Dr Vino's wine blog

Wine coolers, remember those things? Bartles and Jaymes? “Thank you for your support.”

Anyway, you’re hardly alone if you haven’t had one in the past decade–sales have lost their fizz, declining 95% in that time. Indeed, now they have become a hilarious insult as in the above t-shirt offered by Boston Red Sox fans.

Wine coolers actually did have some wine in them a long time ago. Not anymore. Congress raised the federal excise tax on wine to $1.07 a gallon, effective January 1, 1991. Doesn’t sound like a lot but the previous rate was $0.17/gallon, so it quintupled. That put the economic kibash on coolers and now they they are made from malt. “Wine” cooler, indeed! I vote for a name change. Malt cooler?

Anyway, some important wine cooler trivia: which state had the honor of consuming the most “wine” coolers in 2005, almost beating the second and third states combined? Hit the comments below and the glory will be yours.

Image: chowdaheadz.com/jedrwicot.html

SIPPED: Freddy boy
If there were no Fred Franzia, would journalists have to invent him? In this story, the man behind Two Buck Chuck swears, slams all wine over $10 a bottle, mocks the concept of terroir, and relieves himself near his car–all in the first paragraph! Business 2.0 lapped it up talking about his “wars” and why he has an Enya CD in his Jeep. [Business 2.0, now defunct]

SPIT: Blind tastings
Eric Asimov writes “maybe as wine drinkers we’re all a little more grown up now and don’t need to taste blind all the time.” Indeed! Three cheers wine evaluation without numbers! [The Pour]

SIPPED: Gringo vino
Are Americans finally heading to Argentina to make wine? Fortune Small Business found a few. I hope they read my article from January about the pitfalls! [Fortune SB]

SIPPED: Bambino vino
Gabriella writes up her experience taking 55 elementary school kids on a winery tour in Spain. Could this ever take place if it were in America? [Catavino]

SIPPED: green wine
Whole Foods rolls out an “organically grown” wine in a tetra prisma! [Seattle dbusiness]

SIPPED: merlot
The grape, spit in Sideways, will get it’s own defense on the silver screen with a new documentary. Key question: will anyone notice?

SPIT: The greenback
The US dollar falls to 15 year lows. Say hello to more expensive imported wine–and wine travel overseas!

(Photo credit: Fair use is made here of a reduced-size crop from a larger image in Business 2.0 attributed to Michael Kelley)

With the sale of wine prohibited in grocery (aka “food”) stores, this is what we’re left with at the A&P, etc. Mmm, “wine product.”

Comments are open.

UPDATE: Read more…

Sipped: Leaping into retirement
Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars was sold for $185 million. The legendary founder, Warren Winiarski, now 78, will stay on three more years in a consultative role–just long enough for the two rival movies about the Paris tasting to appear in theaters! The buyers are Ste. Michelle, a unit of UST, and Piero Antinori, who will own 85% and 15% respectively. [Reuters]

Sipped and spit: Gallo buys William Hill and Canyon Road! Duckhorn almost sold! [SF Chronicle]

Spit: Ratatouille wine
Before one bottle was on shelves, Disney canceled a Ratatouille branded wine. Was it because the wine was French while Disney’s home is in California, coincidentally also the home of 90% of American wine production? Was it the idea of selling a wine in an animated movie (at least ostensibly) aimed at kids (though wine features prominently in the film)? Or was it a new puritanical streak since they recently banned smoking from their movies? [LA Times]

Spit: high alcohol wine
Randy Dunn, maker of Howell Mountain Cabernet, says “higher alcohol wines should stop.” I guess we know how he would vote in the poll! [Appellation America]

I can’t say that my iPod is exactly loaded with country music tracks. So it’s no surprise that I’d never heard of Brad Paisley until last week, despite the fact that his last album sold over two million copies.

In the funny song “Online” on his new album, 5th Gear, the schlumpy lead character has an alter ego on MySpace (Yes! A country song writes about the internet! And wine!). Roll some of the lyrics:

‘Cause online I’m out in Hollywood
I’m 6 foot 5 and I look damn good
I drive a Maserati
I’m a black-belt in karate
And I love a good glass of wine

Maybe in the next album, the main character will drink wine instead of the aspirational alter ego (Brad Paisley himself?).

See the video on bradpaisley.com

Sipped: Peter Singer, Princeton ethicist
“And buying the merlot may help sustain a tradition in the French countryside that we value–a community, a way of life, a set of values that would disappear if we stopped buying French wines. I doubt if you travel to Fiji you would find a tradition of cultivation of Fiji water.” Excellent! He’s clearly been reading his Dr. Vino! [great piece on bottled water in Fast Company]

Sipped: NYC tap water
The NYT gives NYC tap water a thumbs up for taste and price, pointing out that eight glasses of tap water a year has a total tab of $0.49. [NYT]

Sipped: Oregon wine tourism
Oregon Wine has a new interactive map for plotting your next trip to the state. Good stuff–we love maps! [Oregon Wine]

Sipped: Michigan wine country(?)
“There’s a quiet revolution happening here,” Joel Goldberg, a local wine writer, told the NYT about the burgeoning wine life in Michigan. “Go off a side road and through the woods and you’ll find a vineyard here, a vineyard there — hundreds of acres of new vineyards are going in all over the place. And there are some real quality wines.” [NYT travel]

Spit: the US Dollar
Touched a record low versus the Euro on Friday as it fell to $1.3814.

Spit: EU wine reform, in Central Europe
“If this EU reform is passed, I think the size of the vineyards under cultivation in Hungary will be halved. It could create a dramatic situation,” Laszlo Kiss, president of Hungary’s National Council of Wine Communities. [AFP].

Spit: California Rhone-style wine under $10
“Why can’t California deliver the same kind of terroir [as a Cotes du Rhone] for $10? “[SF Chron]

Imagine my surprise the other evening when that I thought that through the rosé blur I saw a naked woman on the label. Was this one of those subliminal messaging ads? No. There she was, in silhouette on the label of Domaine Bernard Baudry Chinon rose 2006, and about nine months pregnant. And she was tossing back some wine. And that had a big line through it.

Would this wine make you infertile? Oh no. The penny dropped. This was some illustrated warning against drinking wine while pregnant!

Funny that it was a wine from France of all places, not the America, the land of the free and the Surgeon General.

And to top off the odd juxtaposition, I was chatting with a pregnant woman the other day in New York who had just had a prolonged amniocentesis. She said that the doctor had told her to go home and have a glass of wine to relax. And no, she wasn’t Rachel Weisz.

Wow, American doctors recommending wine. French wine makers posting warnings. Talk about changing attitudes to wine!