYC wine bars

No doubt stung by his Dr. Vino demotion to rural town council last week, Nicolas Sarkozy, Minister of the Interior and a leading candidate in the race for the French presidency, has now announced that he is in favor wine reform.

After the Revue du Vin de France reported that he does not like wine since he’s too busy (“you cannot reconcile alcohol with frenetic activity”), he got a raspberry from this web site.

But now that wine-lover Segolene Royal is gaining ground in the polls, Sarkozy is making nice with wine producers! The BBC reports that he actually tasted local wine while campaigning in Sancerre! No report on whether he looked “dour” as he did during a sherry tasting in Spain. (Be sure to send photos of him in Sancerre if you find them.)

Not only that, but he is now trying to curry favor with wine producers by intimating that he might remove tight restrictions on advertising wine in movie theaters and on TV that date from 1991. “Wine cannot be lumped together with tobacco or drugs”, Sarkozy told the local wine producers.

As if that weren’t enough to bring the downtrodden French winemakers to his side, he “promised to protect French wine producers, vowing to bar from the market imported wines which fail to match the domestic wines’ quality.” Whoa, Nico. While lifting the advertising restrictions is a good thing, who would be the Senior Minister for Wine Quality?

Still, this pandering to wine producers raises Sarkozy’s Dr. Vino rating to: member of the National Assembly.

Related:
“Sarkozy woos French wine makers” [BBC]
“Leaders and liters of wine: French presidential contenders 2007” [Dr. V]

UPDATE: Leave it to Bertrand, wine photographer extraordinaire, to tip us off to a photo of Sarkozy tossing back the Sancerre. People came from near and far to behold the busy man take time to sip some wine.

tags: wine | French wine | French elections

Have you ever wondered why there are so few Americans in Argentina’s wine country while the French and Chileans seem to know their way around Mendoza? When I was there, I did. So I explored the issue in an article that appeared in the January issue of Wine Business Monthly, now available online.

Have you ever thought about how wineries use the internet to market wine? Or why sports fans are asking for “mas vino” instead of a nice cold one? Or whether Costco will make the three-tier system crumble? Then fire up your iTunes and listen to the most recent installment of “Unfiltered,” a podcast hosted by Tim Elliot of Winecast. I joined four others to taste wine and chew the fat. Oh no wait, since we were in four different time zones and connected via Skype, there was no imbibing (at least collectively), just talking.

tags: wine | argentina | podcast

Points: they’re possibly the most polarizing thing about wine. While many critics use the 100 point scale and many shops sell wines with flaps of paper touting the point scores, there is a backlash against points. A growing number of retailers favor staff-written “shelf-talkers” and many wine reviewing web sites–including this one–don’t use point scores in reviewing wines choosing instead the old-fashioned form of communication known as words.

While I understand what makes points popular and have to a certain extent made my peace with them, I still find them to impart a false sense of precision and objectivity while totally neglect the consuming context (e.g. “does this wine go with a my grilled asparagus?”). Moreover, once everyone starts rating wines out of 100, whom do you believe when two reviewers give the same wine different scores? I just found something that makes me want to reach for the dump bucket: Justwinepoints.com.

This apparently new web site only gives wines a point score out of 100. No words. No mention of who is the taster handing out the points. Just wine points because as their tag line reads, “because nothing else matters.” And, oh, they don’t mind sticking the producer for “added value” by charging to have a label image next to their points.

Surely this is so new and so decontextualized that nobody will care, right? Wrong. I just got an email blast from Sam’s Wine in Chicago (map it) touting the introductory vintage of a $15 sauvignon blanc from New Zealand. They turn to justwinepoints.com for the score: 99 points. But they had to add the words “lovely, rich and crisp.”

Let me give justwinepoints a review they’ll understand: 62. And the only reason that’s above failing is so that they don’t came and see me during office hours.

Related: “Are wine ratings running out of gas?” [NYT]

tags: wine | wine scores

Randy, a site reader from Colorado, sent in this photo of him from his vacation in Sonoma. He writes: “Here’s one of my highlights; I got to play one of only 100 $12,000 60th Anniversary Fender guitars that comes with six $1000 bottles of very rare wine. The guitar’s wood is actually dipped into the wine to make the color. It was beautiful!”

Rock on!

tags: wine | guitars

We wine lovers generally think about how to turn our money into wine. But apparently there are those who think that wine can turn into money.

The Wall Street Journal had a big story on page B1 over the weekend about the new phenomenon of wine investing (no free link to the story, “Fine Wines No Longer Just Tempt Collectors”). In London, the Fine Wine Fund has been set up with the goal of investing in wine. They charge fees similar to a regular fund for alternate investments with a two percent annual management fee and 15 percent of the profits.

Is making money out of wine a panacea? Post your thoughts in the comments! One thing is for sure: while the story doesn’t mention the size of the Fine Wine Fund, if a lot of money sloshes into the relatively small market for investment-grade wine, prices will likely go to even more eye-popping levels. Let’s just hope that some corks get popped along the way too.

* * *

Steve Bachmann was quoted in the story talking about inefficiencies in the wine market. You can check out his thoughts on how to value wines on his blog, The Wine Collector. He’s also the CEO of Vinfolio, a fine wine retailer.

tags: wine | wine collecting