Dr Vino's wine blog

Several states in America, land of the free, own the means of distribution–when it comes to wine, spirits and beer. You don’t have to be a Tea Party member to wonder if this is the best arrangement.

Thanks to shortfalls in state budgets, state authorities are increasingly looking to liberalize liquor distribution according to a piece in the WSJ yesterday. The issue is in play in at least Washington State, Virginia, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Vermont.

Privatization could be a mixed bag for wine enthusiasts. Read more…

John Gilman, author of the newsletter A View from the Cellar, weighs in today with his thoughts on Mayacamas Vineyards. There is some duplication with Evan Dawson’s travel post from yesterday but there is also much new, including John’s tasting notes from Mayacamas Cabernet 2003, 1991, 1985, 1974, & 1968. Let’s turn the floor over to John for his views from the cellar…

Mayacamas Vineyards is one of the greatest cabernet sauvignon producers in the history of California. Read more…

Evan Dawson, who writes about Finger Lakes wines for the New York Cork Report (and who we last saw here), recently tweeted that he was in Napa. I asked him if he wanted to contribute a post from his travels and he suggested his stop at Mayacamas Vineyards. Today we have his thoughts. Tomorrow, John Gilman offers his tasting notes on several decades’ of Mayacamas wines.

By Evan Dawson

Whither Napa Cabernet? The economy dealt a blow to the iconic American wine as consumers started reaching for less expensive bottles. Now, a growing number of critics and consumers, including those in California, are openly wondering if the Napa Cabernet train has come off the rails: commentator Dan Berger, for one, last week dismissed California Cabernet as “little more than a parody of itself.”

High up the side of Mount Veeder one sunny but cool, midwinter morning a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t help wondering if the way back might offer ideas for Napa’s way forward. After all, the Cabernets of the 1970s helped put Napa on the world wine map, so it seemed reasonable to wonder if in wine, as in fashion, the past could provide inspiration.

To find one answer to this question, I had ventured to the Maycamas Vineyards. Celebrated in the 1970s as a leading producer of Cabernet, I was curious if the once-hot style would seem as out of place as bell bottoms or as appealing as Mad Men. After all, not much had changed there. Read more…

Sadat X, a niche hip hop artist, has taken up wine reviewing. The segments are concise and involve neither a dump bucket nor stemware. For more videos in the Sadat X oeuvre, head on over to Rockss and Fruit for a compendium.

Everyone’s looking back! The Telegraph kicked things off with an article last week about wine trends of this decade — “the Naughties.” The signal trend highlighted by Jonathan Ray is making pink wine acceptable. He continues to list some other winners and losers in his column.

Over on eBob, there’s a discussion of the best wines of the decade. While which wine was the best remains a matter of discussion, one trend is for certain: there was a steep escalation in prices of the top wines from around the world over the past decade.

What are some of the other trends of the past ten years? Read more…

SIPPED: number crunching
Wineries that advertise in Wine Spectator have their wines score better–but only by less than one point. Such is the finding in the lead article in the new issue of the Journal of Wine Economics. See the whole paper here as pdf or a blog reaction from the journal’s editor or a hard-hitting response from Robin Goldstein. The quantitative study looks only at reviews and does not examine the editorial, art, restaurant awards, or the Top 100 for advertiser bias. WS editor Tom Matthews responds to the research.

SPIT: binge drinking; SIPPED: wine tasting
An elite girls’ school in England has a new approach to tackling the problem of binge drinking: wine tastings. “We want to introduce the girls and their friends to good wines and their complexity, and educate them to develop an interest in the making of the wines rather than them seeing wine as something that you knock back in the summer holidays without thinking.” Revolutionary!! [The Indepdent; ht @candidwines]

SPIT: closures
Francis Ford Coppola’s winery produced a wine dubbed “encyclopedia” in a carafe-shaped bottle. The custom, oversized screwcaps leaked and ruined 55,000 cases of the wine, the winery alleges in a lawsuit filed against the screwcap’s manufacturer, Vinocor. [Bloomberg]

SPIT: pre-selling wine
Some California wineries are going all Rioja and consciously holding wines back for bottle aging–sometimes a decade or more–at the winery. [NYT]

SPIT: “me-too” wines
The New Zealand wine industry faces challenges, as bulk exports rise and prices fall. The NYT writes that the country’s vintners are “desperate to avoid the fate of neighboring Australia.”

In “The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World,” Michael Pollan traces the relationship of humans and four plants: the apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato. When watching the new PBS documentary based on the book, I was surprised to hear Pollan compare pot and wine. To the tape:

Though marijuana is not fully legal [in Amsterdam], it can be sold and smoked in coffee shops, drawing tourists from around the world. You can walk down the street and catch the whiff of marijuana smoke coming out of bars–cafes as they’re called–and you can choose exactly what kind of experience you want. [voiceover from clerk: “More dreamy”…] You look at this scene and you marvel at it. It’s no different than people sitting around and enjoying their glass of wine or cigarettes.

Apparently American elementary schools aren’t the only ones who equate wine and pot. Yes, marijuana and wine are intoxicants. But there are big differences, even aside from one being legal and the other not (well, maybe not for long). Even though there are many varieties of marijuana and one Colorado newspaper may soon hire a marijuana critic, the different varieties all appear (as I found out from some googling, ahem) to create intoxication to a greater or lesser degree, faster or slower.

While intoxication is, of course, possible with wine, it is not always why a lot of wine enthusiasts lift a glass. Imagine a professional wine taster doing a ganbei and that taster wouldn’t make it very far in his career, let alone the day. Or a food-wine pairing that ended with slumping into one’s soup. Wine is not Everclear.

While certainly some wines have dialed up the alcohol in recent years, there has been consumer pushback recently with this style of wine and lower-alcohol wines have become more popular (Kermit Lynch, a retailer in Pollan’s own Berkeley, recently sold a mixed case of wines marketed as lower alcohol).

Pollan is, surprisingly, an unkind bud to wine. I guess he joins Adam Gopnik in the “whoda thunk?” group of food writers in their views on wine. Gopnik once wrote in The New Yorker: “Remarkably, nowhere in wine writing, including Parker’s and Echikson’s, would a Martian learn that the first reason people drink wine is to get drunk.”

Should food writers see wine as food?