Dr Vino's wine blog

Who doesn’t love a good wine under $20? I have a doozy here for you this Friday: Clos de la Roilette, Fleurie, 2014 (find this wine).

I’ve been a fan of the producer for a while. We recently uncorked a 2009 “cuvée tardive,” a barrel-aged selection from their old vines sprinkled in the manganese and clay soils of Fleurie. It was drinking superbly. A few weeks later, with that 09 still on my mind, I stumbled on the current release (2014) of the “regular” cuvée, which is aged in large foudres after a semi-carbonic maceration. We popped it and it was a joyous addition to the last weekend of summer (yes, a couple of weekends ago). With ebullient dark fruits and enlivening acidity, the wine gives the highest distinction to “gulpable” Beaujolais. A steal at $17.99.

Patrick Cappiello, voted the superhottest somm of 2014 and shaping up to be a finalist for 2015, tasted some box wine on camera. As you might imagine, there is lots of gagging and spitting (one named Vella Burgundy scores an F with notes of raisin and vinegar as well as “Louis Jadot must be rolling over in his grave”). Bandit Merlot gets lots of praise from him and merits a B+ score–as does Bota Box.

While it makes for a good segment, I wish that P. Cap had used his place of power and influence to praise the format itself. For a lot of people, a 3L box is an affordable way to squeeze off a fresh glass for many nights in a row. It’s also greener, with a lot lower carbon footprint. But I’ve said all this before…What needs to be said again is that the industry needs to put better wine in the box. And there are a few producers and importers are are doing just that. Cappiello posts photos of Miller High Life to Instagram as well as bottle shots of Mugnier and Coche Dury. So is no stranger to lowbrow (as well as highbrow, natch). By highlighting a few more of the good box wines out there and praising the packaging format, people like Cappiello can help remove the stigma of the box, which would be more informative than just LOLing about how bad box wine is for the millionth time. But don’t get me wrong, it’s still a funny video and worth a click.

Mathieu Lapierre said that the 2013 showed more “Burgundy influence.” At the Kermit Lynch portfolio tasting in New York yesterday, he elaborated briefly that given the location of Beaujolais, vintages can oscillate between “Rhone-influenced” (e.g. 2009) and “Burgundy-influenced.” He said 2013 for him ended without hail, the grapes were healthy and they harvested as late as October 28, a record.

The Raisin Gaullois 2013 is a vin glouglou from the estate’s youngest vines, bottled en screw. (Too bad that the 5L bag-in-box is not imported!)

The Morgon, always a reference point for the region, has a beautiful poise between come-hither fruit of the semi-carbonic macerationo and tannic structure from the granite soils in the 2013 wine. The “Cuvée MMIX” (2009) was a tad ripe for me (Rhone-ish, if you will), but the “Cuvée MMXI” (2011) more successfully combines the ripeness of the wine with intriguing structure. Thing for my “to do” list: taste this MMXI with the Foillard Pi Morgon wine for a fuller understanding of their differences and similarities.

Asked if he prefers to drink the Morgons now or with some age on them, Mathieu replied that with friends he prefers young wines but that for more serious occasions, he’s currently drinking the 2007s. He invoked the late Henri Jayer, saying “a good wine must be good young and old for different reasons.”

Find these wines at retail
Visit the domaine’s improved website Read more…

Wine and tech make a frequent pairing in broad-audience reporting on wine. Domestically, both the industries have a strong presence in California and they are both, well, sexy. Mmm, naked grapes swathed in algorithms!

Today’s wine and tech story that we are putting in our laser focus is a short video segment on Bloomberg. The intrepid reporter ventures to Napa Valley to check out an optical sorting machine, technology pioneered in Europe that has come to our shores for $175k a pop. Instead of having people sort the picked fruit off a vibrating sorting table, the machine runs the fruit through a destemmer, then snaps pictures and blasts offending berries off the conveyor belt with a blast of air (sometimes called the “air knife”). The final bin ultimately contains berries without blemishes. The machine is more effective at sorting the wheat from the chaff than the membership committee at the Silverado Country Club.

The reporter asks, “And the critics–why are they skeptical about this new optic [sic] sorter?” Wait, critics don’t like wines from Napa cabernet that his been sorted like this? Sounds like the resulting wine actually has got 98+ points written all over it.

So much for carbonic, semi-carbonic or whole cluster when a machine could get rid of those perceived imperfections.

SIPPED: varsity tasting
The Oxford-Cambridge rivalry has played out over wine glasses for over 60 years: this year’s tasting included a Vega Sicilia 1953. En garde, you “coconut,” “tobacco leaf,” with “horse manure character!” Oh wait, those were the tasting notes… [NYT]

SLUSH, you huskies! A wine from South Dakota will greet Iditarod competitors at the finishing line. #winesworthmushingfor [ArgusLeader.com] Oh, a previous story reported that the course had to be rerouted in part, thanks to climate change.

BLING: Treasury Wine Estates, the maker of Penfold’s and other wines, is targeting Asia, where profit margins are double other regions. Part of the fatter margins come from trophy bottles such Penfold’s 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon closed with an ampoule sold for $168,000. [Bloomberg]

SPRAYED? Would you sparkle wine with a Sodastream? The NYT investigates a variety of “hacks” for the popular carbonator; do let us know your experiences. Tom Mansell tweeted to me “I’ve done cider. I don’t recommend it. Anything but water fizzes like crazy. (heterogeneous nucleation)” Doh!

It was just an aside from the podium during Danny Brager’s talk on the state of the wine industry. But the Nielsen wine guru said that wine is closing in on beer among viewers of the Super Bowl. According to their polling, 71% of viewers will have carbonated beverages (aka soda), 42% of viewers will have beer, 35% will have bottled water, 32% will have wine, and 22% will have spirits. I’m not a math whizz, but I think that adds up to a whole lot of bathroom breaks!

The survey info came out yesterday and included information on food consumed during the Super Bowl. As you might expect, it included many of our “impossible food-wine pairings.” So, from the archives, here they are:
* Chips and Salsa
* Buffalo wings
* Seven-layer dip
* Pizza

Bonus: “Betting wine for football”
Bonus bonus: “How and why did light beer come to be the choice of NFL viewers?”

Usually, mega wineries are supposed to harvest economies of scale as well as grapes. But Casella, the maker of Yellow Tail, is trapped between a strong currency and a hard price point, which has led to their balance sheet spilling red ink.

A WSJ story squarely blames the $31 million shortfall on the strong Australian dollar and competition in the American marketplace. “There is no volume issue, it is all about the exchange rate,” CEO John Casella said. Failure to secure a new loan by January 30 could lead to asset sales.

A Bloomberg story recently reported that bulk exports shipped in giant plastic bladders overtook the volume of bottled wine exported from Australia. While this offers cost savings, it also reduces wine’s carbon footprint.

The strong currency does provide a significant obstacle to Australian estate wines becoming the Next Big Thing.

What if Beaujolais Nouveau day–the third Thursday in November–turned into a celebration of Beaujolais writ large or even larger, wine? According to a report in a British wine publication, that’s what happened yesterday in parts of London.

It’s a good idea. While a friend who just left Paris after living there for several years recalls Beaujolais Nouveau day as the most wonderfully exciting wine day of the year, overseas, the decades-old marketing idea is tired. It’s contrived. It has a unnecessarily large carbon footprint. And 99% of the wines are underwhelming tutti fruity concoctions that serve to qualitatively undermine the name of the whole region. A few shops and restaurants in New York City dutifully stock some bottles of Nouveau but few take too many since what they say about white shoes after Labor Day has an analogy in Beaujolais Nouveau after New Year’s Day.

So I say capture the fun, the celebration, and ditch the nouveau. While slaying the region’s sacred cash cow may seem radical, and recognizing the economic difficulties in the region, after the success of the Summer of Riesling, maybe we need a November of Beaujolais to help the region transition away from Nouveau?

Did you attend any launch events yesterday? What did you think?