Dr Vino's wine blog

First it was a new winery in Manhattan. Now, word buzzes in about the new Manhattan Meadery, which promises to make “a distinctive honey wine” in NYC (though which borough will receive this honor is unclear since “Brooklyn buzz” is on the ad).

While we were just sitting here sipping our sauvignon, they have brought the fight to us wine geeks, touting their product as “wine,” and packaging it in 750 ml bottles with 13% alcohol. The audacity! And they continue that their measly mead is “a light and crisp dry white that is thoroughly wine-like, but unlike any wine you’ve had before.”

Oh yeah, which vintage is your honey from, Mister Meadery? Can you imagine, the meadery is exploiting the honey bees during their time of Colony Collapse Disorder! Drink real wine instead! There’s a global glut! Manhattan Meadery, you’re on notice!

Cities used to be for beer making. Wine, traditionally made near the vineyard, is moving into cities at warp speed.

First wineries infiltrated Brooklyn, as Brooklyn Oenology and Bridge Urban Winery have done and Abe Schoener will do in Red Hook later this year. Next up: Manhattan. City Winery, a night club meets wine bar meets winery, will open at 143 Varick St in the fall.

Michael Dorf, owner of the nightclub the Knitting Factory among other pursuits, is heading the City Winery. Grapes will be trucked in from New York State, California and possibly beyond to be made into wine under the supervision of David Lecomte, a French trained winemaker who has made wine at Chapoutier and Herzog, the kosher winery in California. People can buy a barrel (approximately 250 bottles of finished wine) starting at $5,000 and track its progress. Crushpad, which pioneered this approach in San Francisco, will also open a facility in NYC in the fall.

While the winery space will be for members (aka “barrel owners”) only, the nightclub/wine bar will be open to the public with more than 50 wines by the glass and an event space for up to 400. Oh, and there’s a state-of-the-art sound system.

Read more about City Winery and the bureaucratic hoops they had to jump through including licensing and waste removal issues at Wines & Vines (they could send all that pomace to Delluva Day Spa instead!). The Village Voice also had a recent piece on the trend.

Tipster Steve points out that times have changed since 2000 when the “last” winery moved out of NYC as tax incentives and rising costs lured the kosher Kedem to Bayonne, NJ. The barrel always rolls…

Jancis Robinson, Robert Parker, Hugh Johnson, Burton Anderson, Frank Prial, Kevin Zraly, and Ed McCarthy were inducted into the Wine Media Guild Hall of Fame on Monday night at a ceremony in New York City (there were also posthumous inductees; see the full list and bios). It was the inaugural class inducted into the HoF and therefore the first ceremony.

Members, various guests and two of the inductees poured into the event at I Trulli restaurant. Read more…

In a further sign of how our currency is rapidly becoming the American peso, the wine list at The Modern restaurant on West 53rd Street (below MoMA) in Manhattan now lists the euro equivalent pricing.

During lunch there yesterday, I asked if they actually accepted euros for payment. They said it is for informational purposes only to help their European guests make the conversion. Must be a pretty picture for the Europeans! The only catch for them as they order their magnums is that the price on the menu does not include service and tax as is the norm in Europe, which could lead to a 25 percent upside surprise when the check comes.

Last week was the final session of my six-week NYU wine class. The grouping of people was very fun and hopefully everyone is a little more wine savvy.

One of the things that I do in the class is poll people on whether they like each wine. They’re free to love them or hate them and we generally have some fence-sitters too. Some people love certain wines (“smell the terroir!”) that are hated by others (“smells like terroir!”). Oddly enough, the expensive wines are not always the most popular since they have either too much individuality or too much conformity to please everyone.

But some wines are unanimously enjoyed. Below is a list of those wines. Incidentally, I poured about 35 wines (blind) spanning many places and styles. One week I was away on parental leave and recruited Mollie Battenhouse to help me out. Mollie, the former sommelier at Tribeca Grill and a candidate for the Master of Wine (all she has left is her dissertation), is starting her own wine business in NYC that is a first of its kind. More on that on a future date…To the wines! Read more…

Red Hook, Brooklyn, will be the home of a new “urban winery” later this year.

Abe Schoener, excellent and unconventional winemaker from California, told DrVino.com yesterday that he will open the winery in a building on Beard Street sometime late in the summer 2008. Schoener’s partner will be his Brooklyn-based distributor for the NYC area, Mark Snyder of Angel’s Share.

The wine-making facility represents a first for Schoener. Although the former Greek philosophy professor makes compelling and hugely serious wines under his Scholium Project label from California, he does not have a winery there. The Red Hook winery will make exclusively wines from New York State grapes, purchased from vineyards up the Hudson River Valley and from Long Island.

With a slip outside the building, Schoener said yesterday that some of the grapes will be shipped to the new winemaking facility. Not for carbon footprint reasons, mind you, but just because the slip is there easily presenting that option.

Even though the space will be dramatic, with 60 foot ceilings behind door 15 the huge complex on Beard and Van Brunt, it is not yet determined whether it will be open for visitors like the Bridge Urban Winery and Tasting Room in Williamsburg.

The Schoener wine label is currently unnamed but will have a historic reference. It will not be part of the Scholium Project wines.

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SIPPED: discussion!
Eric Asimov of the NYT had a thoughtful article in Wednesday’s paper about exposing teenagers to wine in the home. It’s great to see a constructive discussion (325 comments long!) on his blog about fostering wine enjoyment in the home rather than the usual discussion of excesses. Related: we’ve discussed kids at wineries and how appropriate is the drinking age of 21 here. [NYT]

SIPPED and SPIT: NYC wine bars
Closing tonight is Divine Wine Bar East. Zagat reports they have having the Mother of All Happy Hours tonight to liquidate (ha) the inventory. Opening: Bowery Wine Company and the new wine lounge at Le Cirque. See the action on the NYC wine bar map!

SIPPED: The audacity of nope
French President Sarkozy, a self-proclaimed teetotaler (although see here and here for evidence to the contrary), has the nerve to ask to see the wine list at Windsor Palace before a state dinner. [Times of India]

SIPPED: resveratrol
“Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown for the first time that resveratrol, a natural antioxidant found in grape skins and red wine, helps to destroy cancerous pancreatic cells by crippling the diseased cells’ mitochondria, the minute organelles found in the majority of living cells which provide them with energy.” [FT.com]

Image: fair-use is made of a reduced size crop of an image that appeared in the NYT attributed to Lisa Adams.

I briefly dropped by Terroir wine bar in the East Village yesterday during its first hour of being open and I can confirm that it is, indeed, now open! The wine list is compact, focusing only on a handful of terroir-driven wines. Four wines are available at $2.75 for a three-ounce pour and $5 for a six-ounce pour–real inflation busters! Other wine btg goes up to $19 for Bovia Barolo 2003 and all conform to the bigger, heartier seasonal style Paul Grieco outlined to me previously…The staff were outfitted in t-shirts bearing the image of the now-deceased, crochety iconoclast from Barolo, Bartolo Mascarello, in a Che-like image…The wine list is in a three-ring binder, which the designer described to me as being like the school notebook of “a 16 year-old boy whose obsession is not with cars or girls but obscure grape varieties,” including one with Aglianico written on it multiple times… Very tempting small plates available in the 550 sq ft space (a former bike shop) but I had to run–more anon as I’m sure I’ll be back…Here are some pix with more after the jump:

Read more…