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July 10 2006
My weekly post at the Wine Sediments portion of the Well Fed Network can be found here.
In this week’s post, I do a round-up of four online cellar management web sites—logabottle, winelog.net, corkd.com and cellartracker.com
This isn’t a comprehensive list, as others surely exist, but a site of this nature is at the center of the future community aspect of wine and tasting notes online.
Cellartracker is the oldest and most mature, but Cork’d is an up and comer with a younger sensibility.
I suspect, though, for most people, these inventory sites aren’t critical—given that 98% of wine is drunk young, within a year or two of its release.
So, the real value is in the tasting notes and peer recommendations ala reviews like Amazon.com.
Read the post and comment on whether you think these sites hold value for management or cellar organization—or, if folks just like to get validation on their own palate.
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July 9 2006
Inspired by this MSNBC article.
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July 8 2006
If Randall Graham, noted iconoclast, had a favored son in the wine world it might be Paul Grieco from Hearth Restaurant in New York City.
Wine Enthusiast had a blurb on him in the July issue that sprung notable observations like:
You have to love a guy that is passionate and true to his convictions. I think he’s right on the notion that people pick wine based on the equivalent of an additional meal, I had never really thought about it, but that’s probably pretty accurate for me.
His wine list can be found here and is very, very interesting in its diversity bordering on esotericism.
I recommend downloading it and giving it a review. of course, he has the quirky insider wine du jour—Gruner Veltliner, but he also goes to some length to write compelling copy in the wine list that acts as a narrative to the wine ... with the art of storytelling around wineries getting some attention, this is interesting. Lenn from Lenndevours should be pleased to know that Grieco favors Long Island wines as well.
Since I am a Notre Dame football fan, I’ll end with an excerpt from his list that references the Four Horseman. Most people equate this to the reference in the bible of a coming apocalypse. Not me, though.
The 3 Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Big French Oak, Huge Alcohol, and Over-Extracted Fruit) rode into town. By the Way, the 4th Horseman (Complete Lack of Balance) was off drinking beer due to palate fatigue and could not make the trip.
At the gates of the town, they were met by the warrior winemaker, Ted Lemon. The battle was grapey, the tannins were tough and the outcome was not always fined and filtered. But thankfully, the struggle did end. With very little provenance and an inability to last longer than a few sips, the Horsemen had to retreat back to their well-fortified, well-marketed fortress and plan for another day. Finesse and Elegance and Balance had won the day. As least for today. Those horseman are tricky and will always find a way back to our table.
Good stuff—I might have to ask Dr. Vino in NYC for a first person report.
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July 7 2006
We’veall been there—we roll up to the nice restaurant for valet parking and nudgethe old Honda into position to hand the keys over to the young guy tending tothe vehicles as we longingly glance over and admire the Mercedes, Range Rover,BMW 7 series and the Volvo XC90 adjacent to the restaurant. Meanwhile, our car gets moved around thecorner next to the kitchen entrance.
Thecurrent disintermediation of the wine supply chain with the relaxation of wineshipping laws is creating a new breed of intermediation by online companies.
Thecurrent vogue in the online wine business is kind of like the valet.
Overthe course of the last couple of weeks, I’ve been turned on to at least six newwine related companies in various stages of coming online.
And,most of these intermediating companies are engaging in business models wherebythey act as front-ends and pass the sales to the wineries for fulfillment—thetechnological equivalent of the gleaming ‘ol Mercedes in the front, and the "if it ain’t broke don’t fix it" sensibility of the Honda next to the kitchen door model.
Iwon’t re-hash or review these business models until I can materially add towhat I wrote here, but suffice to say that in the wake of wine.com’s continuedfinancial woes, the online wine space is going to be an interesting place forthe foreseeable future.
WhatI will comment on, however, is the notion of a universal wine database—acatalog of all wine produced by all producers to enable the front-endsales—just like media.
Ina recent blog post round-up I mentioned this and noted that similarapplications have been created—notably for music: CD’s and online musicplayers.
MichaelStajer, CEO of WineCommune, noted in a recent blog post that the lack of thistype of
database was, perhaps, a hindrance to other wine companies comingonline—noting the expense of creating such a proprietary application (I’veexcerpt his blog post without changing his overall intent):
Rightnow, there is no available comprehensive database of wine producers, label nameand basic geographic information. You can purchase a subset of the UPC databasethat includes wine, but it is woefully inadequate. The UPC database lacks mosthigh end wines which don’t have a UPC code
There is no way to normalize the datawithout building your own database.
We built our own database from a combination of sources.
Whatshould such a database contain:
Maybe we need a little guy to shake us up - start an online application thataims to build a database and relies on user contributions to build it. Accesswould be dependant on how much you contributed. An accurate, freely available,comprehensive wine name/information database would spawn a new generation ofapplications.
AsI did a little more research into this, I found out that the engine behind themusic CD capability is a company called Gracenote, formerly CDDB which stoodfor CD DB (abbreviation for database). And, ironically enough, the Chairman of the Board, Scott Jones, issomething of a local tech demagogue in my neck of the woods.
Thecommercialization of the CDDB project begat another open source project and thenutshell is, based on this description in Wikipedia, is:
freedb is a database of compactdisc track listings where all the content is under the GNU General Public License. It wasoriginally based on the now-commercial CDDB (compact discdatabase). As of April 24, 2006 the database holds just under 2,000,000 CDs[1].
Hmmm… both CDDB and freedb started out as open source projects …
And,Stajer is right, this sort of db is needed, badly. By anybody’s measurement, nobody really knows how many wineriesthere are producing how much wine. It makesit kind of difficult for anybody to be the Amazon.com of wine when you don’thave an ISBN like you do for books, or a universal UPC.
Thelink that Stajer makes that bears fruit in the CD music analogy is the fact thatcontent was contributed by users. They,however, had the benefit of an easy sharing mechanism for product via thenetwork, a luxury that wine doesn’t share. Therefore, to get a start, the information will have to come fromsomewhere.
But,it would seem getting access to the data is difficult, as well.
But, what about theATF—they seem to have the wine thing regulated pretty tightly, wouldn’t theyactually welcome a third-party investment and creation of a database to aid intheir own regulatory behavior and their COLAOnline server for wine labeling?
And,wouldn’t it be possible to start in a recent vintage year where record-keepingis reasonably stout, say within the last five years, and then build thisdatabase out from there?
And,perhaps the ATF is a good place to start for the content only because I thinkthe business model has to be a for profit venture that is initially a yeoman’seffort by a couple of guys (as Stajer suggests as well) that can then belicensed to other companies for their use enabling many other companies to comeonline to create vehicles for wine sales, and allowing everybody—consumers,businesses and wineries to have their proverbial car parked a little bit closerto the front door.
California,in addition to being known for wine, is also known for technology and theinvestment money therein. Who is going to answer this call? The valley tech space, or the wine industry further north? Or, parts unknown? Until then, the industry as a whole willcontinue down its path of fragmentation and benign insularity.
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July 6 2006
Onthe heels of finishing up the Stormhoek wine tasting, comes an opportunity, ona smaller scale, to review another wine, this time a California chardonnay fromHook & Ladder Winery.
Acouple of interesting things pop up to me: #1) the sampling and to whom they are going #2) ethics in wine tasting
What’sinteresting in the Hook & Ladder sampling opportunity is that the samples,according to the winery pr representative, are going out to wine bloggers in anamount 2 – 1 greater than to traditional wine media. That is an indicator of sphere of influence when, say, 50bloggers might get sampled and only 25 wine writers would get the same.
Thewine blogs Basic Juice, Vinography, Lenndevours and a few others have, for sometime, received the occasional bottle for review, but the dynamic moving fromwine media to wine blogging, in greater numbers, seems to be taking root.
And,actually, I have a friend, who was at the Stormhoek party, that asked me if I could do asimilar wine tasting at a gallery opening. Man, I’d love to, but unfortunately, I don’t anticipate the wine fairydropping off 10 – 12 bottles in the next three weeks ... can somebody help me??
Backto my point, another blog, Winery Web Site Report, reported a couple of weeksago that the winery Mankas Hills was doing a similar exercise, though theywouldn’t send to every state—which is really kind of silly because theconstitution basically upholds a consumer right to information, and in thissituation the wine is the information.
Nonetheless,receiving re-occuring samples invites a situation that I hadn’t previouslyconsidered—ethics.
Ifound a post on the blog site Grape Juice that discussed this very topic latelast month as a re-cap from a threaded conversation that took place early in2005. I won’t re-hash it too much here,but the following link (found here) gives a bit of an overview.
In general, I think part of the charm of a blog is itgives “transparent context” to any given situation and creates anarrative. So, ethically, as I thinkabout Stormhoek and I think about Hook & Ladder, I analyze it as a story—there’sa beginning, there’s a middle, and there’s some sort of closure. This post is the beginning and I’m sure therewill be a couple of other interesting things pop up that will flesh out themiddle and the end related to Hook & Ladder.
So, in that vein, Ihave no problem elaborating that I’m expecting to get this wine. I may or may not like it, but I’ll writeabout it. And, generally speaking, nothinggood can come from trashing something especially when it’s as subjective as wine,so ethically the issue is giving a "full disclosure" story about something that somebody elsefinds interesting—not necessarily feeling obligated to be favorable about something.
This is really the difference between "reporting" and having a "conversation."
And, to that end, I expect the Hook & Ladder to have somethinginteresting to say in the process.
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