Dr Vino's wine blog

The wine world just got wackier.

A new Twitter account going by the name of Bobby Parkerchuk mashes the tweets and tones of Robert Parker and Gary Vaynerchuk. The bio reads: “Wine guy, hedonist, host of Winery Advocate TV. Loves points. Loves the hustle.” Parkerchuk has been hailed as “hilarious,” “my new god,” and ” the best micro-niche-sub-culture satire ever” by people who probably should know better. We scored the twitter-interview, via instant messenger:

Dr. Vino: Bobby, how would you describe yourself?

Bobby Parkerchuk: Blending the bombastic musings of Robert Parker with the hustle of GaryVee. With points for all.

DV: So where did you get the inspiration for this?

BP: I have to hand it to Ruth Bourdain…she’s a surly broad w great legs–and I’m not talking in the wine glass…99 pts.

DV: Eric Asimov said that the reason you’re so much worse that RuBo is that you have such “drek” to work with. True? Read more…

“Alcohol delivers flavors.”

So writes Lettie Teague in her debut column “Wines that Pack a Little Extra” for the Wall Street Journal on Saturday. What does she mean by “alcohol delivers flavors”? She seems to be implying that higher alcohol translates into more flavor. But is that really true?

One of the hottest hot-button issues in the wine world is rising alcohol levels. Although alcohol itself is tasteless, elevated levels of it in wines often accompanies enhanced polyphenols, which can make for big, showy wines, such as a Martinelli Zinfandel that weighs in at over 16% alcohol. But high alcohol actually often crowds out flavors (or vineyard specificity), and, at elevated levels, its searing heat can dominate a wine’s aromas. Although Teague quotes Aldo Sohm, sommelier at Le Bernardin, to support her case in the story, in a follow-up email to me, Sohm said that high-alcohol tends to come at the expense of refinement and complexity. And that’s just it: does Teague really think that the wines of Christophe Roumier or Noel Pinguet (Domaine Huet) or Manfred Prum (J. J. Prüm) lack flavor compared to Martinelli zin or El Nido Clio? I would think not. So why does she present such a black-and-white view in her story, where “flavors” only arrive in the rarefied vapors north of 14% alcohol?

The piece also portrays sommeliers who champion low alcohol wines to be insufferable snobs. She even goes to far as to wonder if the word “balance” is “actually a code to keep out wines that they don’t like or styles that don’t fit their personal taste.” Teague then plays “gotcha,” discovering cabernets above 14% on the list of RN74, a San Francisco restaurant whose wine director is quoted in the piece against high-alcohol. (She also finds some some high-alcohol wines at a retailer who took a similar stand.) So what? At worst, that shows them guilty of inconsistency but it neither invalidates their point nor does it prove them wrong or snobs. Teague rummages around in her basement to find, lo and behold, that she has a bunch of “delicious,” high-alcohol wines. So she likes them, therefore they are okay, but when other people say they don’t like them, they are guilty of pushing their own personal taste and of snobbery. Who’s the hypocrite here?

It’s also worth noting that both on on Twitter and in a follow-up email, Rajat Parr denies making the claim that wines over 14% lack balance and suggests a more nuanced approach to alcohol. Sources often deny quotes especially on controversial issues, such as this. But Teague also recently had her account of the proceedings in another column publicly disputed by those who attended. And in a related blog post on alcohol levels, Teague states that the nebulous “anti high-alcohol crowd” says that high-alcohol wines pose health risks. I, for one, have never heard that argument.

The Wall Street Journal formally introduced their new duo of wine columnists, Jay McInerney and Lettie Teague, on Saturday (even though rumors had been flying on the internets for months). They replace John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter who left the paper in December after writing the column for 12 years.

McInerney files his first column and it is about Prosecco rosé Champagne. Not only does it contain a sidebar with $635 of wine recommendations, but the piece also compares Dom Pérignon to both the Porsche 911 Carrera and the 911 turbo! There’s talk of maxing out credit cards to buy bubbly! The piece also justifies the price of one bubbly by comparing it to the tasting menu at Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas! The only place he really leaves the reader hanging is whether the pink bubblies taste better out of a white gold encrusted Jeroboam.

He has met Hugh Hefner, natch. And he just saw “mature” Julianne Moore on the street and the rosé Champagne made him think of her again!

In February, we noted that McInerney’s punchy House & Garden column had a predilection for bling and wondered whether it would keep up in the leaner times of 2010. But the reader could be justified in thinking that he is the only person in America unfazed by the recession. What’s the Dom Pérignon in a Prius analogy instead of Porsches? And what’s the conversion rate of Joël Robuchon in Vegas to Shake Shack? If the WSJ editors wanted wealth porn, they got it! At least so far. It will be interesting to see if he eases his Ferragamo loafer off of the throttle in future columns.

What do you think, will this play in Peoria in 2010?

Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City among other works of fiction, has been named WSJ wine columnist according to a tweet from Ray Isle, wine editor of Food & Wine magazine.

McInerney wrote a monthly wine column at House & Garden until Condé Nast shuttered the magazine in 2007. His columns were compiled in two books, Bacchus & Me (amazon, aff) and The Hedonist in the Cellar (amazon, aff). So here’s one wine writer who was able to find a job again!

In 2006, he married Anne Hearst. With that kind of financial fusion, perhaps he will buy his own wine instead of the Journal picking up the tab?

McInerney will replace John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter who ended twelve years as wine columnists in December. Their popular column had a populist slant, periodically reviewing white zinfandel, wine on cruise ships, at Disney World and their annual, participatory “open that bottle night.” By contrast, McInerney, whose punchy column ended before the recession took hold, frequently wrote about fine and collectible wines.

Robert Parker states that his publication, The Wine Advocate, purchases “more than 60%” of the wines that it reviews. Parker previously said that he paid for 75 percent of the wines, but amid the furor last year over the free trips that two of his contributors, Jay Miller and Mark Squires, had accepted, he scaled back that figure. However, many people wonder if even the revised figure is true. After all, The Wine Advocate reviews thousands of wines a year (16,474 wines last year), and more than a few of them are extremely expensive. Also, Parker now has six contributing writers, all of whom are presumably drawing salaries from The Wine Advocate.

In 2006, Parker’s assistant, Joan Passman, told a New York Times reporter that Parker purchased bottles “on occasion” but that “by far the largest portion” of wines he sampled were free samples. (Parker publicly dismissed her assertion, saying she had “no clue as to whether I spend a dollar or a million dollars on wines to be tasted.”) In the related article, Marvin Shanken admitted that the Wine Spectator, which has many more subscribers and much higher revenues than the Wine Advocate, was dependent on free samples. “It’d be economically impossible to buy all those wines, especially the ones that are $100 to $300 to $500 a bottle,” he said. During the Miller/Squires flap, Parker seemed to suggest that shouldering the travel expense could lead him to “sacrifice” coverage of some areas. If that travel cost is too much to bear, it certainly seems reasonable to wonder if Parker is really buying as much wine as he claims.

To find out what the Wine Advocate spends on wine according to the stated policy, I crunched the numbers from Read more…

SPIT: controlled storage
James, who has taken a couple of classes of mine in the past year, wrote that he recently pulled the cork on a 1974 Heitz, Martha’s Vineyard for his 50th birthday and it was drinking fabulously. I asked him when he got the wine and he replied, “It was stored in a number of different environments since I had the wine since college in 1978. It was stored in my dormitory, then in my parents basement, then in my apartments, then in a controlled storage facility, and finally in a wine storage cooler. And it still turned out to be the best wine I have ever tasted.” Most excellent!

SIPPED: musical chairs
Jay Miller publicly states that he will no longer be reviewing Australian wines for the Wine Advocate. In other news, Wolfgang Weber, a senior editor at Wine & Spirits magazine and Italian wine critic, has announced that he will be leaving the magazine to join a boutique wine sales and marketing firm. In neither case has a successor been officially named. UPDATE: W&S Editor and Publisher Josh Greene writes in to say that he will be resuming the role of Italian wine critic for the magazine. UPDATE: Lisa Perrotti-Brown, based in Singapore, will be reviewing the wines of Australia (and New Zealand) for the Wine Advocate.

SPIT: blogging
John Mariani, a longtime wine and food writer, predicts a rise in vapid wine blogs. Sigh. We’ve seen this movie before. A more bold and original prediction would have been: The quality of blogs increases as journalists have fewer outlets. [Bloomberg]

NOT SIPPED: Johnny Apple’s wine
Betsey, widow of legendary NYT reporter Johnny Apple, will put his wine collection up for auction. The story repeatedly mentions his “enviably enormous expense account.” To which a former NYT executive editor says: “Johnny Apple would be impossible today, unfortunately.” Gawker reacts.

SPIT: alcohol
A buzz without inebriation? Instant sobriety? Such are the claims of an alcohol substitute being developed by Professor David Nutt, sacked as the UK government’s drug adviser last year. Should wine be threatened? Not if it is considered a food! [Telegraph]

SIPPED: kind words
The Winnipeg Free Press included this blog in their year-end roundup of notables. And my book, Wine Politics, receives a strong review in the current issue of the food journal, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. See the review here or more reviews on the new book review page.

“This is our 579th—and last—”Tastings” column. The past 12 years—a full case!—have been a joy, not because of the wine but because we had an opportunity to meet so many of you, both in person and virtually. Thank you.”

That was how John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter concluded their column in today’s WSJ. They don’t elaborate on their future plans; No editor’s note appears to indicate what will happen with wine coverage at country’s highest circulation newspaper.

When John and Dottie, as they were known to their readers, started writing the column, both came from news sections of the paper as opposed to wine, food or criticism. They asserted their independence from the trade, purchasing wines for review at retail and tasting them blind at home, with dinner over several nights. They rated wines on a scale of “Yech”, “OK”, “Good”, “Very Good”, “Delicious” to “Delicious!” Their column was often very personal, touching on wine in their family experiences, such as vacations on cruise ships or at Disney World. Indeed, their final column is a clarion call for how context influences the wines we drink.

But their signal contribution to wine writing was Open That Bottle Night, encouraging readers to pull a symbolically significant bottle from their cellar and open it just for the heck of it on the last Saturday in February. Readers then sent in letters with their experiences that John & Dottie rounded up in a subsequent column. It was inspired and interactive. And it won them legions of fans.

Best of luck to them in their future endeavors.

SIPPED: number crunching
Wineries that advertise in Wine Spectator have their wines score better–but only by less than one point. Such is the finding in the lead article in the new issue of the Journal of Wine Economics. See the whole paper here as pdf or a blog reaction from the journal’s editor or a hard-hitting response from Robin Goldstein. The quantitative study looks only at reviews and does not examine the editorial, art, restaurant awards, or the Top 100 for advertiser bias. WS editor Tom Matthews responds to the research.

SPIT: binge drinking; SIPPED: wine tasting
An elite girls’ school in England has a new approach to tackling the problem of binge drinking: wine tastings. “We want to introduce the girls and their friends to good wines and their complexity, and educate them to develop an interest in the making of the wines rather than them seeing wine as something that you knock back in the summer holidays without thinking.” Revolutionary!! [The Indepdent; ht @candidwines]

SPIT: closures
Francis Ford Coppola’s winery produced a wine dubbed “encyclopedia” in a carafe-shaped bottle. The custom, oversized screwcaps leaked and ruined 55,000 cases of the wine, the winery alleges in a lawsuit filed against the screwcap’s manufacturer, Vinocor. [Bloomberg]

SPIT: pre-selling wine
Some California wineries are going all Rioja and consciously holding wines back for bottle aging–sometimes a decade or more–at the winery. [NYT]

SPIT: “me-too” wines
The New Zealand wine industry faces challenges, as bulk exports rise and prices fall. The NYT writes that the country’s vintners are “desperate to avoid the fate of neighboring Australia.”