Dr Vino's wine blog

SPIT: invitations. SPIT: glassware
All the talk this long weekend was about the White House state dinner. And perhaps to the surprise of wine lovers, it wasn’t about the two typos and at least one disastrous food-wine pairing on the menu! Instead, it was about the “party crashers,” Tareq and Michaele Salahi, who waltzed into the formal dinner without being on the guest list. It turns out there is a winery angle: they are owners of a Virginia winery that has filed for bankruptcy. While various creditors are making claims, the worst offense to one visitor to their Oasis Winery was the plastic cups in the tasting room!

SIPPED: logistics photos! Mmmm!
The Daily Mail published photos of 36 million bottles of wine in an English warehouse. Although their Christmas angle was different, they do note two interesting things: first, that Constellation self-distributes in England, unlike the US; and, second, they ship wine not glass by bottling all the wine in the UK after importing it in 25,000 liter bulk tanks.

SIPPED: ultra-premium wine
Want to upgrade from Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve wines? The Sonoma-based wine group now offers something new: customers who drop $30k get to taste and talk with the KJ head winemaker who will learn their wine preferences and produce a case of wine (12 bottles) with custom labels. Only $2,500 each! [Luxist; ht @ItalianWineGuy]

Photo via Facebook

A few sips form the twitterverse:

jmolesworth1: Counting the empties: 2x NV Krug, mag ’98 Paul Autard CdP Côte Rônde, ’97 Montelena Estate Cab. ’92 Dalla Valle Cab, ’89 Ridge Monte Bello
MemMW: Good God- 1907 Blandy’s Bual opened 4 wks ago. Simply Transcendant. Beyond Leroy, beyond Krug. Talk about giving thanks!!!!!
EricArnold: Burrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp.
EvanDawson: Food coma: better late than never. http://yfrog.com/35zc5j

And from CellarTracker, the top ten most uncorked bottles yesterday (as of this moment, by producer) were: Turley, Louis Roederer, Marcassin, Seghesio Family Vineyards, Kistler, Ridge, Kosta Browne, Kosta Browne, Gary Farrell, and Wiliams Selyem. See the whole list.

What did you uncork? How did it go?

Right now, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Dr. Manmohan Singh, prime minister of India, is being feted at a state dinner! The Obamas brought in chef Marcus Samuelsson of Aquavit in New York to cook a meatless, Indian-inspired meal for the 320 honored guests. (Get full details at nytimes.com) In a toast, the President hailed the American relationship with India a ”great and growing partnership.”

But cutting to the chase for us wine geeks, are the wines fulfilling a great partnership with the food? One course in particular caught my eye: guests wanting the green curry shrimp with smoked collard greens will be offered the Beckmen, Garnache [sic] from the Santa Ynez. While I haven’t tried the wine, one of Beckmen’s other grenache wines rolls in at 15.6% alcohol, not exactly my recipe for good times with green curry. I might just hold on to that Riesling from the previous course if I were seated next to Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Jhumpa Lhiri, Bobby Jindal or Steven Spielberg tonight.

What would you pair if you were the USA sommelier with this course? (Only American wines are served at the White House.) Full menu selections come after the jump. Read more…

In our recent discussion of wine education for kids, two readers thoughtfully provided translations of an Italian rhyming verse (“Filastrocca del vino”) that is used in some Italian elementary schools.

But we can’t let the Italians have all the fun! You are hereby challenged to come up with some sort of poem–be it a limerick, haiku, rhyming couplets or full-on iambic pentameter–about wine for kids in America. It can be descriptive of the current state of wine education to kids or focused on grapes, wine or consumption. It may be adopted in classrooms across America!

Whatever you choose to do, post your rhyme/poem in the comments below by next Monday. To whet your whistle, there will be a prize: Foodie Babies Wear Bibs, the sixth in a series of children’s board books by none other than Mrs. Vino. Have fun with it! (The winning entry will be the one that makes her laugh the most; prize can only be sent to a US address.)

I recently posted about a pamphlet that our six-year-old son brought home from school equating wine and pot.

A friend living in the Veneto, Italy writes in with this comparison:

I thought I would share the work that our son brought home from his Montessori pre-school today: filastrocca del vino. A page of rhyming verse about making grapes into wine. Followed by pages to color about grapes + wine including a smiling Chianti bottle. Their fall learning unit was covering varietals through learning about grapes.

After the jump, find the text of the rhyming verse and a couple more pics (no joints). Read more…

“The weak dollar makes American products cheaper overseas, buoying sales, and makes imports more expensive, encouraging consumers at home to buy American…As the dollar fell, gold reached $1,117.40 an ounce at the stock market’s close on Wednesday, setting another record high as hedge fund managers and wealthy speculators continued to buy the precious metal.” – NYT 11/11/09

Applying this to wine:

1. About two-thirds of wine sold in America is produced in America, by volume. If you’re in the portion that drinks imported wine, what price would it take for you to consider switching to domestic wine? If foreign exchange rates fell to $2 to the euro (a decline of 33% from current levels) would that be enough to make you drink more domestic wines? Or, say, $3 to the euro, double the current rate? [shudder] Bear in mind too that FX moves are often parabolic since wholesalers and retailers seek to maintain the same markup even when the base cost rises. [Update: please see comment below from Matt S.]

2. Will domestic wineries start targeting overseas markets more? Apparently they already have since the Wine Institute reports that exports of US wine have doubled since 2002, when the dollar was at a high. But will American wines exported be more than Blossom Hill and white zinfandel?

3. With the rising price of gold, maybe that gold-encrusted Jerobaum of Champers wasn’t such a bad deal after all?!?

Related: “Why so few tasty American wines under $12? Wine importer Bobby Kacher“

Last week, our first-grade son brought a pamphlet home from public school equating wine and pot.

On one page, entitled “Drugs are trouble,” wine, beer, marijuana and cigarettes are graphically depicted in a cage making cat calls at children. Wine, marijuana; they’re both drugs! On the flip side, at least they differentiate between wine and illegal drugs–all while introducing the topics of crack and cocaine!

I can see it now: “Sonny, come help daddy pick out a nice wine for tonight’s dinner. Should we have a ’47 Cheval Blanc or a ’61 Lafite? Look, there’s your birth year wine over there that we can drink together when you turn 21. Oh, watch out–don’t step on daddy’s crystal crack pipe!”

In all seriousness, for six-year-olds? Come on. The whole discussion is not only heavy-handed but also grossly premature. (Checking on the web site of the company that produced the educational materials, I see topics such as “fighting germs” and “following directions” for first graders; drugs and alcohol are saved for fifth grade so someone at the school may have been overzealous.) We’ll just keep on having wine with dinner and our son is welcome to smell it whenever he wants.

For the parents out there, what have you seen about in your children’s schooling? How has wine consumption been framed, if at all, for your kids outside of the home? And what do you do if it clashes with your worldview?

Related: “Should kids be banned from wineries?
“Maine prohibits children from observing wine tasting at stores

Back in March 2008, when word leaked out about Amazon’s possibly selling wine, Mike Steinberger asked, hopefully, whether Amazon.com could end the war over direct wine deliveries. He continued: “the entry of the Internet retailing colossus into the business seemed just the thing to finally break the logjam over interstate wine shipping.”

Instead, the logjam crushed Amazon (AMZN). Late Friday, winebusiness.com ran a story that Amazon was putting its wine retailing business on hold, citing correspondence between amazon and wineries. I contacted members of the AmazonWine team for comment and they were either away on vacation reply or said that they could not comment. The Wall Street Journal got through to a spokesman who confirmed the wine trial was over.

The intractable logjam was the interstate shipping laws that govern interstate wine shipping. You can get 200 pages or so on it in my book Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink. Or you can check out Tom Wark’s post for a more concise background on the logjam known as the three-tier system. Further, California law on unlicensed “third parties” may have affected the group’s plans.

I look forward to the final analysis of how exactly Amazon attempted to achieve a different structuring of interstate wine retail and why, sadly, it flopped. While AmazonWine kept program was kept under wraps, conventional wisdom is already blaming the bankruptcy of New Vine Logistics, which put the domestic wine component in jeopardy (imported wines were also to be available).

Given the economics of shipping wine, the company may have been targeting higher-priced bottles. In that regard, the economic backdrop didn’t help the plan as high-end wine sales have softened in the past year even though overall consumption of (lower-priced) wine is slightly higher.

In other news, Forbes.com ran a piece late Friday piece entitled, “Must-read wine blogs.” It’s a must-read itself and will give you some tips on some more blogs to add to your feed reader, if those good ones mentioned are not in yours already.