We are spending the last week of August in the beautiful Napa Valley. The vines are looking spectacular throughout the Valley from Napa all the way to Calistoga. We are renting a house with family in the Oak Knoll AVA. Five acres of Cabernet Sauvignon surround the house. The owner sells these grapes to a [...]
The post Napa Valley Late August appeared first on Napa Valley Wine Blog.
Source: http://www.winecountrygetaways.com/napablog/napa-valley-late-august/
There’s been a lot of good tennis on TV the past ten days or so thanks to the US Open. And more exciting matches are coming over the weekend as new champions will be crowned. (The weather looks good in the coming days so they might actually wrap things up on schedule the coming days.) […]
The post They grew the balls inside the bottle [photo] appeared first on Dr Vino's wine blog.
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Wired Tests Wine Preservation Systems, Picks Correct Winner originally appeared on Winecast. Licensed under Creative Commons.
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“Lafite is out, Conti is in.” originally appeared on Winecast. Licensed under Creative Commons.
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Odds and ends from a life lived through the prism of the wine glass…
Naked Wine and Occupy Wall Street
It’s not hard to notice the parallels between the natural wine movement and Occupy Wall Street - both are valid causes sorely lacking coherence and a rallying point that would move them from fringe head-scratcher to mainstream momentum.
• Natural wine is about purity of wine expression—shepherding grapes grown without chemicals to the bottle with as little human manipulation as possible, representing the place where they came from in the process.
• Occupy Wall Street is about re-calibrating the world’s best economic system – capitalism—to preserve the middle-class, the labor force that has allowed the U.S. to create the most productive economy in the world.
Neither movement represents fringe radicalism as some would have you believe. I look at both as being valid inflection points and, at their core, about keeping a balance between big and small, allowing every man and woman an equal opportunity at pursuing success around their particular truth.
What reasonable person would deny the validity of either if not clouded by confusion?
One idea well-conceived and well-communicated can change the world, but, unfortunately, both the natural wine movement and Occupy Wall Street are prevaricating from their essential truth, rendering them both toothless and feckless.
No need to crib from Che Guevara, but appealing to base logic and the common denominator would do both movements some good.
Just one man’s opinion…
On the Aussies, Redux
A few weeks back, I noted how the Australian wine industry was poised for a rebound in public perception due in part to two things happening in concert – public backlash to Yellow Tail wine, what I call the, “Derision Decision,” and an unspoken coalition of influencers recognizing Australia’s artisanal wine production – the antithesis of Yellow Tail. I cited recent sympathetic mentions from Jay McInerney in the Wall Street Journal and Dan Berger, wine writing’s current patriarch, as proof points.
You can add to the list of sympathetic mentions about artisanal Australia with recent mentions from Jancis Robinson and James Suckling.
Don’t sleep on Australia. It’s making a comeback slowly, but surely in public perception.
Tim Mondavi and Wine Spectator
Thomas Matthews, the Executive Editor for Wine Spectator magazine (WS), has commented on my site a few times. Each of these instances has been to protect or project Wine Spectator around its editorial goals.
Good on Thomas for not being afraid to get in the ring. Certainly, WS takes its fair share of shots from the wine chatterati, mostly with grace and aplomb.
Lest I cast myself as anything but objective, I should note that James Laube’s article on Tim Mondavi and Continuum in the current issue of WS (November 15th issue) is everything right about what mainstream wine media can offer wine consumers that online wine writing (mostly) doesn’t –long-form, depth, first-person access and an effort that takes weeks and not hours.
Laube’s piece is excellent - well-written and balanced; acknowledgement thereof is in order.
Besides the Wine
Jordan winery has two wines – a Cabernet and Chardonnay, but they really have a triumvirate in terms of things to buy. Jordan focuses on food and wine as being partners at the table and, to that end, any purchase from Jordan should also include their olive oil. Wow!
The Jordan olive oil makes Trader Joe’s EVOO seem like Two Buck Chuck, comparatively speaking. A little whole wheat Barilla pasta, some homemade pesto using the Jordan olive oil and some artisan bread in five minutes a day and you’re assuredly living the good life. The rub is I wouldn’t pour the round Jordan Chard with the pesto, probably a Sauvignon Blanc, but don’t let that dissuade you from picking up their olive oil – it’s good stuff.
Source: http://goodgrape.com/index.php/site/field_notes_from_a_wine_life_power_structure_edition/
The Steve Jobs Of Wine: Winemaker Paul Hobbs originally appeared on Winecast. Licensed under Creative Commons.
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Source: http://thegrapesaroundtexas.com/2013/06/23/brennan-vineyards-2012-chardonnay-texas/
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What a wonderful experience to witness this annual tradition at two Napa Valley wineries this last Friday, August 30th. The blessing of the grapes is a tradition at both Grgich Hills (37th year) and at Robert Mondavi (48th year). Father Gordon Kalil from St. Helena?s Catholic Church gave the blessing at both ceremonies. We had [...]
The post Grgich Hills and Robert Mondavi 2013 Blessing of the Grapes appeared first on Napa Valley Wine Blog.
Source: http://www.winecountrygetaways.com/napablog/grgich-hills-and-robert-mondavi/
Odds and ends from a life lived through the prism of the wine glass…
The Wine Spectator Affect
When I received my November 15th issue of Wine Spectator on October 11th, featuring a cover shot of Tim Mondavi and an feature article on him and his estate winery Continuum, I captured some online research reference points so I could have a baseline to measure the effect that a flattering Wine Spectator cover story might have on a winery in the digital age.
Using Wine-Searcher, CellarTracker and Google Keywords search data to track various data points, the results, while not directly linked to conclusions, do indicate a small bump in interest as a result of the cover piece.
For example, Wine-Searcher data indicates that the average bottle price, an indicator of supply and demand, rose $2 month over month, from $149 a bottle to $151 a bottle.
In addition, the Wine-Searcher search rank (always a month behind) indicates that Continuum was the 1360th most popular search in September. By Friday, November 11th the Continuum search rank had increased to 471st for the month of October. (See the top 100 searches for October here).
Likewise, interest at CellarTracker increased, as well. The number of bottles in inventory from October 11th to November 11th increased by 177 bottles, likely no small coincidence.
Finally, Google searches increased fivefold from an average of 210 monthly searches to approximately 1000 monthly searches.
What does this all mean? Good question. The truth is, a Wine Spectator cover appears to have moved the needle a bit, and while the easy route is to take a righteous Eeyore approach to mainstream media and its blunted impact in the Aughts, as contrasted to what a Spectator cover feature or glowing words from Parker meant just a decade ago, I believe a more tangible takeaway is to realize that these sorts of cover stories don’t happen in a vacuum and that Wine Spectator cover and feature was likely a result of weeks, months or even years’ worth of effort from a PR professional.
In an attention-deficit, social media-impacted, offline/online hybrid world of information consumption with mobile and tablets proliferating, in order to break through to (and ultimately assist) the consumer, the value of the PR professional, an oft neglected part of the marketing hierarchy, in reaching out and facilitating the telling of a winery’s story seems to be more important than ever.
It’s not about press releases, it’s about people supporting and telling the winery story, repeatedly, as a professional function – that leads to media notice, and that leads to 14 cases of wine being sold and inventoried at CellarTracker in a 30-day period of time. It’s perhaps obvious, but not adhered to.
Wine Labels
To me, a wine bottle is a blank canvas that can either inspire in its creativity or repel in its insipidness. While I have a reasonably conservative approach to the kinds of wine I want to drink relative to technological intervention, I am unabashedly progressive when it comes to the kind of wine labels that appeal to me. In support of my interest with wine packaging, I keep an eye on The Dieline wine blog to see what’s happening in wine label design (another example from The Coolist here) and I also pay attention to the burgeoning field of wine label design contests.
What say you about progressive labels? Like ‘em? Loathe them? I placed a poll to the right.
Below is a slide show of winners from the recent International Wine Label Design competition.
Reconciling the Contradiction
I will lobby the nominating committee of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences on behalf of anybody who can help me understand how it is that in the span of a week I can see multiple research reports (here and here) on a revived sense of fiscal austerity by consumers yet other reports (here and here) indicate that wine above $20 is the fastest growing segment this year.
These two clearly don’t jive with each other, yet I’m witless to understand why wine is “trading up.” Help!
Source: http://goodgrape.com/index.php/site/field_notes_from_a_wine_life_cover_story_edition/
WINE KILLS. This is what a wine trade group in France foresees on wine labels. Did you miss which country this is? FRANCE. You know, the country that might as well be the first child of Bacchus, a land that’s been growing vines since the Gauls were in charge, where kids in black and white […]
The post France: wine trade says “non” to possible measures appeared first on Dr Vino's wine blog.
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The Perils of Posting On April Fools’ Day originally appeared on Winecast. Licensed under Creative Commons.
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Source: http://www.beyondnapavalley.com/blog/the-top-10-wines-of-2010/
Source: http://thegrapesaroundtexas.com/2013/05/29/pontotoctexas-the-next-texas-wine-destination/
Pieropan: A Small, Family Producer in Italy?s Soave Region was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.
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Champagne Sparkling White Wine Rose Alex. Vall. Vyds Andrew Murray
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Source: http://www.beyondnapavalley.com/blog/lets-get-fizzacle/
Coravin, a new wine preservation system, has garnered a lot of praise since its soft launch in June with the latest big piece coming from Eric Asimov in the NYT. The device uses a syringe to pierce the cork, withdraw wine, and replace the liquid with argon gas. Argon, for those who haven’t been keeping […]
The post Coravin: what is it good for? appeared first on Dr Vino's wine blog.
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Phelps Pastiche Ritchie Creek Rochioli Rosenblum St. Clement
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Barolo: One of the Great Red Wines of the World was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.
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Pinot Blanc Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot Pinot Noir Syrah or Shiraz
Source: http://thegrapesaroundtexas.com/2013/04/06/texas-dry-riesling-lost-oak-2011/
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| A Tweet on a bottle of wine. Don't think I've seen that before! |
-buy Bodegas Borsao 2010s and 2011s-all from Campo de Borja-all under $10,which is F*@$%^@ unreal for such quality-red,white, and rose #wineI seem to recall Parker doing a special feature on the wines from importer Jorge Ordonez's portfolio last year. Much of what we hear about Robert Parker these days involves tumultuous times at The Wine Advocate so I hardly recall the last time I bought a wine based on one of his recommendations.
? Robert M Parker, Jr (@RobertMParkerJr) August 26, 2012
-it's from Master Sommelier Alpana Singh (@alpanasingh on Twitter):If you like California Cabernet Sauvignon, try Spanish wines. In Spain, they use American oak barrels. You get a lot of fruit, coconut, and dill. If I have someone ask me at the restaurant for a good Cabernet for around seventy dollars, with our mark-up, we can't do it. However, I can certainly offer them something similar in flavor and texture from Spain.
“For me, as my cellar can attest to, there is no more consistently delicious and over-performing wine in Beaujolais” originally appeared on Winecast. Licensed under Creative Commons.
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| View from Bodegas El Nido in Jumilla |
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| Bodegas Rosario vineyards in Bullas |
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| Bodegas Barahonda in Yecla |
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WellesleyWinePress/~3/HUp9BXHR-Bc/so-how-was-spain.html
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Whitehall Lane Chardonnay Sauvignon Blanc Riesling Chenin Blanc
Source: http://thegrapesaroundtexas.com/2013/05/12/inaugural-lost-pines-wine-fest-2013-bastrop-texas/
Pinot Blanc Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot Pinot Noir Syrah or Shiraz
Source: http://www.wine4freaks.com/46/canonica-a-cerreto-sandiavolo-2004/
Source: http://www.wine4freaks.com/36/2007-st-emilion-grand-cru-classe/
White Wine Champagne Sparkling White Wine Rose Alex. Vall. Vyds
In the increasingly close quarters of our global village, Europe is responsible for bringing at least three different substantive and prodigious professional wine journals to market over the last several years. Each is written by a ‘Who’s Who’ of wine experts. Meanwhile, stateside, the U.S. has experienced an explosion of pithiness with amateur wine writers writing online.
This juxtaposition becomes relevant after reading a recent post titled, “Are wine blogs going tabloid” by professional wine critic and writer Steve Heimoff. In his brief post, with a decidedly American point of view, Heimoff summarizes his thoughts with the rhetorical query, “Why do certain bloggers revert to sensationalist stories that don’t, in the long run, matter?”
Good question. The easy conclusion suggests that controversy and hyperbolically bombastic articles lead to attention and traffic.
Certainly, two recent books that I’ve been reading bear out this discouraging notion: Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage and Celebrity, Inc.
Both books cover similar ground in examining how brands can subvert the 24-hour news cycle for business benefit and how the 24-hour news cycle has been subverted by celebrities using easy technology while leading our news culture into tabloidesque territory.
When considered with Heimoff’s point, it is an easy deduction to suggest that 1 + 1 does in fact equal 2 – the sensational does sell and, by proxy, online amateur wine writers are a reflection of our larger media culture.
However, in suggesting this, there is at least one bigger contextual point being missed as well as a caveat. First, it’s an exclusive view that doesn’t take in the totality of the global wine media village and second, while sensationalism may sell, the lascivious isn’t always what’s shared.
No, it seems our schadenfreude and more primal instincts are kept private, while our shock and awe comes to the fore, at least according to one study.
The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania recently examined the most emailed articles on the New York Times web site in March of this year (link initiates a PDF download), looking for the triggers for what causes somebody to share an article, what makes one thing more viral than another?
Their conclusion? Positive content is more viral than negative content, but both, in general, are driven by “activation” – the notion that high arousal (emotive pleasure or outrage) drives shareable content. According to the research abstract:
Content that evokes either positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions characterized by activation (i.e. high arousal) is more viral. Content that evokes deactivating emotion (sadness) is less viral. These results hold (dominance) for how surprising, interesting, or practically useful content is, as well as external drivers of attention.
This brings us back to my earlier mention regarding the European wine journals that have come to market in recent years. Simply, they’re an antidote to the U.S. proclivity for the vapid.
The World of Fine Wine, the family of Fine Wine magazines based in Helsinki and Tong based in Belgium all represent an Old World counterpoint to what can be deemed as the extemporaneous and superfluous coming from the New World.
As Tong publisher Filip Verheyden notes in the Tong manifesto (link initiates a PDF download) :
We live in times of “instant” gratification. If we want to talk to someone, we pick up our mobile phone wherever we happen to be. If we want to know something, we click an internet button. We’re going at 200 km per hour.
What we seem to forget in this race against time is the trustworthiness of this quickly-acquired knowledge, and that is something we have to find out for ourselves. But who takes the time to do it?
…The articles that appear in Tong demand the reader’s attention. You can’t read them fast and put them away; you have to take the time to understand. I’d say it takes an evening to read and think about each article. These are not issues to put in the recycling bin. Even after five years or more, each will continue to convey the essence of its theme…
The World of Fine Wine and Fine Wine magazine are both similarly endowed with length and verve.
My takeaway based on the Wharton research and the stunning dichotomy between what we’re seeing in the U.S. vs. European wine content is two-fold:
1) The sometimes sensational aspect of online wine writers, especially domestically, should heed the research and focus their pot-stirring ways on matters that provoke an emotional response from readers, ideally with a positive consequence – like HR 1161 for example instead of tired, lame attempted zingers aimed at Robert Parker.
2) In addition to a legacy sensibility about the nature and style of wine, the Old World is also drawing a culturally defining line in the sand in how they view and report on wine – it’s with substance, permanence and integrity.
The conclusion is anything but. However, as the world becomes a smaller place and the U.S. and our wine media becomes a part of the world chorus, losing lead vocal, I would hate for our place in the gallery to be rendered completely voiceless based on a lack of substance which is the seeming trajectory that we’re on.
It’s just a thought…
If you’re interested in seeing an example of Tong’s long-form think pieces, you can see examples here, here and here.
Source: http://goodgrape.com/index.php/site/old_world_vs._new_world_in_more_ways_than_just_the_wine/
The 2014 ZAP Saturday event will have a new look and feel this coming January. The location will be new and the format will be entirely revamped for the 22nd year of this annual Saturday gathering of Zinfandel oenophiles. What has been the ?Zinfandel Grand Tasting? will now be known as ?Tasting Tracks.? I spoke [...]
The post ZAP Festival 2014 Changes Course appeared first on Napa Valley Wine Blog.
Source: http://www.winecountrygetaways.com/napablog/zap-festival-2014-changes-course/
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Source: http://www.wine4freaks.com/36/2007-st-emilion-grand-cru-classe/
Source: http://familylovewine.wordpress.com/2010/08/13/thank-you-from-the-bottom-of-my-heart/
What Makes A Wine “Authentic”? originally appeared on Winecast. Licensed under Creative Commons.
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