Dr Vino's wine blog

RIP: Jess Stonestreet Jackson
The founder of Kendall-Jackson died last week bringing to a close a remarkable life that included making one of the best-selling wines in America. [NYT, SF Chronicle]

SIPPED: the unknown
Which bubbly will the esteemed quests raise in honor of the Royal Couple? The official wine has not yet been unveiled, but Will Lyons at the WSJ guesses it will be Pol Roger while Eric Asimov goes to England and comes back speculating it will be English sparkling wine. They may both be right as there will be multiple events on April 29 for Prince William and Kate Middleton. One thing’s for sure, it won’t be beer, since it has been banned from the festivities.

SIPPED: corks
A NZ winegrower ditches screwcaps in favor of corks for his China exports. Why? “Prestige.” [stuff.co.nz]

SPIT: A truncheon analysis
French riot police no longer allowed to have wine with lunch [Guardian]

SPIT: Mommy
Two firms are engaged in a legal tussle over the term “mommy,” specifically whether the new “mommyjuice” wine infringes on the mark “Mommy’s time out.” Either way, they’re fighting a rearguard battle: the next front for this demographic is for cougar juice! [ThomsonReuters]

With all the hype about the Bordeaux campaign to pre-selling their 2010 wines, it made me think: surely there are more affordable, just as age-worthy alternatives out there. Here are five current releases I would cellar for 15 years that will bring a whole lot of bang for much less buck:

Domaine Baudry, La Croix Boisée, 2008. Cabernet franc grown on limestone from a top grower in Chinon. And around $30 a bottle? I would sign up for a case faster than I would a 375ml of 2010 Lafite–and I’d probably save money if I did.

Clos de la Roilette, cuvée tardive, 2009: Granted, this wine is mighty hard to find now, but it is worth seeking out. A Fleurie from the edge of Moulin-a-Vent, this is more pinot-like than gamay, structure and elegance over fruit and ebullience. I have a case and plan to age at least half of it for a decade.

Napanook 2007 cabernet sauvignon: This wine’s list price is about $50 but I’ve seen it online as low as $35. Even though it is the “second” wine from the Dominus estate, it has the seductiveness of good cabernet. And the fact that it comes from the Napanook estate under the hand of Christian Moueix gives it a track record of success.

Produttori del Barbaresco, Barbaresco, 2006: This excellent nebbiolo can age (the 1978 is drinking well today, apparently). It sells for under $30.

Isole e Olena, Cepparello 2006, about $60: I had the chance to try this wine at a tasting last year and thought it was terrific. I don’t have a lot of experience with aging sangiovese, but if I were going to, this is where I’d start.

And, of course, for the prices Bordeaux futures are fetching, you could get plenty of Bordeaux with a decade or two of cellar age on them. There’s slightly more risk with the provenance, but the rewards come a lot sooner than pre-release Bordeaux since the pleasures of older wines can be had immediately. Or, as we recently discussed, there’s always Lopez de Heredia.

I was discussing this topic on email with a site reader who is a Spanish wine buff. He offers his suggestions from Spain after the jump. What are your suggestions for age-worthy alternatives ?

Search for these wines at retail Read more…

Calera’s back label passes the usefulness test!

Schmaltzy story, cheesy adjectives, mentions of “handcrafted“: none.

Vineyard data and winemaking info: bountiful.

What with Ridge Vineyards, Bonny Doon, and Calera putting lots of info on their labels, there must be something in the air of the Santa Cruz and Gavilan Mountains.

Why pay en primeur prices for young Bordeaux that won’t arrive for two years? A case against en primeur certainly comes in the form of the traditional Riojas from R. Lopez de Heredia. Read more…

SIPPED: the zany
Hardy Wallace (above) dropped in on the en primeurs tastings and handed out his scores ranging from 101.00 to 102.36 points in .17 point increments. He gets the award for best T-shirt! [Dirty South Wine]

SIPPED: three cask monte
Jancis Robinson provides a primer in the various ways that samples at the en primeurs tastings can be manipulated to show their best.

SIPPED: discrimination
Wendell Lee, general counsel at the Wine Institute, provides a further look into insidious nature of the apparent simplicity of HR 1161, a bill that would drastically affect wine shipping by reverting to regulations that pre-date Prohibition and supersede the Commerce Clause. [ShipComliant]

SIPPED: branding
The Food Network releases their own branded wine. Only question: do you drink it with food, or with TV (if at all)? [Eater]

SIPPED: peace
Serbs and Croats beat their swords in to pruning shears at a winery project in Bosnia. “Working in a vineyard is like therapy, it helps a lot (to forget about the war).” [Reuters]

Francis Ford Coppola is pulling a daring business move: renaming his wine estate after a box wine.

Of course, for Inglenook, it wasn’t always that way. The property is one of the oldest in Napa Valley, founded in 1879, and its image was burnished in the middle of the twentieth century by John Daniel who produced some lauded cabernet sauvignons. But then it was tarnished as the brand became separated from the estate and winery and came to make and market wines such as “Burgundy,” “Chablis,” sangria and–wait for it–“Sunset Blush.”

So it is a challenge that the director of The Godfather has taken on, one that must hearken back to a black-and-white era, while encouraging consumers to forget the intervening decades of jugs, boxes and blush. Do you think he can do it? Do you care? Oh, and to signal his quality play, he also hired away the winemaker from Chateau Margaux (but he has not purchased the Napanook vineyard, which contributed to Inglenook in the 40s and 50s). I think that he could do it with lots of nostalgia marketing, but it will take decades to break the box/jug association. And, by then, we could see if the wines were worthy of John Daniel.

Fun fact: in 2009, WBM estimated Coppola made 900,000 cases of wine, making it the 17th biggest winery in the US.

Related: “Coppola makes leading wine expert a deal he can’t refuse” [Marketplace]

Donald Trump has purchased Kluge Estate Winery and Vineyard in Virginia for the terroir, saying, “I’m really interested in good real estate.”

Er, wait. He added that he’s not so interested in wine. He continues: “This place had a $28 million mortgage on it, and I bought it for $6.2 million. It’s a Trump deal!”

In buying the the 776-acre property in Virginia at foreclosure auction, he has said “you’re hired” to the owners Patricia Kluge and her husband and will likely be keeping them on to run things, according to washingtonpost.com.

Will any of the one of the wines get re-branded “Comb-Over Cuvée” as the twitterati suggested? No such luck from the presidential hopeful (and teetotaler). “It’s only Trump. Everything is Trump!”

Facebook and Twitter may contribute to toppling regimes these days. But can social media save a winery from falling into the abyss?

A case study is unfolding in France. On January 1, a small wine producer going by the name of “Olivier B.” announced on his web site that he was hanging it up. He makes a range of reds and whites from the Côtes du Ventoux appellation that sell for about 12 – 30 euros. He put a picture of his bottles in the shape of a cross, with the hat that adorns the labels of all his wines in the middle, and said it had been his cross to bear for the past few years and the dream was over. His love was lost, both the winery and his parter (simply, “elle”) who said she could not support him any more in this venture. The warehouse where he made his wine was for sale and the bank wouldn’t grant him a line of credit to buy it.

The French blogosphere then turned Olivier B. into a cause celebre for the misfortune of small vignerons. Many rallied to his cause (see a summary). Two bloggers organized a public tasting of his wines in Paris. The big breakthrough appears to have been when the Miss Glou Glou blog at lemonde chimed in. Then a local paper, La Provence, picked up his story. Then AFP ran a story. The media tsunami continued with TV channel Canal+ and radio stations from France, Belgium and Switzerland running stories. Traffic to his blog took off. But more importantly, sales started flowing, and he had 20,000 euros of sales in two weeks.

He wrote in a posting on his blog that making “Parkerized” wines was never his objective but during his deepest, darkest moments, he did think that if he got a 95-point score from Parker that all his problems would be solved. But now, he says, thanks to the blogosphere he has “hundreds of Parkers” to thank for the turnaround.

This fascinating story isn’t over, of course. Check out Olivier’s blog for the latest. One interesting aspect is that despite the apparent globalization of the internet, this story hasn’t reached the English language blogosphere or media. Another is that the blogosphere rallied in an advocacy mode. Whether and how many times it could be repeated is an open question. But certainly Olivier B. is glad it has worked so well this time.