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January 4 2007

Our Wine Neighbors, The Jetson’s!

I’m moderately technologically adept—and I think most people, certainly those that manage and read blogs are as well.

While I’m nowhere near the Jetsons in terms of technological savvy or acumen, I embrace my inner geek and roll with it—this despite some of my Luddite friends—some wine drinkers and many who are not. I know a person that doesn’t have a computer at home and, gasp, another person that doesn’t have a personal email. My father who is young enough to be with “it,” whatever “it” may constitute looks at a computer the same way he looked at a microwave 25 years ago—with awe and wonder. And, he still doesn’t use either one.

So, I’m firmly in tune with both worlds—the technologically advanced and the “kicking and screaming” camp.

That said, I read some technology predictions for the next 25 years that scared the hell out of me.

If these predictions are correct, whatever technological progress we’ve made in the last 25 years will be eclipsed by a factor of 5x in the next 25 years and it could have some radical implications on the world of wine.

Ray Kurzweil, a noted futurist with a track record of accurate predictions, released his sixth book in the fall of 2005 called, The Singularity is Near.

His book is predicated on a theory he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns. This theory is an evolutionary system that says that order increases over time. The “singularity” referenced in the title is described as a transforming event on the future horizon in which computers will exceed and then blow far beyond the capacity for human intelligence.

Kurzweil is quoted in an airline magazine called Hemispheres as saying,

“We can use these technology forecasts based on regions of the brain that have already been simulated to come up with pretty good estimates of the amount of hardware and computational capacity required to simulate the entire human brain. In my book, I analyze that and come out with about (10 to the power of 16) calculations per second. We’ll have that amount of computation for about $1000 by 2020.”

He continues to break down his theory into laymen terms by saying simply,

“By conservative estimates by the late 2020’s, we’ll have detailed models and simulations of all the several hundred regions of the human brain, and we will then understand its principles of operation. This nonbiological machine intelligence will ultimately be more powerful than biological intelligence because it will combine the power of human intelligence, which is primarily pattern recognition, with the typical strength of computers.

The question was then posed about an uprising of computers that perhaps create havoc like some science fictions movies or space age cartoons.

Kurzweil’s answer was,

“First, we’re going to merge with the technology. When you get to 2035, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a human who doesn’t have a substantial nonbiological thinking process inside his body. These people will be hybrids. It’s not like you’re going to walk into a room and say, ‘OK, all the machines over on the right and humans on the left.’ It’s going to be all mixed up”

What does this have to do with wine?

One of the stories got strong play 2006 was the concept of the “Robo-Sommelier.” Numerous articles were written and the blogosphere was atwitter at the prospect that a robot, er, wine-bot, could taste and identify types of wines and would have the ability to become personalized to recommend wines that suit an owners palate.

In a BBC article that I read, a Dan Coward from Bibendum Wine Limited, gave his best Thomas J. Watson impersonation when he said,

“I love new ideas in wine, but this one seems like technology for the sake of it.”

Thomas J. Watson, a leader for decades at IBM is famously recalled for his utterance,

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Coward continues,

“The human taster will always have the upper hand in terms of flavour, smell and texture, and can make qualitative judgments based on the combination of these factors.”

Not so fast.

If Kurzweil is correct, the computational ability to mimic and exceed human sensory capacity—a function of the brain-- will be eclipsed by 2020—a mere 13 years from now.

What scares the heck out of me are signs now that point to continued hegemony based on this technological assumption.

The battle for terroir and appellation specificity might become not a battle to be fought, but a quaint notion leftover from a bygone era.

Numerous folks are already globally sourcing fruit putting out a bottle that speaks to flavor profile and not of “place.” If technology advances as it has been suggested then consumers would presumably have their palate typed to a specific wine that was made exactly to their specifications, regardless of where the fruit came from. Instead of bemoaning Yellowtail, we would be bemoaning, perhaps, 95% of the industry?

And, perhaps most sinister, what if Parker, in a nod to Ted Williams who wanted to preserve his DNA and his body via cryogenics for future possible use, used the available computational modeling to mimic his palate in order to have a robot chemically taste wine in perpetuity, long after he has passed, to keep the Wine Advocate going and his acolytes legion long into the future thus furthering his influence into the next several decades without silly things like a succession plan.

Crazy? Sure it’s crazy, and so was the idea of this thing called the Internet being omnipresent in our lives just a mere 20 years ago.

I’m not sure if George Jetson drank wine, but many of us will swill it down, if only to cope with the changes that are likely coming to our passionate place in this world.

Posted in, Wine: A Business Doing Pleasure. Permalink | Comments (6) | Print | Email This

January 2 2007

Prepping for the Year in Wine, 2007!

A post-holiday hangover? Nah. But, January is here. 2 ½ looooong months til spring. And, for now, It’s time to slough off the palate from a season of conviviality and good fortune and get ready for the everyday drinkers i.e. back to the budget wines.

Alas, I wish every bottle I drunk was a winner. Unfortunately, for me and most of the free world, you get the occasional clunker. Sometimes a wine is just not worth a darn, or, through no fault of no one, our palates will turn parts finicky and mercurial.

But, the holidays offer up the equivalent of baseball spring training for wine lovers—hope springs eternal. Choices are more carefully cultivated and the corks pulled have a higher propensity of excellence—if only because our spending creeps up a bit.

I drank numerous clear winners over the holidays. And, the good news is, and good news, increasingly for ’07 and beyond, is the fact that I can buy these wines online—instead of the restaurant with mark-up or the tasting room, as I did with the two wines mentioned below.

My wife and I enjoyed an excellent dinner at our favoriate local restaurant, Oakley’s Bistro, on New Year’s Eve. I wished there was a formal wine pairing, but the small wine list, carefully chosen, had the Babcock Pinot Noir—a relative restaurant bargain with a 1x mark-up on its retail price of around $18 a bottle. With my wife eating beef while I enjoyed pork tenderloin, the Pinot seemed like a happy go-between.

The ’05 Babcock Pinot Noir Tri-Counties Cuvée, in its fifth vintage, is so called because it’s a blend of Santa Barbara County Pinot from the Babcock vineyards, fruit from Monterey County and some fruit from Rabbit Ridge in San Luis Obispo.

Typical of Central Coast Pinot’s this ’05 is rich, silky and sumptuous. Fruit forward with strawberries, blueberries and blackberries, a touch of spice and very moderate tannins, this wine, at retail, would be a superb Pinot bargain.

The winemaker, Bryan Babcock, said this of the exteme value, “The wine is awesome, and as you taste it you will be wondering, ‘How can Babcock afford to put this stuff into the Tri-Counties Cuvée?’ Well, all I can say is that when you have a really good Bi-counties Cuvée put together and you need some juice from another county to make the name work, you what you gotta do.”

Indeed. He did the right thing, though. The wine is sold out on his web site, but still available in the channel. Pick some up if you can find it.

Later on New Year’s Eve, it was a perfect opportunity to pop the cork on the L. Mawby Consort Sparkling wine. I picked up the Consort back in October on a wine tasting trip in the Leelanau Peninsula in Michigan.

L Mawby is, perhaps, Michigan’s most celebrated winery at a time when Michigan wine is beginning its ascent to national respectability. I was kicking myself, though; I should have bought the L Mawby Talismon. The Talismon is L Mawby’s flagship sparkler and the wine that has built their reputation—it’s made in the methode champenoise style, which is both time consuming and expensive (Read more here). Sometimes my inherent cheapness forces me to miss out on things. I bought the Consort for $18 instead of the Talismon for $27. I rationalized that $9 bucks is $9 bucks, especially when I don’t drink sparkling wine that often. I wish I had the Talismon to try, especially since I’ve seen it on one or two year end Top 100 lists.

L Mawby and its namesake, Larry Mawby is also featured in the recent book, The Great Wines of America (The Top 40 Vintners, Vineyards and Vintages) by Paul Lukacs.

According to the book, Mawby made his first sparkling wines in 1984, had a breakthrough in quality in 1990 and has made nothing else but sparkling wine since 2000. And, while his second label includes fruit from elsewhere, his flagship L Mawby wines are crafted exclusively from grapes grown on the Leelanau Peninsula in Michigan.

The Consort is a nice sparkling wine; it’s extremely lively and fresh, and would easily be discernible head-to-head from a deadening inexpensive mass market competitor. Bottle # 37 out of 348 was mixed with a dash of liqueur and made for a nice digestif before giving way as a celebratory quaff later on that night.

In the aforementioned book, Larry Mawby is quoted as saying, “Passion even more than money is what we need here. Those of us who started in Michigan thirty years ago were nuts, but we had passion. We need more of that now.”

Cheers to Larry Mawby and his passion. He makes some tasty sparkling wine and I’m always a supporter of people that wear their emotion on their sleeve and follow their hearts. My resolution for ’07 is to drink more passionate peoples’ wines, less of the clunkers and to support the small winery that sells online. If the hours leading up to and occurring shortly after midnight on January 1, 2007 are any indication, I’m off to a good start.

Keywords: L Mawby Sparkling Wine, Babcock Pinot Noir, Michigan Wine, Central Coast Pinot Noir

Posted in, Tasting Safari: Wines You Can Buy Online. Permalink | Comments (0) | Print | Email This

January 1 2007

Happy New Year!

In honor of the new year, a time for resolutions and increased self-reliance, a poem celebrating wine from my favorite poet/philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Bacchus

BRING me wine, but wine which never grew
In the belly of the grape,
Or grew on vine whose tap-roots, reaching through
Under the Andes to the Cape,
Suffer’d no savour of the earth to ‘scape.

Let its grapes the morn salute
From a nocturnal root,
Which feels the acrid juice
Of Styx and Erebus;
And turns the woe of Night,
By its own craft, to a more rich delight.

We buy ashes for bread;
We buy diluted wine;
Give me of the true,
Whose ample leaves and tendrils curl’d
Among the silver hills of heaven
Draw everlasting dew;
Wine of wine,
Blood of the world,
Form of forms, and mould of statures,
That I intoxicated,
And by the draught assimilated,
May float at pleasure through all natures;
The bird-language rightly spell,
And that which roses say so well:

Wine that is shed
Like the torrents of the sun
Up the horizon walls,
Or like the Atlantic streams, which run
When the South Sea calls.

Water and bread,
Food which needs no transmuting,
Rainbow-flowering, wisdom-fruiting,
Wine which is already man,
Food which teach and reason can.

Wine which Music is,—
Music and wine are one,—
That I, drinking this,
Shall hear far Chaos talk with me;
Kings unborn shall walk with me;
And the poor grass shall plot and plan
What it will do when it is man.
Quicken’d so, will I unlock
Every crypt of every rock.

I thank the joyful juice
For all I know;
Winds of remembering
Of the ancient being blow,
And seeming-solid walls of use
Open and flow.

Pour, Bacchus! the remembering wine;
Retrieve the loss of me and mine!
Vine for vine be antidote,
And the grape requite the lote!
Haste to cure the old despair;
Reason in Nature’s lotus drench’d—
The memory of ages quench’d—
Give them again to shine;
Let wine repair what this undid;
And where the infection slid,
A dazzling memory revive;
Refresh the faded tints,
Recut the agèd prints,
And write my old adventures with the pen
Which on the first day drew,
Upon the tablets blue,
The dancing Pleiads and eternal men.

Posted in, Influences. Permalink | Comments (0) | Print | Email This

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