Potential for Trouble: High
March 9th, 2010 by Tom Johnson
A wine tasting that describes itself thus:
Find out for yourself what Girl Scout Cookies pair best with selected wines 
More than anything else, it’s the winking emoticon that scares me.
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Some Kind of Stinky
March 9th, 2010 by Tom Johnson
Tom Mansell over at Palate Press has a good piece on the effects of sulfur in wine.
UPDATE: Link was broken. Now the link is fixed.
Posted in Good Stuff | Comments (2)
Could This Be the Future?
March 8th, 2010 by Tom Johnson
La Vida Buena Vineyards in Mendoza, Argentina, goes condo.
La Vida Buena Vineyards is not a Time Share or Fractional– you receive a Deed Fee Simple to your vineyard. But because La Vida Buena Vineyards comprises fifteen small vineyards on 108 acres it can collectively offer many things a stand alone 5 acre vineyard cannot, for example low monthly vineyard maintenance fees starting at USD$175.00 that include on-site 24/7 Workers, Worker’s House, Vineyard Manager, Agronomist, Argentine Accountant to handle all aspects of owning a vineyard…
It is, the website says, a “turnkey operation.” Pony up and you’re in the wine business “confident that there will always be a lovely residence to stay and enjoy one’s efforts and investment.”
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Your Tax Dollars at Work
March 8th, 2010 by Tom Johnson
Tom Wark travels to Maryland to testify before a legislative committee considering changing Maryland’s direct shipping laws. Wark, who has testified in favor of direct shipping before, is remarkably patient when confronted with lunkheads.
The one legislator who decided to try to counter my testimony was a good looking gentleman in his late 30’s who, like most legislators, asks questions in order to make a point…What this tall, young politicians wanted to know of me was how I could claim that there would be enough shipping into the state (Maryland) to generate significant tax revenue, but that these shipments would not take food off the table of local retailers who would be hurt by the competition?
What I’m sure he heard me explain, but didn’t care about, was my belief that Marylanders were probably just as smart as wine consumers in other states where they are unlikely to pay substantial shipping charges on wine they could otherwise obtain locally.
In response to his query, I repeated my contention about the intellect and reason of the average wine lover Marylander. He was not satisfied with my response: “I don’t’ drink wine but I can’t believe they’ll be buying wine both on-line and at local stores.”
This forced me to explain my own proclivity for Austrian Riesling, how I can’t find much of it in Sonoma, how I buy it on-line, yet how I often patronize local grocery stores as well as wine stores to procure other wines.
“Well, I think you must like wine more than most people,” he replied.
Which is, of course, missing the point entirely.
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Hard Data on Hard Times
March 8th, 2010 by Tom Johnson
Silicon Valley Bank predicts that “as many as ten” wineries will go into foreclosure this year.
“We have 250 vintner clients saying this downturn is the worst in 20 years,” Bill Stevens, manager of the bank’s wine division in St. Helena, California, said in an interview. “Anybody who was late to the party won’t have staying power.”
There are also 30 wineries for sale, more than ever before, according to the bank. Those properties fit into three general categories: they’re carrying too much debt, bought at the height of the real estate market or have owners who are cashing-out as competition rises and profit margins fall.
According to a survey conducted by the bank, seven percent of vintners called their finances “very weak” or “on life support.” Land values in Napa have dropped 15 percent from the 2007 peak and 71 percent said credit was hard to get.
A study by Gomberg, Fredrikson & Associates in Woodside, California, concluded that while American wine sales rose almost 2% last year, spending on wine dropped 3.3%.
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Because We Are Stupid, There Are Experts to Remind Us of the Obvious
March 8th, 2010 by Tom Johnson
A Boston study concludes that women who drink a little red wine on a regular basis tend not to put on weight.
The study carried out by researchers at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital surveyed almost 20,000 women and asked them about their drinking habits over the course of 13 years. The group which gained the most weight were the alcohol-free women.
Alcohol-free women were also the least likely to have participated in karaoke or had sex in a moving automobile. OK, I made that last part up.
Anyway, as soon as the researchers published their findings, scolds came out of the woodwork to remind us that good news should never be taken at face value. You know: just in case there’s someone out there who decided this study granted license to drink a gallon of wine a day.
Experts, however, are quick to remind women that the study does not change documented evidence on the affects of heavy drinking…Catherine Collins, a spokesman for the British Dietetic Association, told The Telegraph that wine should not be viewed as a dieting tool.
“If these women have a healthy diet and lifestyle and are having one or two units of alcohol a night then that has less calories than someone who instead has a chocolate bar to unwind,” Collins told the newspaper. “It’s a question of ‘what’s your poison?’”
Except, of course, that the study had nothing to do with substituting wine for a candy bar. It was an attempt to measure the affect of moderate drinking on weight gain all other things being equal.
But we can’t let people feel good about things, can we? We’re experts. It’s our job to ruin everything.
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Just In Case You’re Wondering
March 7th, 2010 by Tom Johnson
The official Champagne of the Academy Awards is Moet & Chandon Imperial, which sells for about $35 a bottle. I bet no one is actually drinking it.
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I’ve Heard of People Saving Corks for the Memory, But Aren’t We Being Just a Bit Literal Here?
March 5th, 2010 by Tom Johnson
Wine cork USB thumb drive designed by Arwye Wan. Here.
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Everybody’s Going There Because Nobody Goes There
March 4th, 2010 by Tom Johnson
Jason Wilson, editor of The Smart Set and expert on Italian wines, attends the Italian wine show Vino 2010 and has an epiphany. Like all epiphanies, it’s a little hard to follow, but the nut seems to be a new-found desire to leave the big names behind and pursue more esoteric pleasures:
I want to weed out the so-called “luxury” experiences that don’t deliver, and seek out the ones that do. I want to tell stories about wines from lesser-known regions and grape varietals, as well as values from well-known producers. I want to talk about wine as an idea, rather than as a status symbol. Beyond the quality-price ratio, I want to explore wine as a legitimate plank of the humanities, worthy of the highest sort of criticism.
Wilson’s apparently feeling the urge that is keeping the wine industry up at night: the desire to search-out simplicity and authenticity. This replaces the score-driven quest for quality, at least as quality is defined by critics, that has dominated wine marketing for close to a generation. It is as if a whole consumer market, previously fixated on climbing to the top of the highest mountain, suddenly turned and headed off across the plains to points unknown. No wonder the wine industry is confused.
There is, in all of this, a dawning understand that people who actually have to pay for the wine they drink — that is, those who aren’t professional wine writers — have a hard time telling the difference between a $20 and $50 bottle. Those differences may be meaningful to critics tasting blind in sterile isolation, but to those of us who consume most of our wine with friends and food, the Law of Diminishing Returns kicked in a long time before Wine Spectator got aboard the value train. At some point a couple of years ago, it started to occur to American wine drinkers that the European bistro rats who populate our wine dreams probably aren’t drinking $100 vin de garde; they’re drinking vino di tavola that was hauled in bucket from a couple of miles up the road.
If the aspiration for the last decade was to get on the right mailing lists, the aspiration for the next is to find that back road in Italy or France where terroir is not as much environmental as it is cultural. That’s the road Wilson wants to travel, and I’ll bet you right now when he gets there he’s going to run into a lot of other people on the same quest.
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Leaving Open the Question of What One Does When It’s Dinner for Eight
March 4th, 2010 by Tom Johnson
Wine glasses recalling the Seven Deadly Sins.
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