Dr Vino's wine blog

Just when you though that the passing of 9/11 would mean the end of talking about the tasteless 9/11 memorial wine that Tony Bourdain hates, think again. In his first show after 9/11, Stephen Colbert ripped on “giftportunities,” or the various form of cashing in on the tragedy. Included was the 9/11 memorial wine from Long Island’s Lieb Cellars, which Colbert described as “perfect for when you’re drinking to never forget.” And no, it’s not priced at $9.11, which would be crass, he says, but $19.11. “You don’t want to honor the heroes with some cheap-ass nine dollar wine.”

Even the Daily Show’s Samatntha Bee piled on the 9/11 wines, saying “This is real. You can drink this. If you’re a f^(king asshole.” Colbert video below:

Just stumbled on this fictitious (or not?!?) diary of a wine sales rep. Some LOLz for you whether you are in the wine trade or a wine geek who has ever wondered what it might be like selling the wines you love. The entry on the Languedoc gets two-and-a-half stars. Er, wait, they have wine to sell–92 points.

DearWineBuyer.com

SIPPED: quality
The Muscadet region, known for quantity over quality, now boasts three sites officially recognized as superior, as crus, including Clisson. So glad the authorities are catching up! [larvf.fr]

SNAPPED: fun pics of the 2011 harvest in the Loire (one of which is above). [Wine Terroirs]

HAMMERED: $500k of Lafite
A vertical of 25 solid cases of Lafite from 1981-2005 sold for $539,280 to an “anonymous Chinese phone bidder” at a Christie’s auction in Hong Kong. Great way to dump those ’91s! [WSJ]

SIPPED: going postal: The budgetary crisis at the US Postal Service puts wine shipping on the table. [NYT]

SPIT: frauds
Mike Steinberger summarizes the recent reactions–and adds his own–to Parker’s recent report on tasting fraudulent wines. [winediarist]

SIPPED: edumacation
My next NYU wine course runs Oct 12 – Nov 16. Registration and details.

Eric Asimov’s column in the Times today highlights ten restaurants with strong selections of wines under $50. What are notable restaurants you would add to the list?

Wine under $50 certainly has obvious appeal. But it also has pitfalls, notably dull selections available at stores or supermarkets for $10 might appear for $40 on a list. That’s why there’s a paradoxical diner skepticism: on the one hand, we love a deal but on the other hand, we are apparently incredulous that lower-priced wine could actually be good. Pascaline Lepeltier of Rouge Tomate flagged this for us earlier, and she tweeted an elaboration yesterday about the place of wines under $50 and diner psychology:

i would say it is mainly the area where people may not expect to find good AND cheap wines; so you have to convince them

So which places can you cast aside your possible skepticism and order with confidence from the under $50 selections?

I’m a day late to the theme of the Labor Day holiday. But, heck, why don’t we make it Labor Week? In the wine world, the efforts of those who prune, spray, and harvest go mostly unheralded as we tend to focus on glamorous vintners or winemakers. Perhaps nowhere is the labor situation as acute as South Africa.

There, wine farms, as they are known, have been around for centuries, making South Africa possibly the oldest “New World” wine countries. Sadly, the “dop” system, now illegal, of paying workers a portion of their pay in wine also spanned centuries, bringing with it devastating health consequences for the farm workers. A recent report from Human Rights Watch contends that the industry still has a long way to go for meeting a suitable minimum standard for worker conditions.

Still, there are signs that the industry in the racially divided country is changing. The NYT recently ran a terrific profile of Ntsiki Biyela, originally from KwaZulu Natal who had never tasted wine before learning to make it on a scholarship at Stellenbosch University. Now she is the wine maker at Stellakaya Winery and was hailed as the country’s Woman Winemaker of the Year in 2009.

Mark Solms, a psychoanalyst, left South Africa during Apartheid. When he came back to later take control of the family farm, he did so by mortgaging his own property so that the black workers could become one-third owners in the adjoining property and set up a museum trace the history of workers on the farm. He talks about it in the below video at a TED conference in London. “The answers are obvious–it’s not brain science. You only really have to want to.”

Check out this “Hitler yelling” parody that several people tweeted to my attention. Even if it’s 18 months old, it’s still sufficient for your Saturday LOL needs.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev came out with a counterintuitive approach to fighting alcoholism in his country: drink wine. During a recent visit to Krasnodar, a leading wine region, he said: “Wine making is one of the sectors that should be developed to help contribute to the eradication of alcoholism.” As this informative post over on FT.com reminds us, it was only a generation ago that Gorbachev led an anti-alcoholism campaign that included symbolically plowing under some vineyards.

If Medvedev’s approach has a similar ring to it, that’s because Thomas Jefferson also advocated wine as a drink of moderation as opposed to the “ardent spirits” of his day (mostly whiskey). Although Jefferson’s appeal fell on deaf ears, Medvedev’s has slightly more hope: the FT post says that as Russians travel, they favor wine over vodka. Also, Russia today, unlike the USA of Jefferson’s time, actually makes a fair bit of wine: Statistics vary, but it is somewhere between the seventh and thirteenth largest producer in the world. In fact, Medvedev made the call in the region of Krasnodar, which is on the Black Sea and is the home of Sochi, host of Winter Olympics in 2014. So expect more coverage of Russian wine in the next couple of years as they try to shake off the image that their wine is only one step above paint remover. (One sign that they are succeeding may be that the largest sparkling wine producer is having an IPO.)

Surprisingly, the eight liters of wine per person that Russians already consume places them only slightly less than the US and much more than their fellow BRIC countries, which are all under two liters per person.

But if Medvedev really wants to take the Jeffersonian mantra to heart, he needs to purge the market of non-grape, ersatz wines that give real wine a reputation for cheap swill and cut taxes on wine instead of raising them. As Jefferson declared, “No nation is drunken where wine is cheap.”

Have you ever thought about the iconic Tube maps from London or the Paris Metro maps, in all their stylized glory, and how they would look applied to wine regions?

Well, wonder no more. San Francisco architect and professor David Gissen worked up just such a map; now it is available for purchase as a cool 18 x 24 wall decoration. Each region gets its own color like one of the subway lines and the subregions are various stops. Here’s what Gissen said via email about his inspiration for the map:

I guess I made the map as a sort of loving critique. I feel that the American appreciation of EU wine is dominated by a pastoralist point of view and aesthetic. If I see another picture of a vineyard or pruning shears, or a wine map that looks like a hiking map, I might lose it. I believe that French wine (like all EU wine) was born in and through villages, towns and cities. From my perspective it’s completely urban. I want to make some artifacts that express my point of view. The map is the first of these. I may make others, but I’m not sure. Of course, if you need to learn the appellations, the metro-wine map is useful, but I’m not primarily interested in its instrumentality. I’m more interested in its ability to shift what we understand wine to be.