Dr Vino's wine blog

Google reshuffled its proprietary algorithm recently to favor quality and penalize “content farms” that were gaming the system, producing content optimized for search engines, rather than humans. The NYT had a discussion of the changes, and here’s a list of 25 sites severely affected. (Arianna Huffington should count 315 million lucky stars these changes came just weeks after she sold her site to Aol.)

When I read about this development, I wondered what would happened to Snooth.com, the wine web site that seems to be a champion of SEO, ranking high in the organic search results yet providing so little useful information that they were found to be scraping cellartracker.com content since 2007 to populate some pages. For web ad sales, more page views can mean higher ad revenues.

I searched for a few specific wines and the results returned a few snooth pages in the top ten so I thought they hadn’t been affected. But according to quantcast, their (directly measured) pageviews have slid significantly over the past week. I guess time will tell the fuller story.

SIPPED: baton passing
Robert Parker has announced editorial changes at the Wine Advocate, including the fact that he will no longer be reviewing the wines of California. Antonio Galloni will assume those duties and add the Cote d’Or and Chablis to his bailiwick that already includes all of Italy and Champagne. And who said criticism was getting more regionalized?

SPIT: recession
The drinks division at LVMH reports a 19% rise in revenues to €3.3 billion. Dom Pérignon and Krug were standouts. [Guardian]

SIPPED: creative shipping
Maryland wine consumer can’t have wine shipped to them. So many have it shipped to friends in Virginia or offices in DC (remember how DC is the thirstiest non-state in the nation?). It’s a miserable inconvenience and the Maryland law should simply be changed. [WashingtonPost.com]

GULPED: Trenta
Good to know: the Starbucks “trenta” size can also serve as a decanter. [cockeyed]

Happy Friday! A little light programming for your today. Yesterday, I spotted a meme on Twitter using the hashtag #indecisivemusicals that included such suggestions as “Rent … no maybe we should buy.” With the Andrew Lloyd Webber wine auction coming up this weekend, I wondered on Twitter if we needed some #winemusicals? I proposed “The Full Monte Bello” and “Gentlemen Prefer Brunes et Blondes.” Here are some of other chuckle (or groan?) worthy suggestions:

“Oaklahoma!” @ablegrape (by Rolland & Hammerstein?)
“My Fair Lieu-dit” @ablegrape
“Sunday in the Park with Nuits Saint Georges” @felixsalmon
“Guys and Dolcettos” @howardggoldberg
“St Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” @davidwlamb
“The Musar Man” @Tri_pops

Search for more and add your own in the comments or on Twitter. And let us know if you hear of the opening of any of these shows, presumably well off-Broadway.

“I do it on the web for free.”

A fellow blogger and I once joked about putting that on a T-shirt. Blogging is not a path to riches. Especially for wine. While a tech blogger might earn a decent living from Google’s Adsense or the Amazon affiliate program, such a path is not really open to wine bloggers. For one, Google considers wine ads to be for an “non-family safe” content. So in order to allow wine ads on a site, a publisher using Adsense has to allow adult content which could be opening Pandora’s box in more ways than one. Similarly, the small percentage that Amazon offers affiliates may go a long way on if the blog reviews plasma TVs and digital cameras. But wine books and corkscrews? Not so much.

However, there are some ways to make money in wine writing. Read more…

Occasionally, “memes” get started on Twitter: someone starts a hashtag such as #lessambitiousfilms and people chine in with their ideas, such as “The Sounds of Muzak,” “Being John Stamos” or “Saving Private Ryan 15% on his Auto Insurance by Switching him to GEICO.”

Now the meme has spread to wine with people tweeting about #lessambitiouswines. Suggestions include, “Châteauneuf-du-Pabst,” “Henschke Hill of Poise,” and “Humble Mountain Vineyards.” I suggested playing it both ways with “Bronze Oak #lessambitiouswines Gold Oak #moreambitiouswines.”Howard Goldberg has been on a roll offering “Geworstraminer,” “Pinot grease,” and “Defite-Rothschild.” Hit the comments if you have other ideas.

And if you are poking around on Twitter for some chuckles, there has been a raft of anonymous accounts offering up spoof tasting notes to inside-baseball sommelier talk. As they say at the finest tweeting establishments, #enjoy.

Wine writers, already about as endangered as the Iberian lynx thanks to the sagging media world (not screwcaps), have something new to fear–automatically generated tasting notes! Have a taste of what the site spits out:

Fully refined almost corpulent Chenin Blanc. Hits you with sage, boggling cardboard and bashful mint. Drink now through 2009.

Now, a sample of “extra silly:”

Neo-classic but equally longingly elegant Zinfandel. Forces smoked oyster, acidic monster gasoline and corpulent jack cheese. Drink now through eternity.

Greg Sumner, the site’s creator and soon-to-be wine overlord, pulls back the curtain to reveal the formula:

How it works.
It’s very simple. I put word types into arrays, then chose a word at random out of the array. The tasting note comes out in the following structure:

(Intro) (Modifier) (Adjective) (Varietal).
(Adverb) (Adjective) (Flavor) flavors, (Adjective) (Flavor), and (Strength-word) (Flavor).
Drink (When) through (EndWhen).

Whoa, keep this thing away from sommelier robots! At least they don’t have a random score generator–yet.

SPIT: en primeur scores?
James Suckling is retiring from Wine Spectator after 29 years. An announcement states that reviewers James Molesworth and Bruce Sanderson will assume the duties for Bordeaux and Italy respectively. Further, “The wines will be reviewed in our standard blind-tastings in the company’s New York office.” Given that Molesworth does not rate barrel samples, is the the end of the magazine’s participation in en primeurs, the system of selling Bordeaux wines two years before the arrive? When asked about it on Twitter, Molesworth indicated it is still an open question.

SIPPED: new owners
Evesham Wood, a small producer in Oregon, has been sold. Russ and Mary Raney have sold their 24-year old, 13-acre vineyard and winery to Erin and Jordan Nuccio. The Raneys will consult as well as spend more time in France. [Avalon wine]

SIPPED: Le Tour pairings
The Tour de France is, in many ways, a rolling promotion for France’s regions. David McDuff makes the link to wine and gastronomy for each stage with maps, photos and guest posts. [McDuff’s Wine & Food Trail]

SPIT: HR 5034
A hearing before a subcomittee about HR 5034 has been postponed, hopefully indefinitely. We maintain our existing threat level.

SIPPED: Amazon sells wine
…in Britain.

After surveying several dozen choices last night in my basement last night–too cool an evening for a rosé, never enough Pinot around–I settled on the 2008 D. Coquelet, “vieilles vignes” from the often-overlooked appellation of Chiroubles. Still in his twenties, Damien Coquelet is both the stepson of Georges Descombes, the Morgon vigneron, and a rising star of Beaujolais.

I chose the wine because I wanted a good wine with dinner. I did harbor a hope that my wife and I could enjoy it over two nights, thus extending what I hoped would be a good bottle. But something happened: it was so delicious, we drank it all!

Somehow, the best bottles always seem to disappear quickly. Put out a bunch of wines, invite friends over for dinner, and (all things being equal) the bottle most quickly emptied is likely the best that evening.

That made me wonder if this might be the best way for wine drinkers to rate wines, where the highest praise is a rating of “quickly emptied.” The rest of the scale might look like this: empty, half-empty, sipped…and spit.

Sure, it’s kind of goofy, not very precise and has some obvious flaws, such as discounting future improvements of the wine. It’s very here and now and unabashedly so. But it is a great tonic to what ails the point system, which aims for precision and objectivity but often lands wide of the mark. In his memoir, A Life Uncorked, Hugh Johnson wrote, “The weakness of [the 100-point system] is that it is based on tasting, rather than drinking.” Indeed.

A rating system for wine drinkers instead of merely wine tasters reshuffles the deck: suddenly, being an utterly drinkable Riesling or Beaujolais becomes a trump card, rather than the hindrance it can be in a blind tasting lineup. Moreover, it limits the number of wines that can reasonably be reviewed to a hundred or more a year–really, how many people need thousands of wine recommendations? Also, it brings context in to the evaluation: the food, the seasonal appropriateness, where the wine is in its evolution, if you’re drinking it on a vacation. With the wine drinker’s ratings, the best wines become memories in a scrapbook, rather than trophies traded at auction in Hong Kong.

Anyway, it’s not perfect. But it’s worth discussing. And maybe even worth raising a glass to!