Dr Vino's wine blog

How great it is
“2005 was my best vintage–until 2006.” Franz Pichler of FX Pichler in Austria told me at a tasting.

Why drink wine?
“Twenty five years ago people drank wine for three reasons: 1) allegedly because it made dinner better; 2) because it made the people at dinner better; and 3) to intimidate others. Now, the first two reasons are still valid but the third is to ensure you will have sex within six hours of drinking the wine.” –Josh Wesson, founder of Best Cellars, at a Vinexpo panel about “millennials” in New York yesterday.

All for one?
“It is a reasonably well-known fact that the largest buyer of classified growth Bordeaux…..with a heavy emphasis on FIRST GROWTHS, is the Asian chairman of a major…and I mean major company….of course all his activity is done through third/fourth/fifth party strawmen….and not one auction house or wine merchant would dare reveal the name(and they all know who it is)….purchases to the tune of 40-50 million dollars per year for about 4-5 years.” [Robert Parker, on his BB, ellipses in original]

Vodka, aka, diluted ethyl alcohol
“The European Union would define vodka simply as diluted ethyl alcohol, which is, of course, what it is. That suits members like Britain, the Netherlands, France and Austria, which wring “vodka” from anything from grape mush to sugar cane. The quotes are important here, because countries of the Vodka Belt around the Baltic Sea, which have distilled the stuff for centuries and produce two-thirds of the European Union’s vodka, insist their traditional use of grains and potatoes to make vodka should be enshrined in the definition. All else, they insist, is mere regional swill, and should be labeled as such.” [Serge Schmemann in the NYTimes]

Truth in labeling
“It might be disenchanting if the label also listed the chicken, fish, milk and wheat products that are often used to process wine.” Oh those? Not so much. But what’s this Mega Purple? [LA Times]

It’s spring time, which for us wine geeks doesn’t just mean crocuses and robins–it means it’s time to pay now for wine that won’t be delivered for another two years.

A friend called me on Saturday and asked if I wanted to claim a few bottles of Ridge Monte Bello 2006 allocation. I hesitated for a moment, thinking that nobody outside the winery has ever tasted the wine and the final blend is probably a year away from being constructed. Then I said yes.

Is this sheer folly? At least when Bordeaux futures start rolling out in the next month, journalists and buyers from around the world will have already ventured to the region to taste barrel samples and be able to offer a third party opinion.

But I figure Ridge is a Name You Can Trust. Which wines would you be willing to pre-buy without anything other than the weather report and some vague assurances from the winery about the current vintage being spectacular?

Perks
Become a non-executive member of the Board of Directors of UST Corp (NYSE: UST), which owns several wineries as well as Skoal “smokeless” tobacco, and you can get a $5,000 worth of the company’s wine! (That’s 555 bottles of $9 Columbia Crest.) Other officers get a similar allowance and the CEO Vincent Gierer gets a $6,500 allowance “to foster the use of the Company’s wine products at events they host.” Mmm, yummy wine products. Granted, some of this sum goes for “the maintenance and/or installation of security systems” for all that wine booty. But you’d think with his $6 million salary, he could have afforded that anyway. [SEC filings via footnoted.org]

Declines
Constellation Brands (NYSE: STZ), the biggest publicly traded wine producer announced disappointing earnings thanks to “pricing pressures that it blamed on rising supplies of competing Australian wines and reduced consumption in Britain.” The shares fell to a multi-year low on Thursday. [Forbes]

Rises
French wines tacked on two percentage points in the US market–at the expense of Australia, according to an AFP story. “The export figures show that we are going in the right direction. We must advance toward the path of committed reform,” said Louis Regis Affre, managing director of the Federation of Exporters of Wine and Spirits in France (Fevs). [Sapa-AFP]

Fakes
Sir Ian Kershaw, author of an award-winning two-volume biography of Hitler, said he was “immediately skeptical” when reading reports of the sale of an $8,000 “Fuehrerwein” at auction. Was it the fact that Hitler was a teetotaler? He doesn’t mention that but he points out that “a Tafelwein, a low-class table wine, was, even in 1943, not a particularly dignified present, even allowing for Hitler’s scant knowledge of wines,” he said. “Beyond this, an earlier wine bottle carrying a picture of Hitler – or at least a Nazi emblem – had been banned as kitsch.” Indeed. [thisislondon.co.uk]

Let’s get critical
Critical Wine, a new movement that “aims to raise awareness of the potential ills of globalization,” will hold an event April 3-4 in Verona, just after VinItaly. Wolfgang Weber writes “participating wine producers work with indigenous grape varieties, practice organic or sustainable viticulture, and exhibit some sense of their particular territorio.” The marketing of resistance? [Wine & Spirits, no link available]

Cuvee chez soi
Home wine making is on the rise. [BusinessWeek]

Armagnac fights cancer the scientific journal Thrombosis Research reports. No word on the effects of cognac. Or E&J Brandy. [via decanter.com]

Legendary investor Warren Buffett has his own elixir, and it’s not red wine: “The good news: At 76, I feel terrific and, according to all measurable indicators, am in excellent health,” Buffett said. “It’s amazing what Cherry Coke and hamburgers will do for a fellow.” [AP]

We wine lovers generally think about how to turn our money into wine. But apparently there are those who think that wine can turn into money.

The Wall Street Journal had a big story on page B1 over the weekend about the new phenomenon of wine investing (no free link to the story, “Fine Wines No Longer Just Tempt Collectors”). In London, the Fine Wine Fund has been set up with the goal of investing in wine. They charge fees similar to a regular fund for alternate investments with a two percent annual management fee and 15 percent of the profits.

Is making money out of wine a panacea? Post your thoughts in the comments! One thing is for sure: while the story doesn’t mention the size of the Fine Wine Fund, if a lot of money sloshes into the relatively small market for investment-grade wine, prices will likely go to even more eye-popping levels. Let’s just hope that some corks get popped along the way too.

* * *

Steve Bachmann was quoted in the story talking about inefficiencies in the wine market. You can check out his thoughts on how to value wines on his blog, The Wine Collector. He’s also the CEO of Vinfolio, a fine wine retailer.

tags: wine | wine collecting

The plot thickens! First, $500,000 of rare Bordeaux goes missing from a restaurant in Sweden last August. “Only 600 bottles of the best wine were stolen. They did not take any of the cheaper wines. They were real professionals,” Lars Fagerlund, restaurant manager, told decanter.com.

Then in late December, the “big wine caper” took place in the well-heeled enclave of Atherton, California. Thieves cracked the electronic code and stole 450 super-premium bottles of wine. The New York Times wrote that “There was no sign of forced entry, indicating the possibility of an inside job…The perpetrator had a discerning palate, leaving behind lesser vintages. The average bottle stolen was reported to be worth $222.”

Now news is coming out of Bordeaux of yet another heist. “Over €600,000 of first growth and other top Bordeaux wines have been stolen from one of France’s oldest negociant houses in a heist which bears all the hallmarks of an inside job,” reports decanter.com.

Wow, international intrigue, precious wine, savvy thieves–someone had better alert a screen writer and Catherine Zeta-Jones! THIS is the wine screenplay they have been waiting for! (Sorry, Russell Crowe)

tags: wine | wine collecting

OK which would you find the most shocking?

A) A teetotaler puts his name and image on a wine label
B) That teetotaler would give said wine to his underlings on his birthday
C) A 1943 “schwarzer tafelwein” could be sold at auction last week
D) That bottle sold for almost $8,000

In case none stood out and you answered all of the above, then you’re right! The bottle of 1943 Fuhrerwein bearing the image of known teetotaler Adolf Hitler was originally given to Nazi officers on the occasion of the dictator’s birthday. It was sold at Plymouth Auction Rooms in England last week for £3,995 (including the auctioneer’s commission). No word on who was the buyer.

Sources:
“Hitler wine fetches £3,995 – but don’t mention its taste” [thisislondon.co.uk]
“Hitler’s wine up for auction” [decanter.com]

tags: wine | Hitler | Nazi wine

Vote it up
Voting ends today in the inaugural edition of the American Wine Blog Awards. Consider Dr. Vino in two categories! You can vote here.

Vote it down
Mariann Fischer Boel, the EU Commissioner for Agriculture, was dealt a setback in her reform for the wine sector. The EU Parliament voted 484 – 129 against her proposal to uproot almost 1 million acres of vines. The Parliament is a consultative body so the reform is not dead but it may be wounded given the lopsided nature of the vote. [Bloomberg]

Cellar time
Park B. Smith, the eminent wine collector featured along with this cellar (check out the slide show!) in this week’s NYT, invited Eric Asimov to lunch in the cellar. On his grand cru blog, Asimov recounts the “parade of Chateauneufs.” [The Pour]

La vache qui boit
Kobe beef cows are a pampered lot since they are seranaded with Mozart, massaged and fed beer to make their meat succulent. But their analogues in Australia, where it is known as wagyu, are being fed red — a premium red wine blend that is, costing A$20 (16 USD) a bottle! “The addition of a litre of premium wine to each animal’s feed for the last 60 days of its life is said to give the meat a sweetness that lifts the quality even further. The antioxidants in the wine are also thought to improve the colour and shelf life of the beef.” [Daily Telegraph, via Uncorked]

Koshu, nice to meet you?
Who’s heard of indigenous grape varieties in Japan? Well, first class travelers on Japan Air Lines will be getting to know the koshu grape variety better as it will be poured in their cabin. [JAL, thanks, Mark!]

Drink inside the box
According to this story, the French are discovering bag-in-a-box wine. Now we can too with the next edition of Wine Blogging Wednesday, scheduled for March 14. [Box Wine Blog]

tags: wine | food and drink | wine collecting

Red wine beats the greenback
“Like chocolate was to the Aztecs, wine has become the ultimate currency,” said Daphne Derven, an independent scholar on food and wine based in Eugene, Ore. “It appears that the thieves, whoever they were, had more faith in the stability and accruing value of the ultimate bottle of wine than the American dollar.” The big wine heist in Silicon Valley [NYT]

Red wine makes greenbacks for entrepreneurs (almost)
In a cover story with a provocative headline, Fortune magazine profiles Sirtris, the biotech start-up that is trying to commercially develop resveratrol. The research into naturally occurring compound in red wine has been led by Dr. David Sinclair, red wine hater, at Harvard. It may hold the key for fighting diseases associated with aging. [Fortune]

IN: Yves Bénard
Yves Bénard, head of the Champagne division at LVMH and co-president of the regional Champagne body (CIVC), is likely to assume the presidency at the French wine regulatory body, INAO. Given that Champagne is one of the most commercially viable wine regions and Bénard is no stranger to brands, is he the man to lead the appellation system out of the morass they are in? [Decanter]

OUT: Michel Rolland
Two years after Michael Broadbent criticized their wine in the documentary Mondovino, the owners of Chateau Kirwan have dumped him. Begin the Rolland backlash? [Decanter.com–link mysteriously removed]

Wine for no greenbacks in NYC
Free, public tasting of 2005 Chateauneuf-du-Pape with importer Alain Junguenet, at Tribeca Grill on Feb. 3rd from 12:00-4:00. Six winemakers will be there pouring samples.

tags: wine | wine tasting | wine collecting