Wine on the Rocks
February 5th, 2010 by Tom Johnson
Chevsky reports on a Chateauneuf-du-Pape tasting that I, personally, would have crawled across broken glass to attend.
Yet when American consumers are exposed to French wine, I know Chateauneuf-du-Pape’s are often the most popular of all French regions (granted – most consumers cannot afford the astronomically priced top-of-the-line wines we tasted that day). Why are they popular? In my humble opinion, these are transitional wines for new world wine lovers looking for the next step up – big, fruity, but with more character than Cali and Aussie fruit bombs.
Aside from the wine’s intrinsic appeal, CdPs have been attractive because they’re wines from a French appellation with serious terroir cred, and the oldest and most storied makers could be had for $30 – $60 a bottle. That changed as the wine bubble inflated and the CdP producers got on board the single-vineyard-super-duper-ultra-premium x-treme reserve brand extension train. About four years ago, Chateauneuf price crept up to a point where I, for one, could barely afford them.
Still, there remain some under-appreciated bargains. I’m a sucker for Beaucastel’s second wine, Perrin & Fils, which can be had for about $35 a bottle and is to Beaucastel what a BMW motorcycle is to a BMW sedan. My wife and I had a 2006 Chateau Fortia (restaurant price: $55) a couple of weeks ago that was as sleek and complimentary a food wine as I’ve had in a long time.
With every successive vintage since 2003 being touted as a new Vintage of the Century, there are lots of older CdPs available at bargain prices. Now the trendspotters are lining up for the vintage-of-the-millennium 2007, and I’m seeing the highly touted 2003 – 2005s in bargain bins. I just added some 2004 and 2005 CdP to my basement for 20% less than I would have paid two years ago.
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You Are What You Drink
February 5th, 2010 by Tom Johnson
What we drink, we all know from watching TV commercials, sends a powerful message to the world — I mean, assuming the world is interested, which it really isn’t, so we ought to drink whatever we want.
Anyway, I was reading an L.A. Times column about the woes of Saab, and I got a kick out of the way wine was used to describe character.
Saab drivers, as you no doubt know, are intellectuals. They’re college professors and journalists and people who work in public radio (many drive the same Saabs they had in college). Though book smart and knowledgeable about cheeses, the lives of Saab drivers are often a mess. They either drink too much (only wine) or are on the verge of divorce because their spouses have run off with partners who are either less depressed or less critical of the world, or both.
Somehow, the specification of wine as the drink of choice makes the caricature both less depraved and more self-deluding. How’s that for a value proposition?
Drink wine. It will make you less depraved and more self-deluding.
While I would buy that product — depravity being my most morbid fear and self-delusion my fondest aspiration — I think I get why beer companies go with:
Drink beer. It will get you hot chicks in bikinis.
If nothing else, it’s easier to back with video.
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Doing the Subcontinental
February 4th, 2010 by Tom Johnson
You hear a lot about the growth of wine in China, but what about India? Well, I’ve got market research:
Changing habits of Indians in drinking have, among other things, changed fortunes of the wine industry in India. Both the Indian wine market and the indigenous wine industry are witnessing tremendous growth. Favorable and promotional government policies, higher disposable incomes and growth in foreign tourists are some of the reasons for such growth.
Reapp Advisors, a consulting firm that help companies do business in India, says that per capita wine consumption there is only 0.07 liters per person. That’s not much compared to the 60 liters the French drink or even the 25 we Americans plow through, but given that there are 1.1 billion people in the market, that’s still a lot of wine. Actually, it’s close to 12 million bottles, and that figure is growing at a rate of 25% a year.
India currently produces just over 8 million bottles of wine. The 4 million bottle gap is being filled largely by Italian producers, who promote heavily using Bollywood stars and are making significant capital invetsments in Indian wine production. The most recent entrant into the India Market Share Derby is a joint venture involving two Italian companies, Moncaro and Cantina Enzo Mecella, and the flow of wine and capital back and forth between the countries is apparently fairly typical of how the Indian industry is being built:
The Indo-Italian joint venture is not waiting to launch Indian wines. Instead, it is launching its Italian range of wines from the Marche region. This wine will be bottled at the Riona winery in Sangli, western Maharashtra. The company will make local Indian wine, preferably reds. It will also import wine in bulk from Italian wineries and bottle it in India. At the top-end the company will also bring in their own wines for Indian consumers.
The winery will be built in Sangli near India’s west coast. That’s the heart of Indian wine country, at least as it exists today. According to this, the venture will “produce Indian wine with the possibility of Italian varietals to be introduced for the first time in India…The initial phase will see a roll out of the staple Chenin Blanc, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Shiraz and Merlot, it is learnt.”
“Chardonnay and Merlot grow very well in Sangli district (where the winery is located),” said Mr. K T Mane, the Indian partner. “The varietals under experiment are under way and have been planted to check the suitability to Indian soil, climate and Indian palate.”
American companies trying to sell wine in India have been frustrated by tariffs and other barriers they believe India has erected to protect the embryonic Indian wine industry. Those barriers threaten to blossom into a full-fledged trade war.
UPDATE: Estimates of the long-term potential if the Indian wine market may be overstated. A new geological study suggests that the tectonic plate on which India sits is sinking into the Earth’s mantle.
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Proof, If Any Were Necessary, That I Dig Down Into Traffic Data
February 3rd, 2010 by Tom Johnson
Regular commentor Leanu appears to have a (relatively new) wine blog of his own.
Don’t tell anyone. I think he’s trying to keep it secret.
Posted in Good Stuff | Comments (1)
The Valentine’s Day Chronicles, Volume 1: Wine & Chocolate
February 3rd, 2010 by Tom Johnson
For the next two weeks unimaginative media will pound Valentine’s Day to death right in front of us. My own, personal, grocery store has had racks of Valentine’s Day cards on display since they cleaned out the Christmas crap, and my email box is full of “helpful” ideas for how I can trade money for assurance that my wife will still love me after V.D. has passed.
As a blogger, I personally have been looking for original ways to note Valentine’s Day, and I can say with some assurance that there are none. Everything you could ever write about Valentine’s Day has already been written. Still, if I don’t make note of it, I lose my blogger’s license. In order to conform with regulations and amuse myself, if no one else, I’m going to spend this Valentine’s Day season recording what everyone else is doing.
I kick off this slightly-sour-tempered seasonal celebration by noting a few of the apparently endless number of wine and chocolate-themed events across this Great Land of Ours.
Here’s a Florida winery doing wine and chocolate tastings for three weekends leading up to V.D. Here’s a Pennsylvania art gallery having “a wonderful evening of wine and decadent chocolate desserts” on V.D.-eve. For the more-or-less Canadian among us, the wineries of Niagara-on-the-Lake are celebrating Days of Wine & Chocolate. If you’re stuck in old Lodi (again), there’s a whole wine and chocolate festival conveniently scheduled to coincide with Valentine’s Day. There’s also a wine and chocolate weekend along the Madera Wine Trail south of Yosemite. In New York, as part of something called Sniffapalooza, there will be a blind tasting of both wine and chocolate — though I wouldn’ take it too seriously because Sniffapalooze itself is a perfume show so chances are you’re not going to smell either the wine or the chocolate. Does chocolate smell?
Shissler’s Cheese House in Akron, Ohio, is hosting a wine and chocolate tasting that will also include music, probably by a regrettable jazz/New Age/folk fusion group. Alliance Francaise in Minneapolis will host a wine and chocolate tasting to benefit Haiti, which is painfully short of both wine and chocolate. Dolce Vita in Greenville, North Carolina, will have a wine and chocolate tasting “featuring four different artisanal chocolates paired with four different hand-crafted wines.” George’s Wine Shop in Bellevue, Washington, will have a “specially selected and paired” wine and chocolate tasting. In Grand Haven, Michigan, there will be “a luscious combination of wine and chocolate.” In Phoenix there will be a tasting of eight wines from artist and Sonoma vintner Kenneth Schilling and chocolates from Julia Baker Confections, and as if that is not enough there will also be a display of Schilling’s artwork.
In what appears to be the most blatantly commercial wine and chocolate promotion of them all, Chamard Vineyards on Cow Hill Road in Clinton, Connecticut, will have a wine and chocolate tasting during which “local exhibitors and event planners woo you with products and services designed to make your Valentine’s Day special.”
The PRAVO Wellness Centre in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, “a place for maximizing your life’s potential,” will have an organic wine and chocolate tasting, along with a workshop that will teach participants how to dip strawberries in melted chocolate, an apparently difficult act. If you feel like maximizing your life potential a little closer to home, eHow has instructions on how to host a wine and chocolate party, including this tidbit that absolutely guarantees that I would leave immediately:
Scented candles may add to the mood of the party.
To add further to the mood of your party, and since I’ve already left, you may want to spice things up by serving chocolate sports novelties, or chocolate lingerie, or perhaps even chocolate wafers with real ants.
Or maybe that would be going too far.
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The Question Is, After All This Time, Will They Ever Learn?
February 2nd, 2010 by Tom Johnson
“The great obstacle to our success…is that the average American remains a whisky-drinking, water-drinking, coffee-drinking, tea-drinking and consequently dyspepsia-inviting subject who does not know the use or value of pure light wine taken at the proper time and in moderate quantities. The task before us lies in teaching our people how to drink wine, when to drink it and how much of it to drink.”
Arpad Haraszthy, 1888
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We Do This To Ourselves
February 2nd, 2010 by Tom Johnson
People — me, for example — who bemoan government’s tendency to treat wine more as a drug than a food, need to be more careful how we speak of our beverage of choice. This is from a press release on a Valentine’s Day Dinner:
Alcohol, tax and gratuity are additional.
It would have been too much trouble to write, “Wine and cocktails are not included,” thus not implying that the only reason anyone drinks is for the alcohol?
Posted in Mr. Grumpy | Comments (0)
Why Mid-America is Cynical
February 2nd, 2010 by Tom Johnson
Korbel ran a Most Romantic City promotion that allowed people to nominate their favorite getaways. It was a fun exercise, with nominations flooding in for places like Catalina Island, California, which isn’t technically a city at all, and the unfortunately named Colon, Michigan.
The finalist list read like a grand tour of places we passed through on college road trips (Pinedale, Arizona; Kansas City, Missouri) but gave rise to hopes in flyover country that the coastal elites had finally noticed how romantic a place like Grand Junction, Colorado, really is.
Alas, the winner is Hana, Hawaii, an exclusive getaway on the far northeast corner of Maui.
You didn’t really think they were going to choose someplace like Duluth, Minnesota, did you? You had to realize it was all just a big tease, right?
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The Bitter Wine of Wisdom Hard-Earned, Hoisted in Memory of the Fallen, Drunk With the Understanding That the Future Holds Only More Struggle
February 2nd, 2010 by Tom Johnson
Canadian wine hottie Natalie MacLean and her readers posit wines that go well the the TV series “24.”
No word, by the way, on what Kiefer Sutherland was drinking when he head-butted an apparently offensive fashion designer at Submercer, a so-hip-you-have-to-sneak-through-a-closet-filled-with-toilet-cleaning-supplies-to-get-to-it Manhattan nightclub known for its excellent list.
To make up for this lack of insight, I give you the following value-added Fun Fact. Kiefer Sutherland’s full name is Kiefer William Fredrick Dempsey George Rufus Sutherland. That makes his initials “KWFDGRS,” which I think would be pronounced “kweef diggers.”
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Northwest Classage
February 1st, 2010 by Tom Johnson
Seattle Wine Blog classifies Washington wines.
In contrast to other classifications of wine such as the 1855 classification of Bordeaux, the Unofficial Classification of Washington Wineries is not set in stone and changes every year. Since it is retrospective, it does not necessarily predict future rankings, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
The Premier Cru: Cayuse, Leonetti, Quilceda Creek.
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