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May 15 2006
I found a new functionality for Google that should be of interest to wine fans—go to www.google.com/trends
The functionality lets you take separate word strings and do a search on them in order to review commonality in their search frequency. I did this for red wine/white wine, California wine/french wine and a number of others ... according to the site it can handle up to five search strings together.
From the Google site:
Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google websearches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms youenter relative to the total number of searches done on Google overtime. We then show you a graph with the results—our search-volumegraph.
Be the first on your block with intrinsic knowledge related to the amount of searches completed on Google that combine some wacky combination of words.
Here’s mine for: white wine/lychee/adventure brands
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May 15 2006
I’m back from a long weekend in New York. What a fantastic city. And, really, what a wine city.
Regardless of what neighborhood you were in, there was a wine shop close by.
We went on two food tours one in Greenwich and the other in Chelsea/Meatpacking district. Those were both well worth the money, though our guide on the Greenwich tour was befuddled when I asked her for her favorite wine shop in the neighborhood. Here we were going on and on about all of the unique food businesses in the neighborhood like Murray’s Cheese and she got caught flat on her feet without a wine shop recommendation. Nonetheless, it was an enjoyable time to walk the neighborhood and sample a wide variety of foodstuffs.
I ate at a Mario Batali restaurant on three occasions and had either a wine pairing with dinner or a flight—all of them top notch. A Barbaresco at Esca really stood out to me as a winner. I like Batali because the food in his restaurants is fantastic and, really, an exceptional value. At Esca, my wife and I chose the wine pairing option for our tasting menu (and additional $30 per person) and we each easily were served a bottle of piece broken out as full size pours for 6 courses. Based on the quality of the wine and the pairing expertise, $30 was a pittance.
I also stopped at Astor Wine & Spirits, Vintage New York and Sherry-Lehmann.
One of interesting aspects of wine blogging is receiving press releases from companies. A couple of weeks back I received a release from Astor about a Hugh Johnson book signing and when I received it, I thought to myself that "I’ve never been there, won’t be there and why are they sending this to me?"
Then I remembered that I would be in New York City and maybe I should check it out.
Well, I’ve now been to mecca. Their new store is shiny, gleaming new with a great selection from around the world. It is at once exciting and disheartening when you walk into a store outside of your state and virtually every wine is one you’ve never seen before at home. I picked up a Barbaresco and a Pinot from the A to Z Wineworks in Oregon. My only minor complaint with Astor is that all of the competent help is on the floor and the checkout folks speak English as a second language—creating some difficulty when asking for a wine shipping box. But, this is a must visit place for a huge, carefully selected assortment of wine.
Sherry-Lehmann was much smaller than I anticipated—voted by Zagat’s as the best wine shop in the city in 2006, it was probably 400 sq. feet, but packed with french selections that rarely make their way to my locale. Trophy bottles were abundant. Fortunately for my pocketbook, the wine shipping law changes in my state hadn’t made it back to them because I probably would have bought a ton of wine if I could have had it shipped to me.
Vintage New York was nice as well. I did a $10 five taste assortment from the tasting bar—a concept I love and then picked up a nice Millbrook Pinot Noir for $23, which I saw later at Sherry-Lehmann for $18.99. A couple of the NY wines were not in my favorite tasting profile, but were pleasant enough.
In general, writers live in New York City in order to have "grist for the mill" so to speak, experiences that can help shape a novel with more authenticity. In my case, a little "out of market" tourism has definitely re-charged my wine batteries and provided a lot of "grist" for posts and ideas. I’ll be posting based on some of these experiences in the near future.
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May 10 2006
"I want to wake up in a city that never sleeps," so sayeth the Chairman of the Board, Frank Sinatra.
And, thanks to Tyler at Dr. Vino, probably one of the more popular blogs alongside Vinography, Fermentation and Lenndevours, I’ll be checking in on a good number of wine shops and a couple of personal recommedations this week in New York City.
Tyler has a comprehensive list of New York wine shops on his site with some personal asides. Tyler is responsive on email and was happy to give me a couple of can’t miss recommendations for my visit this week. Thanks to Tyler and if there’s a compelling anecdote, I’ll share that here next week.
On another note, Dr. Vino completed the Wine Century Club, an achievement of having drunk at least 100 different varietals. Congrats to him on this dubious achievement. You can check out the site and the membership information here.
And, speaking of Lenndevours, the nascent guru of New York wine, I’ll also be checking out Vintage New York—a wine shop and tasting bar dedicated to the wines of New York.
I’ll be back posting on Monday, May 15th. Thanks.
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May 9 2006
The wine industry shouldhold onto their collective corks, because they are now effectively gettinglapped by a coffee company from
Say what you will aboutStarbucks—and people do: either you love it, or you see it as another exampleof mega commercialization that is stripping communities everywhere of theirindividual identity.
Though, one thing you can’tsay about Starbucks is that they don’t brand or market themselves well.
Witness the rollout of the“What Makes Coffee Good” campaign with the associated web site at www.whatmakescoffeegood.com
What makes this site such agood marketing example and why should the wine industry take pause to study it?
Starbucks is mainstreamingthe coffee equivalent of terroir AND winemaking.
Why are they doing this?
They are doing it becauseStarbucks needs to wrap a value message around a commodity product. Coffee, razors, toilet paper all have meaningin our lives because of marketing.
And, Starbucks is doing it successfully,I might add.
A two-page spread in theJune issue of Food & Wine magazine introduced the new advertising to me,with loving copy and a headline that says:
Geographyis a Flavor.
This excerpt from an articleon a coffee site very interestingly elaborates on and weaves the story togetheron the “stolen playbook” and interlinked nature of coffee and wine:
Thediscussion in Specialty Coffee has been how to get people to take coffeeseriously… how do we get them to ponder the notion that there is a lot to knowabout this very complex beverage? The answer has been to make coffee the"new wine"; talk about it like wine, write about it like wine, sellit like wine. I guess the argument was convincing; one company started to selltheir roasted and green coffee in clear, corked wine bottles! Another deepfreezes green coffee to save "vintages" as one would cellar
Ina general sense, it is easy to compare coffee to wine. Neither are nutritionalnecessities, but are integral to our food habits. They are both consumed forpleasure. And the aroma and flavors of both have the potential to connect thosewho imbibe with the lives and fates of people throughout the world, to theirculture, their nation, their soil. What we enjoy is a direct result of theircare of the plant, precision in processing, careful transportation andhandling, and diligence in preparation. The more we enjoy single-farm coffeesfrom distinct origins, the stronger and clearer that connection might become.
Whymake standards? Coffee certainly needs standards to enhance the bond betweenthose who love the drink, and all those whose work makes it possible, standardsthat are adaptive and suited to our unique trade. No, you can’t certify a goodcup of coffee since it could be stale, or even worse, French-roasted! And theprocess of instituting a neutral "coffee board," one not related toany trade association or business entity, is a daunting task. But someone hasto guarantee the meaning of first-tier coffees when the market refuses to pay afair price, and corporations are happy to fudge the names of offerings to makethem sound single-origin, or Estate-grown.
But, there’s an importantdistinction here that separates coffee from wine, a point the article latermakes and Starbucks understands as well. Anywhere coffee can grow it should bepretty good.
The concept of terroir, orin their lingo, geography, really doesn’t work that well until you combine itwith that of the process you take with the actual bean.
And, Starbucks makes itstupid simple to get the connection, and the education. And, the web site isnice, professional and clean.
The real question here is whycan’t wineries do this? Now that consumption is rising significantly, why can’tthe Wine Market Council do this bit of marketing—link the concept of thegeography with the value-added process in the winery?
Why can’t a market leadertell a "wine as a product from the land" story, help the consumerunderstand and create a high quality product at the same time?
Why is there always atrade-off between good branding and good wine ala Yellowtail?
If a wine association or alarge winery decides they do want to do it, they can send me a note, becausewhile the www.whatmakescoffeegood.comis interesting, I registered the www.whatmakeswinegood.comsite this morning.
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May 9 2006
A while back I tripped across a web site at www.winelabels.org, it’s a blog in the truest sense of the word, though the technology isn’t a blog service. The owner of the site, Peter F. May, combines some really good, spot-on writing alongside an archive of unusual wine labels—of the Fat Bastard and Cleavage Creek variety.
The site celebrates the weird, odd and esoteric in wine labels.
Peter dives into the occasional double entendre and I was going to reference an article he wrote on the "Gallo Nero" on the Consorzio Vino Chianti Classico wine. But, I decided it was too naughty for me to pull off with grace. In the interest of full disclosure, you now have the context and you can find the article here.
With that in mind, I found a recent article in BusinessWeek that touched on the "Blook" phenomena,
Justabout any blog writer—there are 36 million blogs out there, with 75,000 newonline diaries added daily, according to search engine Technorati—is acandidate. "We believe there’s a market [for book-publishing services] forevery single blogger out there," says Eileen Gittins, CEO of onlinepublisher Blurb.com. "Charles Dickens originally serialized his novels inmagazines. We are seeing much the same thing happening today, with blogs."
Big-name publishers such as Putnam and Little, Brown & Co. have begunreleasing books based on blogs. "I am now more open to blogs than I wouldhave been [before]," says Judy Clain, executive editor at Little, Brown.And a dozen new businesses have sprung up with the intent of helping scribesturn their blogs into books. Blogbasedbooks.com, specializing in blooks, hasset up shop on the Net.
Unheralded in the wine blogging community and, really, saddled with a charmingly ugly site, Mr. May has been rewarded with a book contract and his book "Marilyn Merlot and the Naked Grape" will be off press on June 1. Though, to his distinct credit, May has been maintaining the site since 1998, clearly at least five to six years before most wine bloggers got off the ground.
This is nice to see. Mainstream writers jumping into the wineblogosphere is well documented, but to my knowledge, this is the first"reverse course" book of a freelance writer / wine blogger making thejump mainstream.
Tip of the hat to the new blog (ANOTHER one in Ohio) My Wine Education who tipped me off—she has the book on her Reading List on her navigation—probably based on the fact that they are both in educational technology and technical writing.
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