Dr Vino's wine blog

Last week we heard about baboons who give Chardonnay a thumbs up. This week we learn that cougars like Merlot!

If they are on ABC’s Cougar Town, that is. Also, pouring wine should be done to the rim, apparently.

Of note: Sheryl Crow played a sales rep at wine distributor in Wednesday night’s episode. As SlateWine quipped on Twitter, “Does this mean she supports three-tier system? Say it ain’t so, Ms. Crow.” Couldn’t she bring her glamor to another part of the wine biz, such as an independent shop owner? The cougars have to buy their Merlot from somewhere, after all.

While Merlot’s fall from grace can be traced to one line in the movie Sideways, the fall of Syrah has been more difficult to track. Australian wine, with Shiraz as the signature grape, has experienced a decline in sales over the past couple of years. Even more broadly, it’s still a tough sell: producers and retailers have repeatedly told me that save for a few appellations in the Northern Rhone, the homeland of the grape, Syrah remains a sluggish category.

I was happy to have the chance to check in with Syrah by organizing a small tasting at a private residence last week. In putting together the seven wines in the lineup, I wanted to be sure to include examples from Australia, the US and the Northern Rhone but had the usual constraint that the wines actually had to be available locally. I decided to spare the tasters the hot-climate, jammy style and the boring cheapie style since they were probably most familiar with those, especially the latter, which is poured with abandon at fundraisers and art gallery openings. Read more…

The alternative packaging trend gets bigger and reusable: a 2009 Riesling from the Finger Lakes in 20-liter tank will soon be available in NYC.

Known as Gotham Project, the thirst-quenching Riesling is the brainchild of Charles Bieler (above, left), of Bieler Rose in Provence and one of the Three Thieves, and Bruce Schneider (right), of Schneider Vineyards on Long Island. Bars and restaurants will be able to get it from local distributor Michael Skurnik; the only open question is whether it will be available for homes, as rooftops and poolsides beckon…

UPDATE: You can’t see it clearly in the photo, but both Bieler and Schneider are wearing black t-shirts saying “Give them the Finger Lakes.” I reproduce the image here courtesy of designer Steven Solomon. Welcome to New Yawk!

Paul Draper is, without question, one of the world’s great winemakers. Even though he has every reason to be an egotistical blowhard, he remains humble and democratic in spirit, asking sincere questions of those around him and quick to point to his team as the reason for the winery’s success. It may sound absurd to think that a winemaker’s personality is as discernible in the glass as the terroir, but that combination of curiosity, humility, and respectful excellence comes through in the wines of Ridge Vineyards.

Presiding over forty harvests at Monte Bello in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the winemaker and CEO at Ridge, has seen an almost unparalleled run of excellence. Read more…

Maryland, the home of the Fightin’ Terps, threatens to turn its wine lovers into perps: The laws governing these five and a half million residents make it a felony to order wine online and have it shipped to their homes. To purchase wines, consumers residing Annapolis, Baltimore or along the Chesapeake must buy from a local store; comparison shopping through retailers on the internet or ordering directly from a winery is illegal. (Small wonder neighboring DC is the thirstiest non-state in the nation.)

Maryland is also home to 38 wineries today. Seeking to jump-start the domestic wine industry after Prohibition, the US Department of Agriculture turned to this mid-Atlantic state, opening an experimental winery in Beltsville, Maryland. Even though it was not long-lived, today’s wineries follow the early trail blazed by the Feds. The only problem: they cannot ship their wines to consumers in-state or out-of-state. In a recent survey (pdf), all but one winery respondents found this to negatively affect their business.

The keys to reforming the laws that have kept Marylanders locked out of the wine cellar for several decades may be within reach. Although the legislation has been introduced every year since 1981, Adam Borden, executive director of Marylanders for Better Beer and Wine Laws, says that this year it has majority support in both houses.

But the legislative path is not without roadblocks. Who has screwcaps big enough to stand in the path of this legislation? Senator Joan Carter Conway, chair of the Health and Education committee, threatened to stifle the bill in committee despite six of nine members being co-sponsors. But today, a committee in the House will hear testimony on the issue.

Robert Parker, Maryland’s best-known wine consumer, will not be testifying today since he is traveling, according to Borden.

Marylanders for Better Wine and Beer Laws and their page On Facebook
House Bill (80/141)
Senate Bill (26/47)

SPIT: a move upmarket
The Chilean wine industry attempted a concerted move upmarket a few years ago. But the strong peso and weak global economy have crushed those plans. To wit: exports were up a whopping 17.6% by volume last year but flat by value. [LA Times]

SPIT: California bargains
Mike Steinberger contemplates the puzzle of why so few “superstar” winemakers in California make wines under $20. We discussed the lack of tasty California values last year in relation to Fred Franzia, and heard from wine importer Bobby Kacher and winemaker Patrick Campbell.

SPIT: urban winemaking
Crushpad, the pioneer urban winery in San Francisco, has announced it will move its operations to Napa where its main supplier has space. Of note: two-thirds of their clients are commercial wine brands. [NYT]

SIPPED: innovation
While New York is debating selling wine in grocery stores (and foods in wine stores), Pennsylvania, where the state still owns all the wine stores, gets wine bars in supermarkets! Groc-o-pubs anyone? [Philly.com]

SIPPED: footy!
Unruly winery visitors in the Finger Lakes will get yellow and red cards. [WENY]

SPIT: truth
A shocking piece on Slate.com reveals that during Prohibition, federal officials “ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking.” But instead it accounted for 10,000 fatalities. Unmentioned in the brief story, but maybe people were on to the scheme and that helped account for the rise in home winemaking during Prohibition?

“We have to upgrade everything! Get me Facebook and Twitter!” So says renowned Napa winemaker, Mike Grigich, age 87, in a story in today’s NYT dining section. The story elaborates on the difficult times of selling expensive wines from Napa and how wineries are struggling to adopt new sales techniques, including social media.

It’s hard to know from that quote if a presence on Facebook and Twitter is a part or all of Grgich’s social media strategy. But, as we’ve discussed before, social media are no panacea for wineries, especially since they are too often a regurgitation of marketing pabulum. At best, social media are a part of (Napa) wineries’ new efforts to reach out to consumers directly and bypass the distributor tier, which can lead to increased profits for the winery. The NYT story cites a “meager” 10 percent of average winery sales in Napa are direct to consumer, via tasting rooms and mailing lists.

One thing that businesses can do well via social media, particularly since the demographic skews younger, is to alert consumers to deals. Unfortunately, deals are in scarce supply from wineries directly. The story cites the 2006 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars merlot available at the tasting room for $45 when it is available at Target in the Bay Area for $31.99. Will Stag’s Leap be tweeting about this? Doubtful.

The article alludes to a “curious time warp” with winery tasting room practices and pricing. More evidence of the pricing time warp came last week when a Napa cab from Stephane Derenoncourt launched at $220. While the pricing showed a tin ear to the current economy, the press release contained something unusual that may have been a sign of the times: a plea to write about the new wine.

If Derenoncourt were releasing a $20 Napa cab, that would be worth tweeting.

“Try the Red: Napa Learns to Sell” by Katrina Heron.

Malcolm Gladwell cracks open a cold one and distills some academic research, as is his wont. This week’s topic: drinking and culture. After discussing the extended example of Bolivians and their norms for drinking 180 proof rum on weekends, he comes to the point that it’s not how much people drink but rather how they drink it that matters.

But wine lovers knew this! Since at least King James and Thomas Jefferson, wine has been seen wine as a drink of moderation, lower in alcohol than spirits and consumed with food. Gladwell cites research from the 1950s that showed that first-generation Italian immigrants in New Haven, CT had very low levels of alcoholism, despite drinking some wine with lunch and dinner. Other immigrant groups and second- and third-generation Italians had different patterns of consumption (less moderation, less with food) and had higher rates of alcoholism.

This relates to our discussion last fall teaching about wine in elementary schools, in Italy and America.

It’s good to see the topic getting a broad airing–check out the story if you are snowed in somewhere (it’s not available online). Here’s a taste:

The abuse of alcohol has, historically, been thought of as a moral failing. Muslims and Mormons and many kinds of fundamentalist Christians do not drink, because they consider alcohol an invitation to sin. Around the middle of the last century, alcoholism began to be widely considered a disease: it was recognized that some proportion of the population was genetically susceptible to the effects of drinking. Policymakers, meanwhile, have become increasingly interested in using economic and legal tools to control alcohol-related behavior: that’s why the drinking age has been raised from eighteen to twenty-one, why drunk-driving laws have been toughened, and why alcohol is taxed heavily. Today, our approach to the social burden of alcohol is best described as a mixture of all three: we moralize, medicalize, and legalize.

“Drinking Games: How much people drink may matter less than how they drink it.” Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, Feb 15 & 22, 2010. pp. 70 – 76.