Dr Vino's wine blog

Best wishes to everyone for the holidays!

We uncorked a Pierre Moncuit, “Hugues de Coulmet” brut NV to kick things off. It’s always a terrific champagne that happens to be a great value. This importer’s page reveals that the blanc de blanc sees no time in wood but also has no reserve wine in the cuvée, each of which is a single (alas, unknown via the label) vintage. The house is located in Mesnil but the fruit for this wine comes from just outside of Mesnil in Sézanne. It’s really bright and fresh, with good fruit as well as yeasty complexity. I suppose it would be great with sushi, but we had it as an aperitif and it fit the bill perfectly. I bought it on sale for $32–should have loaded up on more to share with Santa and the reindeer (find this wine at retail).

Decanter reports that the lead buyer of a stake in the Wine Advocate still has close ties to the company he founded that does wine retail, importing and investing: his wife owns a large share and is the managing director. Read more…

A pair standout champagnes I tasted this fall were from Jacquesson, a small house in Dizy run by the brothers Jean-Hervé and Laurent Chiquet (brothers of Gaston). Jacquesson has a number of interesting things going on as they drive toward distinction. First, they are making only one wine that is a blend of sites, their nonvintage “700” series cuvée. (No, this isn’t a BMW.) Each NV blend has a different base wine each year and thus gets a different number. The “735” that I tasted draws 72% of the wine from the 2007 vintage, with the remainder from reserve stocks. It has beautiful poise, a bready aroma balancing on a sprightly core of acidity.

Second, the 2002 is the end of the line for multi-site vintage wines at Jacquesson. From here on out, they will be doing only site-labeled vintage cuvées (there weren’t any of those at the walk-around tasting I attended), no multi-site vintage wines. As you might expect, given the vintage, the 2002 was serious stuff, with more depth and complexity than the sprightly “735,” but still tightly wound stoniness with many years ahead of it.

Third, the labels are terrific. The back label is possibly Read more…

CAUGHT: police have arrested a former employee for the recent destruction of six vintages of Soldera Brunello. A motive appears to be that he was not provided a “mini apartment” at the estate. [Corriere della Sera]

DECEIVED: Palate Press exposes a pattern of Natalie Maclean’s taking other writers’ tasting notes and placing them behind her paywall. Furor erupts both from writers and in the comments, where allegations of winery pay-to-play emerge. [PalatePress.com]

EULOGIZED: Hosemaster laments the death of wine writing. “Yes, Wine Writer had been horribly sick before he passed, a pathetic shadow of what he once had been, reduced to a kind of Laubotomized babbling, a sad and tired victim of Parkerson’s Disease, covered in nasty Suckling wounds, his Hugh Johnson Feiring nothing but blanks. ” [Hosemaster]

SPIT: on Facebook, commenters are wondering how many points to give James Suckling’s purple couch.

Reduce, reuse, recycle. When it comes to corks, we wine geeks don’t want to pull fewer of them. So some of us reuse them this time of year.

A couple of years ago, I posted my own feeble efforts at corks and crafts and Christmas trees (would Martha Stewart be proud?). This season, several others have come up with similar creations. Check them out after the jump! Read more…

William Grimes laments the fact that wine geeks are so frequently the recipients of “unwanted gifts, of gizmos and gadgets,” especially this time of year. In his sites this time are mechanical corkscrews “a baroque solution to a problem that has baffled no one for the last five centuries.”

Indeed, while mechanical corkscrews may help people with limited mobility, you’re better advised to spend your money on wine and buy simple a Pulltaps (or decent stemware) instead!

“The Newfangled Corkscrew: It Comes With a Twist” [NYTimes.com]

Soo Hoo Khoon Peng is the newest owner of the Wine Advocate, report blogger Vincent Pousson and Decanter.com. They point to email received from sources close to the transaction saying that he led a syndicate of buyers to pay $15 million for an undisclosed stake in the company. Soo Hoo, listed as vice president at Detsche Bank on his LinkedIn profile (and on his Facebook page, which has now been removed despite frequent updates prior to Monday), was a co-founder and director at Hermitage Wines, an importer and retailer. Pousson and Decanter report that the email says he divested himself of the Hermitage stake last month.

In his announcing of the transaction, Robert Parker had described the buyers as “totally independent of the wine industry.” He also noted that the Wine Advocate headquarters would continue to be in Maryland. Decanter quotes the email as saying that Singapore is the new “command and control” of the Wine Advocate.

Hermitage Wines has organized events for various wine world luminaries, including Robert Parker at the three-day “Ultimate Parker in Asia” event in 2010. “Parker is god when it comes to wine, nobody in any business is as influential as he is,” Hermitage co-founder Arnaud Compas was quoted in the Reuters story at the time. “He has vision, the ability to anticipate how a wine will develop, and he has always been spot on, which sets the benchmark for prices. Because of that, Robert Parker has created fortunes.”

After several days, there was no reply to an email to Soo Hoo seeking verification of his role in the transaction.

Related: Decanter.com; “Singapore sling” at WineDiarist; previous

Want to drink from a 12-liter bottle of Domaine Serene with William Shatner? Or get lessons from the cast of Dancing with the Stars at the Bel Air home of Ann Colgin? Or stay at a Napa vintner’s guest cottage and drive his Porsche 911 convertible around for a month? Or attend the Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes with 5L Napa cab in tow? Then get ready to start bidding at Naples Winter Wine Festival in January. The event is a charity auction run by Naples Children and Education Foundation. Selected lots follow after the jump: Read more…