Archive for the 'tasting sized pours' Category

Tasting sized pours — tasting edition

Until my post in the next couple of days about gift wines, here are a couple wine pick articles that should tide you over:

* NPR: Holiday wine. Bryan Miller offers some solid, general suggestions. No audio. But you can listen here to the hilarious Amy Sedaris taking a literary drinking quiz! No wait, take my pop-culture wine quiz!

* WSJ: The inveterate John & Dottie present a case for under $150–now that’s my kind of thinking! (See my case of fall wine picks or last year’s wintry case) Unfortunately their picks are not available online, only in the dead-tree edition or behind a pay barrier, but I do recommend the general idea of giving a well-chosen mixed case as a way to give a gift that makes an impact–and not just on the carpet where it lands.

Also, taste some wines free of charge tonight at Astor Wine & Spirit: “small grower champagnes,” their “French favorites,” and some of that throat-warming fire water, cognac, including some XO Tesseron from the 20s, 50s, 70s, and 90s! All free, the first two with discounts for wine purchased. 6-8 PM today. I’m just sorry I can’t make it. Map it.

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Tasting sized pours — looking up edition

Bottoms up!
Remember resveratrol, the naturally occurring component of red wine that promotes guilt-free gluttony and cardiovascular-improving sloth? Even though the human dosage resveratrol is the equivalent to 300 glasses of wine, red wine sales “surged” eight percent in the month after the release of the scientific studies. [WBM]

Pump me up
A wine in a New Zealand competition was stripped of its gold medal. Was it steroids? No, but it appears the wine was juiced in another way since the producer provided a “completely different” wine for the judges than is available on the supermarket shelves. [NZH] Mark Fisher wonders on his blog whether this might change the acceptability of media receiving samples too. Probably not.

Movin’ on up

“Fifteen dollars is the new $10,” a market researcher told the LA Times “We used to go in a store and say, ‘I’ll only spend $10 for a wine for dinner.’ Now it’s $15.” Grr…Must keep prices down…[LAT]

Thumbs up
Vino Volo, a wine bar that I recently visited while transiting at Washington Dulles, now has four locations. Who knew? BWI, SAC, SEA now have locations too with more on the way. But will you be able to carry the wine on board? [F&W]

Bulking up
The bigger the better, at least for blue-chip Bordeaux at auction [Decanter]

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Tasting sized pours

Resveratrol, the life-extending component in red wine that provides guilt-free gluttony and cardiovascular-improving sloth, has been flying off the shelves in pill form. [WSJ$]

I have two words for you: “divorce.” When asked how she coped with her three wedding ceremonies this summer, Pamela Anderson said “I have two words for you: champagne.” Now she and Kid Rock are filing for divorce. Was it Borat who came between them? [CNN]

The screen writer who wrote Lethal Weapon has signed up to write the script for a movie based on the 1976 Paris Tasting and last year’s book, The Judgment of Paris. Whoa! Robert Mark Kamen actually owns a 100 acre vineyard in Sonoma–unlike the most recent screenwriter to have a go at writing a screenplay who admitted he didn’t know anything about wine. [Decanter]

A watercolor by an artist going by the name of Prince Charles–yes, in fact, the heir to the British throne–will appear on the label of Mouton Rothschild 2004, the forgotten vintage. [Decanter]

And in final diplomatic news, the US is cutting Kim Jong-Il off from his wine–and iPods, jet skis, and Whitney Houston movies in a new round of sanctions against the “Dear Leader” of North Korea. [AP]

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Tasting sized pours

Test this
Are you a lactating mom worried about transmitting too much pinot grigio to your infant? Well, the Dept. of Preying on Parental Fears now brings you a device to test breast milk for alcohol! $25 for six tests. Lactation consultants say it’s overkill for most moms. [$WSJ]

Drink this
Rachel Weisz, Academy Award winning actress, is causing a tempest in her chardonnay glass by saying that it is “fine” for pregnant women to drink wine. “Personally I do. They say not in the first three months though, but I think that after that it’s fine. I mean in Europe they drink it, ” she said. Cue uproar. [SAWF]

Not much
“I mean, how much lagrein is there? And how many people have heard of it?” That’s Martin Hofstatter from Alto Adige talking to Matt Kramer about lagrein, a deep red that Kramer describes as “one of the world’s most inviting red wines.” That’s fine. Except that Kramer criticized wine blogs earlier this year for writing about wines that are too hard to find. Ah, the irony! [NY Sun] thanks, Jack!

Ticked Ott
In his NYT review of Jay McInerney’s new book, a collection of his wine columns for House & Garden, Frank Prial rightfully points out McInerney’s expensive taste. Case in point: Domaine Ott rose, which McInerney recommends. Prial says “Domaine Ott is a rip-off.” Love it! You heard it here first!

Voted down
Massachusetts voters decided they like buying their wine from package stores and not grocery stores. Or was it convenience stores? This analysis of the campaign shows how the YES campaign lost a 2-1 lead in the final two weeks of the campaign. Oh well. You can’t say I didn’t try here or here!

Shouted down
Wine woot, an online retailer, offered a four pack of Sierra Club chardonnay that included a donation to the environmental preservation fund. Was it the election week? Or the wine talking? Either way it generated over 200 comments! hat tip: Mark

Star struck
Where are you if one week from today you are at a wine auction presided over by Charlotte Rampling and Jonathan Nossiter? If you answered Burgundy for the annual Hospice de Beaune charity auction, you’re right! I wonder if Nossiter, director of Mondovino, will leave his camera at home.

Tasting sized pours

Free wine
“You drink for free, as much as you want.” – Michel Verdon, a part-owner of Bistrot Du Coin in the DuPont Circle neighborhood of Washington. Granted, he’s talking about Beaujolais nouveau, but hey, it’s free! November 16, closes 2 A.M. [NYT]

Expensive wine
“We get people all the time who vacation with a winemaker then go shopping for vineyards.” Brian Kurth, founder of Portland, OR-based Vocation-Vacations. [USAT]

Cheap wine
The BYOB map universe expands, now conquering Philadelphia! This map also conveniently shows the location of the nearest branch of the only wine retailer in town, the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. [Go Phila]

Vote wine
“The Commonwealth’s policy, which limits sales largely to liquor stores, is archaic.” The Harvard Crimson urges Yes on the Massachusetts Question 1 on Tuesday. Hear, hear!

Sell wine
“You can’t sell wine without a story for much more than $10.” -Glenn Knight, an owner at Wine House in West Los Angeles. The rise of story-less blends in California. [LAT]

Buy wine
Mark Fisher analyzes the wine ratings of Consumer Reports. What works for vacuum cleaners may not work for wine…[Uncorked]

You’re acquired!
Robert Parker defies the odds and picks another thirty-something–and acquires his web site–to round out his new team as a “supertaster.”

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Tasting sized pours

Catch Jancis Robinson on her last NYC stop tonight at Astor Wine for a free tasting and signing of the new Oxford Companion to Wine. 6-8 PM.

In the most punchy writing ever seen on Decanter, a review calls “A Good Year” starring Russell Crowe “an absolute dog.” Russell Crowe’s character, an investment banker turned vintner in Provence, intones such lines as “I want a bottle that tastes like you and a glass that is never empty…” The screenwriter, Marc Klein, said that he “knew nothing about wine or Provence.” [Decanter]

Jay-Z, who announced a boycott of Cristal early in the summer, has declared his new house champagne: Ace of Spades, from boutique producer Armand de Brignac. No word on the price of the wine. But you can watch him wave off a bottle of “cris” in his new video and take a bottle of Ace! [Decanter, YouTube]

Acker-Merrall, the NY auctioneer and high-end retailer, set a record with a $24 million auction last weekend. A methuselah (6L) of 1978 Romanée-Conti went for $125,475–$608 an ounce!

Want 10 million liters of French wine? Bid before November 10, probably pennies per ounce. [Scotsman]

“I love writing about wine. It’s like being paid to date models.” –Jay McInerney [Observer]

A Good Year,” [Dr. V]

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Tasting sized pours

“In London, they receive you with a sumptuous Porto, and in Rome, the mayor serves absolutely exceptional wines. [Instead, Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë] thinks it is fashionable and modern to serve little democratic wines.” -Anthony Rowley, a French food historian talking about the sale of the wine cellar at Paris city hall. [NYT; previously mentioned in the quiz]

“Thanks to last year’s record grape harvest, good California wine is flowing like water.” [LA Times]

“We need to do this before we can do transgenic research to decrease the grapes’ susceptibility to fungus. Neither the grapes nor the wine will be consumed by humans. Our tests will involve chemical analyses only.” -Sarita Groenewald, manager of the GM grape project at Stellenbosch University’s institute for wine biotechnology [IOL]

“A team led by Maurizio Cellura discovered that winemaking at Milazzo was wasteful and needlessly polluting. The production of a bottle of Terre della Baronia created more than a pound of waste and put 16 grams of sulfur dioxide into the air. Producing the 2004 vintage of 100,000 bottles generated 22,000 pounds of plastic waste, 11,000 pounds of paper and oceans of wastewater.” [NYT]

“Not that there is a better drink with food than wine, but the two don’t complement each other nearly as much as we are almost everywhere led to believe.” -Ed Behr, The Art of Eating, #64 [via OWF]

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Tasting sized pours

Wine Blogging Wednesday takes a turn for the unusual. This time, instead of just getting a bunch of wine recommendations, you can also win a book! [basic juice]

The Bordeaux glut, under the microscope [Time]

COPIA, a Napa attraction dedicated to food and wine, strugles to avert financial collapse. [Napa Valley Register]

Brits get warnings on wine labels: wording is still undecided. Could range from “Please Drink Sensibly” to the extensive US Surgeon General-style. Will they be alerted to the presence of sulfites? [Telegraph]

Smoking banned in public places–in France! Starts February 07. Mayor Daley, take note. [WaPo]

Malcolm Gladwell writes in last week’s New Yorker about whether a computer could predict movie hits. We already have that in wine: Enologix.

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