Dr Vino's wine blog

Lawmakers in Massachusetts overrode the Governor’s veto yesterday and passed a law for shipping wine directly from wineries to consumers. The legislation also allows diners to re-cork an unfinished bottle at a restaurant and bring it home with them. With New York and Connecticut already open to direct shipping, opening up the densely populated Northeast should be a boon to boutique winemakers in California and the Pacific Northwest. Now, if only shipping costs can be reasonable…

In New York City, two restaurants are show just how much wine New Yorkers can drink. The Silverleaf Tavern is offering three grades of “all you can drink wines” at $35, $48, and $84. I like their description of the last one “endless wonderful wine, if you arrived drunk and pointed to the wrong grade of wine.” Yikes. Makes the bottomless cup of coffee look so benign…Cité throws in some food too for $69…more

And New Yorkers are mixing it up with many bartending classes available around town, reports James Oliver Cury in Time Out New York. Columbia even offers one–talk about shaking things up!

Winemakers in France staged protests across the south of France yesterday. They are the bulk producers who compete on price and find that they are losing business to New World competitors, who have better labels among other things that appeal to consumers. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin’s plan for the sector is still pending…

tags: wine | New York | France

While you may turn here for tips on value vino, I can now heartily recommend a new blog for your savvy travel needs. Upgrade: travel better

The author is none other than our Senior Free Wine Correspondent Mark Ashley, who recently filled in for me here on this blog, talking about airline wine and wine news.

Mark knows how to sniff out bargains so check out his blog and ask him how to “live better through miles.” What’s the only thing that might be a better pairing than wine and food? Why, wine and travel of course.

While on the subject of travel, I was recently on the French site for “gites,” which are rural vacation properties. I was amused by the translations of questions 4 and particularly question 5 on the booking form. Engrish.com?

tags: travel

The holidays may be long gone but many retailers are still feeling the hangover. The first quarter is often slow and many wine stores have sales in February to make room for new inventory arriving in the spring, which means…

wine sale!

Near me in New York…Astor Wine and Spirits is having a moving sale with different regions discounted by 25% every week. The last week of February the whole store (what’s left!) is on sale since they don’t want to carry wine across the street to the new location at 4th and Lafayette. Some aisles are looking distinctly picked over but it is also a great opportunity to get some values in the Burgundy aisle.

…Zachy’s, the smallish store in Scarsdale, NY that does a whopping $50 million a year in business is also having an internet sale. One week left!

In Chicago, Binny’s is not having an across-the-board sale but it is having selected sale pricing for “members”–including a huge range of great wines under $10.

Wine.com is having a “President’s Day Sale!”

…and many more stores around the country…You’ve got to move it, move it!

Also check out my buying tips for stretching your wine dollar.

tags: wine | sale

We have a new winner in the auction per ounce sweepstakes! Just when you though that last month’s $136,275 lot of six magnums 1971 Domaine de la Romanee Conti had solidified the gold medal with $448.27 AN OUNCE, a challenger comes along and unceremoniously dethrones the new champion.

One bottle of Chateau d’Yquem from the 1787 (!) vintage sold in London fetching $90,000–or $3,600 an ounce. Decanter Reports that a 1787 Lafitte (sic), supposedly in the collection of Thomas Jefferson, sold for $160,000 a few years ago, which set the highest ever per bottle sale price–and rolls in at $6,400 an ounce.

Not that anyone would actually contemplate drinking such trophies! Apparently the Yquem may not be vinegar though as a mainstream wine publication actually pulled the cork on a bottle in 1999 and found them passable. Now THAT would be fun! But do you spit?!?

tags: wine | wine auctions

Glug, glug, glut.

So read the title of an article in The Economist on the wine industry about five years ago. But on Friday when California’s Department of Food and Agriculture reported the state’s biggest grape harvest in ten years, it showed that the global glut has even hit the Golden State. Where will all that wine go?

Quality wine producers in France are distilling their wines into ethanol and Australians are contemplating the same fate for their tens of millions of gallons of excess wine in tankers. (see my backgrounder) Coming at a time when America is famously “addicted to oil,” will the bountiful harvest send California Chardonnay to American gas tanks?

Probably not. For one, in the last big harvest Bronco Wine Co. reinvigorated the $2 a bottle category with its Charles Shaw wines (“two buck chuck”). Further, American wine consumers are actually increasing their consumption, so the big harvest may just end up on tables instead of tanks. Finally, the US already gets most of its ethanol from corn, which is even more abundant than wine grapes–and cheaper too thanks to $1.4 billion in annual subsidies.

But with oil trading at $65 a barrel, that wine had better find its way to barriques quickly.

tags: wine | fuel | energy

This week I give you “friend’s price” — two reviews of value vino!

Casa Castillo, Monastrell, Jumilla, 2003. $10 Find this wine

Falesco, Vitiano rosso, IGT 2004. $9 Find this wine

Click here for the write-ups.

BONUS: the Honig Cabernet Sauvignon 2002 would make a great wine for any Valentine. It has wonderfully rich aromas and flavors of blackcurrant, leather and faint vanilla, but such soft tannins that it is ready to drink. A serious wine. And at $30 it’s less than the roses. (find this wine)

tags: wine | tasting notes

Have you been schlepping a special bottle of wine around with you for your past three moves? Or waiting for that Bordeaux that your aunt gave you for your birth year to achieve its peak? It’s time to open that bottle on Open That Bottle Night 7 on February 25.

Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher, who write the wine column for the Wall Street Journal, started this event six years ago. They urge readers to open a symbolically significant bottle on the last Saturday in February and then send in their stories, with a selection then written up in a subsequent column (kind of like the monthly wine blogging Wednesday). Some stories from previous years have included a couple who enjoyed a 1986 Lafite with their favorite pizza (“The pizza was great,” the husband wrote them. “The Chateau Latour was good, not great. But it got better toward the end of our meal, and much better as we entered the Jacuzzi with Mr. Barry White in the background.”), a research station in Antarctica, surprise visitors, and many fond memories of good times or good people when the special bottle came into their hands.

I’ll be pulling a cork on February 25 and I hope you do too. Make it a party or make it a romantic evening, a gourmet meal at home or a BYOB. But on Sunday the 26th, there has to be (at least) one bottle fewer in your inventory.

There are doubtless hundreds of heartwarming, intriguing, and funny stories that can’t be included in their column because of space limitations. Fortunately, here on the internet, we have no limitations (but neither do we have quite the, um, reach). Feel free to post your comments either here or on the post I write after Feb 25. And be sure to drop John and Dottie a line with your story too: wine@wsj.com

UPDATE 2/26/06: I posted our notes of the evening here. Feel free to post yours too!

UPDATE 2/10/08: People have been landing here looking for OTBN 9 (vintage 2008) so I’ll add that it is this Saturday, February 23. Have fun!

Would you pay $89 for a 3L box of wine? Customers are doing it with style in Chicago–even if that kind of a markup is more like Manhattan!

Avec, the chic and sleek Mediterranean restaurant on West Randolph (so chic they don’t even take reservations), is pouring the wine from a bag-in-a-box. It’s $10 for a quarter-liter carafe, $31 for the bottle sized 750ml, and $89 for the 3L box (see the wine list). The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

Eduard Seitan, Avec’s co-owner and wine buyer, likes the wine so much he keeps three boxes on display at the bar.

“I’m very proud of it,” he said.

This actually is a great idea, particularly because the wine in question is the yummy Cuvee de Pena 2003, which I have previously recommended as excellent value vino. A $10 carafe of good wine is an idea whose time has come in America. Maybe more restaurants will start to drink inside the box?

tags: wine | food & drink | boxed wine | Chicago dining