Good Grape: A Wine Blog Manifesto

Browse by Tag

champagne discount generic+trademarks napa propaganda tasting tour wine wine+blog

December 12 2006

Your Bargain, My Value, His Dud

Gremlins was a movie from my youth—a flick circa 1984 where Gizmo, a cute little furry creature of unknown origin, spawned evil offspring that multiplied exponentially when the furry guy was exposed to water.

That’s kind of how I see top 100 lists … they multiply exponentially when exposed to the opportunity for ink and paper. Virtually every wine magazine has a list of their wines of the year and most upper-tier retailers do as well.

These lists almost inevitably include “value” wines. It might be the most overused word in the wine lexicon.

Value, to me, is a somewhat nebulous concept.

Scoring a beautiful bottle of wine for $50 when only 150 cases are produced is a value to me. Scarcity drives price and Indiana isn’t first on the list for wineries to secure distribution. Value is also finding a $12 bottle of wine that drinks beautifully, but is priced for everyday folks that notice when the electric bill payment leaves their checking account.

Though, there is seems to be a dichotomy when calling something a value.

I think, as I allude to above, that a value is wine that drinks at least twice its price (as in our $12 bottle example) and a wine so good that it’s a must buy at the price it’s offered for sale.

I’m curious what others think, though. Please let me know how you define value.

This value thing came to mind this past weekend as I pulled the cork on two “values.” These wines are held up as bargains and models for bang for the buck by popular critics.

The 2005 Pillar Box Cabernet /Shiraz/Merlot priced at $10 bucks with a Parker score of 91 points and described by Mr. Parker as, “an unbelievable value” and “one of the great wine bargains of the world.”

In the words of my local wine guy:

This inky dark, ultra-dense fruit bomb has a spicy dark fruit nose and a super-ripe, full-bodied palate of rich, jammy, blackberry and ripe plum fruit that finish long and smooth with only the subtlest tannins in evidence.

Somewhere between the lines of my local wine guys’ description is the unsaid statement that goes something like, “This is a Tuesday wine if you like fruit and alcohol.” I, personally, didn’t care for this wine. It is one dimensional and not at all interesting.

What I didn’t mention in my reference to the two criteria for value is it doesn’t count if you think the wine sucks, period.

The other alleged “value” wine is also an Australian offering—the 2004 Woop Woop Shiraz—an 89 point rating from Parker.

This wine, on the other hand, is a superb value in my estimation and drinks exceptionally well for the price—many spots on the Internet sell it for $7.99--this is a bottle that compares favorably to $25 dollar bottles that I’ve had. It opens up nicely with a nice bouquet, is dense and layered and has bright fruit. I like it.

Overall, my lesson here is to take the Top 100 wine lists and the value wines for what they are—exponentially proliferating pieces of ink on paper and use them as a guideline for wines that might be interesting to try. But, in general, I don’t think I’ll be following too many more “value” recommendations anytime soon. It might be more fruitful to continue down the path of education regarding producers, reputation and style.

Posted in, Free Run: Field Notes From a Wine Life. Permalink | Comments (0) | Print | Email This

December 11 2006

Menu for Hope III

Led by the venerable Alder Yarrow at Vinography.com, I am participating in an online-based charity event for Menu of Hope III.
The excellent food blog Chez Pim is the catalyst for the event and 2006 marks the third year for leading a global charitable engagement—last year raised well over $17,000 for UNICEF.

This year’s recipient is the UN World Food Programme, which provides hunger relief for needy people worldwide.

November and December mark the annual high point for awareness for those that may be less fortunate. I encourage all Good Grape readers to support and engage in philanthropic activity in your local community as well as our global community.

And, please give if for no other reason than the fact that pride is a powerful motivator. Alder has thrown down the gauntlet—he believes this years event will earn double last years total to make a donation totaling almost $35K dollars.

How to Bid and Wine … er … Win
The campaign is a raffle for prizes. Browse the prizes, determine which one(s) you would like to try to win, and then you buy “virtual raffle tickets”—one for each $10 of donation you make to the cause on the special web site set up for that purpose.

When you make your donation, you simply specify the prize number(s) (each prize should have one) and the “number of tickets” your donation is buying. Donate thirty dollars and you will receive three tickets; use them for one prize, or for three. Please specify the prizes you are interested in winning.

I will blog on this at least weekly to encourage traffic to the site for bidding, please help do your part not only for my prize offering, but those of my fellow wine bloggers and Chez Pim’s organization around foodie sites. To see the entire line-up of great wine-related offerings, point your browser to Vinography.com and this link.

My offering for the Menu for Hope is a fabulous Cabernet gift pack: (photo found here)

Please reference prize offering WB13 when buying your raffle tickets.

You’ve heard of Cal-Ital’s? This is a “Cal-Mid” wine gift pack. Mid as in Midwest. This fantastic offering includes one bottle of the ‘99 Heitz Cellars Cabernet, Martha’s Vineyard designate. Scoring a 92 by Wine Spectator, this legendary California Cabernet can be found on various sites on the Internet for $130 + dollars a bottle. From WS: Spicy mint and bay leaf aromas mingle with ripe currant and black cherry fruit, turning smooth and elegant on the palate while displaying richness, depth and concentration; finishes with a full chorus of ripe fruit flavors and firm yet supple tannins. Drink now through 2012.

Complement your Napa Cab experience with a bottle of the 2004 Cabernet from Oliver Winery in Bloomington, IN. The winery crown jewel of the Midwest, Oliver creates compelling value-based wines using estate grown fruit and grapes from long-time contracts in California. Priced at $22 a bottle, you’ll get a wine that tastes like a $50 bottle priced for the Midwest market. Previous vintages have been medal winners at the Indy International Wine Competition, the 2nd largest wine competition in the country. Enjoy this brooding wine with moderate tannins and dark fruits after decanting for 1/2 hr. or use it as a conversation piece--a superb wine from the home of basketball that is barely in distribution.

While you’re pouring yourself a glass, turn the pages on Cabernet by Charles O’Rear. A beautiful coffee-table style book with color-drenched photo’s of the vine, the grape, and the people that make the wine this book will find a welcome spot in your home for you and guests to browse through for a 15 minute vacation. A $30 value.

All the Best,

Jeff Lefevere

Posted in, Around the Wine Blogosphere. Permalink | Comments (0) | Print | Email This

December 8 2006

Filter My Wine with Stones, Baby!

Thank Goodness. For a second, I thought someone was telling me that Santa Clause didn’t exist.

There’s a recent article in Wines & Vines magazine that asserted that minerality in wine is a myth—as least a myth in terms of being a characteristic that comes from a vineyard.

I read this and was kind of dumbfounded—the feeling you get when the kid you knew from high school ends up being an axe murderer. Everything I thought I knew to be true, um, might not be true.

Maybe I’m being dramatic. But, if I had to pick a favorite style of wine it would be, hands down without a shadow of a doubt, an Old Vine Zinfandel with a backbone of minerality. If it’s medium-to-full bodied Zin that tastes like it was filtered through wet stones I’m a happy guy. Rombauer makes a Zin like this and it’s one of my favorite bottles. And, the other thing is I’m still waiting for that moment when friends, dinner and a bottle of Burgundy that tastes of fruit, pencil shavings and river rock collide in a cosmic moment of time and circumstance. The wine might not be as good in my mind’s eye if I didn’t fancy it coming from an idyllic chateau with a rough hewn vineyard topography and rocky soil.

I assume that wine that has an undercurrent of flinty goodness comes from vines that are in a rocky, terroir-oriented vineyard and perhaps I do so incorrectly.

So this Wines & Vines article comes out and says that, well the article doesn’t say much, but it does cite Jaime Goode, who maintains his own excellent wine blog. And, it does have an open-ended walk off line to the article:

Without an agreed-upon standard, theories about where minerality comes from are bound to remain speculative. But the possibility that minerality stems not from the fixed characteristics of the vineyard but from compounds that can be controlled in the cellar should be cause for optimism. If emanations of slate can only be derived from slate soils, most of the winegrowing world is out of luck. But if this desirable property is due to the level of acidity or the presence of one or another sulfur compound that can be encouraged or discouraged, so much the better.

Thankfully, as the debate goes on, Grapecrafter comes to the rescue to make sure that the land doesn’t get short shrift in the debate. And, he comes tantalizingly close to invoking BioD, but doesn’t. He says:

Here’s what I’m pretty sure of. There is a characteristic minerally finish to wines which is strongly associated with living soil practices (earthworms, cover crops, abandoning pesticides or herbicides). It has been described as mineral energy, mineral electricity (as it resembles electric current in the throat), and also the flavor one has in the back of the throat after eating half shell oysters or when driving home from the beach. It’s similar to saltiness, but more complex and persistent. We don’t see this characteristic in wines from grapes grown using the methods of petroleum agriculture – bare soil, pesticide use, no earthworms present in the soil. These wines end in the mid-palate, and have a short, blank finish. They also don’t age well.

St. Vini has been following this for a while with excellent posts (and comments) here and here and Josh at Pinot Blogger has a post from a week or so, as well.

If you haven’t been following this online thread, I encourage you to do so, it’s a technical conversation that is accessible and makes for very interesting food for thought.

As for me, I choose to believe that Santa Clause exists and that minerality comes from the soil. I might be wrong, but I feel a little bit safer in my naiveté.

Posted in, Good Grape Daily: Pomace & Lees. Permalink | Comments (0) | Print | Email This

December 7 2006

The Emperor’s New Clothes

I’m incredulous. Seriously, I don’t even know what to say. I wrote a post in March—a scathing post—about a fawning portrait of Olive Garden and their wine program in the March issue of Wine Business Magazine.

I didn’t have a problem with the story being about Olive Garden selling wine in a wine business magazine. My problem was what I believe to be a somewhat disingenuous public relations and the fact that most of the wine that Olive Garden sells is mass market with a capital M.

There is a lot of profit in wine and I think that Olive Garden pushes, no, pimps their cheap wine for the sake of profit. These are grounded, but baseless allegations on my part, and certainly I’m as capitalistic as the next American, but what really galls me is the public relations to make it seem like they are doing some good for America by popularizing wine.

Well, sign up the Olive Garden p.r. person up for an annual bonus because Business Week magazine snuck into the pages of my Wine Enthusiast magazine. Unbelievably, the Olive Garden management team is the winner of the Wine Enthusiast “Person(s) of the Year” award.

Thankfully this is a blog, because verbally I’m speechless.

Let me repeat it. Wine Enthusiast magazine, a magazine for consumers, features the management team of Olive Garden restaurant, a large chain, as their Person(s) of the Year.

It defies any type of rationale and why the hell is it in my Wine Enthusiast magazine? I don’t drink mass market supermarket wine, I don’t eat at Olive Garden and I have to believe that the vast majority of Wine Enthusiast readers don’t either.

Wine Enthusiast says:

“(Olive Garden) … have long been the leaders in bring wine culture to the masses.”

Culture? To the masses? Isn’t that an oxymoron of the first order. Seriously, did this award come with a Wine Enthusiast sales guy attached and an Olive Garden ad contract for ’07? Disgustingly, these is a page out of a 300 level public relations text book—take a weakness and turn it into a strength.

I checked the Olive Garden wine list to make sure I wasn’t somehow missing something. Nope. White Zinfandel, Riunite Lambrusco, Cavit, Turning Leaf, Clos Dubois … all of it can be found at your supermarket.

Methinks that subscription notice to Wine Enthusiast magazine sitting on the office desk is going to go unfilled with a check. I have a big tolerance for sales and marketing shtick, hell I’m in sales and marketing myself, but I refuse to be sucked in by a magazine pushing a fast food restaurant on me pimping mass market wines under the guise that it might appeal to me as a wine lover.

Am I off base here?

Posted in, Wine: A Business Doing Pleasure. Permalink | Comments (3) | Print | Email This

December 6 2006

I Propose Mandatory Wine Consumption

I’m a day late, but yesterday was the anniversary of the repeal of prohibition. December 5, 1933 is a day that every wine lover should celebrate.

I’m going to start celebrating it as my own little ode to the vine, saving me from a life of drinking pirated communion wine, certainly. Ironically enough, I didn’t drink any wine yesterday—blame it on airports, I suppose.

I was in New York City yesterday, which is always enjoyable. A day trip with airport connections isn’t always conducive to a glass of wine, but the city is always enjoyable.

I love the energy of the city—the simmering vitality that pulses from the sidewalks no matter the season. Humanity streams hither and yonder in every direction.

The news yesterday in the city was the announcement of a new ordinance that goes into effect July 1, 2007 that bans trans fats in the city—frying oil will be first and than all foods with trans fats will be banned on July 1, 2008.

The jist with trans fats are that they contribute to the bad cholesterol which can contribute to heart disease

The other re-occurring story seems to be that wine, red wine in particular, is selling like crazy—attributable to the recently reported health benefits from resveratrol, a compound found in the skin of grapes.

This article in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat indicates that AC Nielsen data shows that red wine sales are up 8.3% year over year.

Shoppers bought 4.2 million cases of red wine during the four-week period ending Nov. 18, an 8.3 percent increase over the same period in 2005, according to ACNielsen, which tracks wine sales at grocery stores, drugstores and liquor markets.

The surge followed a flurry of stories in major U.S. newspapers Nov. 2 about a new study on resveratrol, a natural substance in red wine. The study, which was also widely covered on TV, found that resveratrol extended the lives of fat mice.

Ironically enough, I had my lunch on the run at a NYC McDonald’s yesterday—a Big Mac with fries. I was able to make it into Crush Wine & Spirits immediately afterwards in order to buy a couple of bottles to have shipped back to Indianapolis.

My own little LDL bad cholesterol lunch with a red wine chaser.

Call me crazy, but if trans fats are frequently full of bad fats and high calories and they are going to be banned shouldn’t New York also put in place a mandate for people to take Resveratrol to counteract any of the negative effects from an ongoing bad and high calorie diet?

I can see it now, instead of celebrating the repeal of prohibition, we can celebrate fast food by quaffing a lot of wine. Mission accomplished either way, really.

Posted in, Good Grape Daily: Pomace & Lees. Permalink | Comments (0) | Print | Email This

Page 3 of 4 pages « First < 1 2 3 4 >

Enter your email address for a monthly summary of posts, additional news and information available only to email subscribers. Your email is never rented, nor sold to anybody else!