May 21 2007
On the same day that a girlfriend of my wife serendipitously sent and lent her a copy of Julie & Julia, one of the first books borne out of a blog, I received my copy of Chocolate & Zucchini from Amazon.com—a narrative-style cookbook from Clotilde Dusoulier, authoress of the excellent blog Chocolate & Zucchini and one of the few blog writers who has crossed-over to a publishing deal.
Living in Montmartre, just to the north of Paris, France, Clotilde’s stock in trade is charming wit and verve in presenting French and French-inspired dishes. If you’re a foodie, her blog should be in your feed reader—her food photographs alone will make any lover of food porn blush. And, Chocolate & Zuccini the book is gorgeous, as well. Full four color on heavy stock and thoughtfully layed out, I highly recommend it for armchair reading.
Aside from supporting a blog author, the other reason I picked it up was to check out Lenn from Lenndevours.com and his wine pairings, included with almost every recipe. Most recipes are beautifully matched with a wine that has wider availability—wider availability may mean the New York or California market, though, because I know 3/4th of the wines aren’t available in the wine backwater that is Indiana--no fault of Lenn’s, certainly.
Generally speaking, though, I was pleasantly surprised and impressed overall with Lenn’s work. Not bad for a software marketer. When I read Lenn’s blog post many months back revealing this project, I figured the wine pairings would be of the supermarket variety i.e. Blackstone Merlot with the steak frites—you know, wines you can find in Indiana. But, such is not the case. Not only are the wines very thoughtfully calculated, but his tasting notes reveal a careful consideration to carefully match flavor components.
Kudos to Lenn, for what was surely a huge project evidenced just by browsing the book. Clotilde was a bit scant in her praise of Lenn, in my estimation, as well, simply based on my judgment in reading the forward to the book. So, some ‘atta boys’ from the wine blogosphere is surely merited.
On one delicious recipe for Strawberry Avocado Ceviche, Lenn pairs the dish with Bouvet Brut Rośe with tasting notes that say:
“The Crispness of this sparkler matches the acidity of the fish and cuts through the richness of the avocado, while the berry flavors respond to the strawberry component. It has a clean finish and a light-to-medium body, ideal to open a meal.
In yet another dish, Lenn pairs a Chestnut and Mushroom Soup with a New Zealand Pinot—the Brancott Vineyards 2004 Pinot Noir. The tasting notes say:
The typical Pinot Noir flavors of black fruit are joined by a light earthiness that complements the mushrooms, while the dusty cocoa and toasty-spicy oak notes respond to the chestnuts. It is fruity and light, with a gentle acidity and low tannins.
Whatever Lenn was paid he definitely earned every cent and then some (and let’s be frank, writing books for 97% of the population DOES NOT keep the lights on, so it’s likely he was vastly underpaid).
Kudos and compliments to our wine blogging brother for very meritorious work!
And, be sure to pick up the book and support a blogging author, Clotilde, as well. Checking it out from the library, while fiscally responsible, doesn’t do anything to help sales and ensure that more bloggers cross-over. Though, it may help you buy more wine for one of Lenn’s pairings.
Hmm … okay, now that I think about it, buy the book used on Amazon and use the savings to buy some wine for the wine pairing and the dish that you’ll prepare from the recipes.
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May 19 2007
The news of the week in the online wine world has to be the Winelibrary acquisition/partnership with Cork’d, a wine tasting note site launched last year. It might be an acquisition. It might be a partnership. Who knows? What is known is that Gary Vaynerchuk from Winelibrary isn’t afraid to take a risk.
Fact is he could continue to sell in a Wine 1.0 manner while letting his star burnish an image from a marketing perspective in the Wine 2.0 world. So, it takes a lot balls to try and marry the two in a manner that hasn’t been done. Lost in the noise of the ongoing evolution in the Wine 2.0 world is the fact that “free” isn’t a business model, so, perhaps, taking the community aspect of a tasting note site and merging it with buying opportunities via a large online retail wine presence is a way to leapfrog the old guard (Wine.com) and the new guard sites (appellationamerica.com) into truly a next generation site that provides value.
Interesting to me that a wine direct marketer like Geerling & Wade hasn’t tapped into the online community to a greater degree in order to mobilize a community of online wine drinkers into customers--they ship to all 50 states and could have been doing something like this and operating on the cutting edge for months, if not for well over a year.
For now, perhaps it takes a young visionary guy like Gary from Winelibrary to see opportunities, and more likely, to see risk as the cost of doing business and but a small factor in building success.
For a round-up on the blog posts I’m aware of discussing the acquisition, see the below links:
Hivelogic/Cork’d Co-Founder Dan Benjamin
Simplebits.com/Cork’d Co-Founder Dan Cederholm
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May 18 2007
The other day I wrote a post about the opportunity I took last week to check out Crushpad wine in San Francisco.
The next night, I met up with filmmaker Bret Lyman a.k.a. B. Napa to have a glass of wine and talk shop—his filmmaking and my blogging.
I last talked with B. Napa on the cusp of the screening of his film at the Sonoma Film Festival in April. Then, as now, Bret strikes me as the kind of guy that combines a subdued charisma with heartfelt passion and a desire to put a stamp on the world, albeit through his own filter, the lense of a filmmaker’s camera.
If you haven’t checked out the short film yet, you should.
Thankfully, B. Napa has bigger plans for a larger scale documentary, many details still being fleshed out, and the obtuse answer to a specific query deflects his plans not yet ready to be revealed.
Quotes about wine being a social lubricant are numerous and apt. People that have problems drinking usually drink to forget, but wine lovers usually drink to feel, as a part of social intercourse. Bret, unwittingly, or perhaps very knowingly, captures the essence of “feeling” in his work; there is an undercurrent of humanity to all of his stuff that marks him as a talent to watch. When you watch the short film, clocking in at a brisk 13 minutes, you’ll see an eye for detail rarely seen on a broad level, in any subject area. B. Napa has a lyrical eye for detail and a sense for music that matches mood that elevates his work to a level worthy of a bigger stage.
An appropriate quote from Bret’s narration at the beginning of the short, “Crush” sets the stage:
In reference to Don & Son’s winemaker Richard Bruno:
“He and I, we’re not so different.
As a filmmaker I harvest images; clusters of time measured in seconds, minutes. Together they tell a story, become a film.
As a winemaker, Richard harvests the landscape where time is measured in years, each one a vintage, the resulting wine a documentary of taste.”
Check out the films and leave a comment. I personally think that a film that cuts to the human element of the wine industry is ready for a national audience, a sort of Wine Film 2.0 evolution to the macro niche-interest of Mondovino and the black comedy of Sideways. Just as the Oscar winning documentary “Hoop Dreams” told a bigger story then two kids in inner-city Chicago trying to make it in basketball, so too is there a bigger tableau to explore in wine. What do you think?
“Crush” Short Film (Links to Don & Sons site with great video clarity)
http://www.brightcove.com/title.jsp?title=770018169
“Topaz” Short Film
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May 17 2007
On a plane ride back from the West Coast this past week I read an article in the New Yorker that piqued my interest.
There was an article on a shadowy graffiti artist who goes by the nom de plume of “Banksy” who is making waves internationally with his brand of street art that combines a touch of whimsy, subversive delivery in medium and a heaping pour of social commentary—like calling out the elephant in the room. In fact, through his art, he does call out the elephant in the room quite literally as the below picture indicates.
You can see other examples of his art (my titles, not the artists) at the below links
Does the wine blogosphere have a “Banksy” in its midst—somebody that can cut sharply and incisively, while remaining refreshingly detached from the broad evisceration that causes conversation?
Perhaps, so.
Remember when you were a kid and you would come bounding home, skipping steps in a single leap, bolting through the backdoor excited and exclaiming to your mother with the bold innocence that only a 12 year can muster, ‘We had so much fun. We were at the pool and we had a diving contest …”
And, then, like a record scratching, your Mom stops you in mid-sentence and says, “Were you at the Simpson’s pool? You can’t dive there that’s only 6 feet deep. You could have broken your neck …”
Damn.
Maybe she’s right.
It was still fun.
And, so it is with the anonymous and deadly deadpan social wine ironist in our midst … St. Vini from The Zinquisition, one of the very first wine blogs I started reading and something of an inspiration, as well.
By way of background, his anonymous blog comes from an insider—probably somewhere in Napa or Sonoma--that is very in tune with the issues of the day in the wine industry. You can tell by his writing that he is in a position of authority, based on his authority of opinion. My personal guess is that he is probably somewhere between 44-48 years old, has 20 years in the industry and while not completely cynical, Vini is world-weary enough to cut to the chase, quickly.
And cut to the chase he does, as I went on, and on, and on about Crushpad wine in a recent post. St. Vini cuts me down to size with a simple, subversive posted comment.
The comment goes:
“Today’s Tom Sawyer,
He gets high on you,
And the space he invades
He gets by on you....”
You put up the cash, make the decisions, do some of the work, and still pay $32 per bottle. Genius!
V
Damn, if he’s not right. My first thought was, “How nice, he’s quoting Steve Miller Band.” No Midwestern kid since the late 80’s has gone through high school without having a Steve Miller phase. Then, I quickly re-oriented, thought for a second and sloughed off the actual reference to the song “Tom Sawyer” by Rush.
Getty Lee’s voice is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me, even if the reference is apt.
For my age bracket, Dave Matthews is a little more my speed, something like:
I cant believe that we would lie in graves
Wondering if we had spent our living days well
I cant believe that we would lie in graves
Wondering what we might of been
I cant believe that we would lie in graves
Wondering if we had spent our living days well
Wine blogging needs more St. Vini’s—people that call a spade a spade and cut through the morass of romance that frequently invades the wine industry; people that call out the elephant in the room, Banksy style.
Me, personally? Perhaps I’ll get that world-weariness in twenty years, but for now I’ll keep eyes wide open and still marvel at Crushpad Wine and the absolute ingenuity in getting people to be a part of the nuts and bolts of winemaking for, yes, $32 a bottle.
Damn.
Maybe he’s right.
It was still fun.
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May 15 2007
I’m reminded that the reality TV show Survivor has the tagline of “Outwit, Outlast, Outplay” it kind of typifies the state of the regulated wine industry today.
Tom from Fermentation has a post on his site today citing the two year anniversary of the Granholm vs. Heald decision and based on current state of affairs some outlasting is probably in the offing, for both sides.
Two years ago, on May 16th, when Granholm came down, I remember where I was, as if it was Princess Diana, or the Space Shuttle crash, or, well, the day Jerry Garcia died.
Then, I had no idea I would be here a mere two years later as that was pre-blog, pre-wine industry days. At that point, I was t-minus 32 days to my wedding date and I was fighting with the caterer because they gave me a crap selection of wine and they wanted to charge me 2.5X mark-up plus what equated to a corkage fee for selecting the wine. For the record, I whittled ‘em down on price, but the Beverage Manager at the catering facility was, shall we say, a remnant of another time, similar to the antiquated laws we’re discussing. He probably had adult kids when Kennedy was assassinated, but I digress.
That May day, I was in the cafeteria at my previous employer making my way to the line to order some lunch and I stopped off, serendipitously, to read the headlines in the newspaper. I had been following the proceedings from a distance and I was relieved that the Supreme Court ruled for consumers. I even dashed off a note to a small, local distributor who was procuring one of the wines for my wedding to see if he had any thoughts.
Flash forward two years later and I would argue that while the laws have changed, they really haven’t changed enough, and a lot of the law changes are what I politely call, “plant hiding.” That is, they change a couple of things, but at the end of the day you still have a crack in the wall and the proverbial plant there to cover up the crack in corner.
Case in point: I talked with a high-ranking person in the Alcohol Tobacco Commission in the Indiana government today! Today! My question was centered on the micro-wholesale permit capability that was enacted in mid-2006 as an accommodation to Granholm that allows an Indiana winery to self-distribute up to 12,000 gallons (5000 cases) annually. After three weeks of trying to pin this person down about the ability for an out-of-state winery to use this same permit because under Granholm you can’t discriminate against out-of-state wineries privileges that are afforded in-state wineries, I get my answer. Suffice to say it’s not what I was hoping for, but I got the “Well, the laws are changing all the time, who knows what will happen in the future.” In the future, I ask? What about the present? I thought the law was changed to be in compliance with Granholm?
Pregnant pause …
Um, yeah. Not really. Indiana, despite changing the laws in the wake of Granholm isn’t Granholm-compliant. An out-of-state winery in order to get the micro-wholesale permit must have a physical premise in the state of Indiana. That is hardly a balancing of the playing field and is about as asinine as the fact that if an Indiana consumer wants wine shipped directly to them they have to fill out a state-administered form in person in the tasting room for subsequent shipment.
We have a long way to go. And, unfortunately, I fear it’s not going to get any easier. To wit, the following quote from Craig Wolf, President and CEO of the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers Association in response to the Supreme Court refusing to review a Virginia case limiting out-of-state wine sales (and taking a swipe at at the Specialty Retail Wine Retailers Association --Executive Director Tom Wark--) in the process—the SWRA is engaged in battling retail wine shipping laws in many states, including the ones Wolf cites.
Wolf says (quoted from Wine & Spirits Daily):
“This should send a powerful message to those seeking to dismantle smart state-based alcohol regulations-states retain virtually complete control over how to structure their alcohol sales and distribution systems, which are based largely on the wholesaler-centric model.”
“Today’s Supreme Court action ends years of litigation in Virginia, but it is perhaps even more relevant to regulators facing retail direct litigation in Texas, Michigan, New York- and potentially Illinois. The Supreme Court’s decision reaffirms the 4th Circuit’s ruling that nothing in Granholm supports the notion that states have an obligation under the Constitution to ensure that out-of-state retailers, no matter how geographically distant, have equal access to in-state retail markets.”
I’m not an apologist for either side, but any rational human being should see the facts that are clear—if you want to buy wine from a winery, at the least, you should be able to and have it shipped to your door. The three-tier system, while valuable as a means of providing logistics support for large wine companies, is an industry woefully under-skilled to serve the entire wine industry effectively. All of this is colliding—two years ago and today, like bumper cars at the Carnival.
What will happen in the future? Who knows, but I do know it’ll come down to who can “Outwit, Outlast, Outplay.”
For additional reading, see Tom’s original post, Wine & Spirits Daily and an article on Granholm at Appellation America.
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