Dr Vino's wine blog

How does cabernet franc age? On my recent trip to the Loire, I got an excellent chance to explore this issue at the cellars of none other than Domaine Bernard Baudry in Chinon, one of my favorite producers in the Loire. Read more…

SIPPED: a new meaning for, “wine, down the hatch!” [source via reddit]

SIPPED: skulduggery
Alder Yarrow has one of his quasi transcripts up about a fascinating panel discussion on alcohol, levels and balance. The voluble Jim Clendenen of Au Bon Climat had some provocative statements and Adam Lee of engaged in skulduggery with sommelier Raj Parr–and everyone! [vinography]

SPIT: scores
What drives Bordeaux prices? A post on the Liv-Ex blog suggests a change from scores to brands.

SPIT: “Operation Suckling”
James Suckling’s recent promotion with Quebec’s state monopoly draws a raspberry (or was it 51 points?) from a local critic. [montrealgazette.com]

SIPPED and SPIT: chilling reds
Gallo to introduce the masses to chilling reds w new 10.5% abv wine. Wait til the masses discover good Beaujolais! [Marketingmagazine.co.uk]

SIPPED: excellent reporting
Fans of Krug may enjoy this excellent NYT story on LVMH/Hermes protagonist Bernard Arnault. Critics claim he “broke” families he bought from and “compromised the artisanal essence of their companies.”

END OF AN ERA: Patrick Campbell sells Laurel Glen winery in Sonoma to Bettina Sichel. [Decanter]

There’s a new order at the Wine Advocate. Last month, Robert Parker announced editorial changes at the publication he founded in 1978. The moves notably included promoting Antonio Galloni to a greater role, as Galloni took over reviewing California wines from Parker himself as well as adding coverage of Burgundy (ex-Beaujolais) to his beat that already included Champagne and all of Italy.

To get to know Galloni better, I recently emailed him a few questions on a wide range of topics. He took a break from tasting in Burgundy, where he is now, to respond. His unedited replies follow below. Read more…

Have you ever been itching to carry a bottle of Petrus and a can of Red Bull on a plane? Thanks to researchers at UC Davis, that might be possible. (However, as we discussed previously, don’t think you’ll be allowed to openly serve yourself the Petrus on board.)

The researchers may be able to take scanners they developed to study spoilage in unopened bottles of wine and use that technology to differentiate between explosives and toothpaste and bottles of water in travelers carry-ons. In the above video, found via the good folks at Upgrade: Travel Better, they demonstrate their scanning device with a bottle of ’79 Petrus and a can of Red Bull (hopefully not mixed together afterward!).

In its wine application, the device was originally built to test for oxidation through the presence of acetic acid and acetaldehyde, according to Augustine’s page. There’s certainly a market for that, but it has to be small compared to the market for testing an unopened bottle for TCA (often referred to as cork taint). After Augustine is done counting his millions from solving the security problems of the TSA, maybe he could turn his research to detecting TCA, which would be a boon for wineries and wine enthusiasts alike.

SIPPED: more Zin Man
The ad about Zin man, riffing on the Old Spice guy, got a big thumbs up from all of you. So I asked the Paso Robles folks for a few more details about their ad. While they wouldn’t provide details about how much it cost, they did say the ad was shot in Paso Robles using a professional actor (not a vintner) as the star. They are planning 8-10 more ads this year.

SPIT: Celebrity status
Out of disbelief, a wine store clerk in Manhattan refuses Matt Damon’s credit card for the star’s impulse purchase of $1,200 of wine, insisting that he pay cash. Which store was it? And which wine was it? [latimes with video]

RUNG: alarm bell
A French researcher warned a Bordeaux trade group this week that the region will be too warm to grow red wine grapes to long-lived wines–by as early as 2050. When will Norway develop a premier cru? [AFP]

SIPPED: foreign takeover
Concha y Toro, Chile’s #1 wine producer, is buying Fetzer’s three million case production for $238 million. How will this affect consumers of Bonterra, or Fetzer’s other brands? Probably not at all. Concha y Toro shares in Santiago were up 7% on the news. The Chilean currency has appreciated by 21% against the greenback in the past two years. Will other domestic wineries be in the sights of foreign companies? [WSJ]

SPIT: critter labels
In case we needed any further indication that critter labels have jumped the shark right off the wine bottle, Yellow Tail is now suing a more recent arrival for infringing on the wallaby. [WSJ]

SPIT: counterfeiting?
The BBC explores laser bottle etching, stealth mineral placement, and bubble codes at Chateau Margaux, all weapons in the current fight against counterfeiting. Whether these measure can outsmart fraudsters remains to be seen.

Google reshuffled its proprietary algorithm recently to favor quality and penalize “content farms” that were gaming the system, producing content optimized for search engines, rather than humans. The NYT had a discussion of the changes, and here’s a list of 25 sites severely affected. (Arianna Huffington should count 315 million lucky stars these changes came just weeks after she sold her site to Aol.)

When I read about this development, I wondered what would happened to Snooth.com, the wine web site that seems to be a champion of SEO, ranking high in the organic search results yet providing so little useful information that they were found to be scraping cellartracker.com content since 2007 to populate some pages. For web ad sales, more page views can mean higher ad revenues.

I searched for a few specific wines and the results returned a few snooth pages in the top ten so I thought they hadn’t been affected. But according to quantcast, their (directly measured) pageviews have slid significantly over the past week. I guess time will tell the fuller story.

My vacation rages, and so do our mystery photos!

This one, not one of my photos, is from a rocky vineyard that produces a limited quantity of fruit. But the juice it produces is quite coveted, if little known…Anyway, enough with the hints! Hit the comments with your thoughts as to just where in the wine world this photo is from. If anyone gets this one, head straight to the head of the class!

While I am in an undisclosed location with limited internet access, I offer you this riddle: where in the wine world are these caves hewn from rock?

Show your deductive powers and hit the comments with your thoughts. Details to follow on this wine mystery!