July 9 2007
In the midst of all of this talk about wine ratings and review methodologies, I think it’s useful to re-visit and remember how simple wine is to make.
This helps keep me grounded, for sure.
I don’t think people try to be a wine elitist, but the knowledge to be proficient in the language of wine is forbidding enough that sometimes I think enthusiasts lose sight of the forest, for the trees—like the bad organic chemistry professor unable to communicate at a level that a wide-eyed student can understand.
I was reading one of my wife’s magazines, an arty D.I.Y. magazine called “Craft” and there’s an interesting article written by a bicyclist/adventurer, Alastair Bland, who spent seven weeks (and 2000 miles) bicycling throughout Greece.
Faced with a light load, and plentiful fruit stands in the summer of ’06, he did what any lover of vinous things would do, he made wine.
His seven steps to making fruit wine should be a moment of clarity for anybody (me included) who seeks to elevate wine to a throne of worship.
I’ve paraphrased and excerpted the article to just the net-net (the article, in the current issue, volume 3, isn’t online yet).
Step 1: Pick a half-gallon of berries (mulberries, blackberries, et al)
Step 2: Juice the berries using a clean sock to separate the juice from the pulp
Step 3: Move juice to a screw top container; like a Nalgene bottle for example, leaving room for fermentation
Step 4: Add yeast, specially bred wine yeasts work, as does bread yeast from a countryside baker
Step 5: Ferment, allowing for 7-10 days; at day 4 or 5 it will be spritzy, but drinkable; wait for the full fermentation to complete
Step 6: Decant from sediment; using clean sock if handy; pour back into a clean vessel
Step 7: Drink! Mulberry wine is a rustic, punchy, big-boned beverage, dominated by yeast aromas and lingering traces of berry. There is little tannic quality, making it surprisingly smooth. The alcohol runs at 8% by volume. Don’t expect a first-rate drink—this is travel wine. Enjoy it in the afternoon, but remember that it’s always 5 p.m. somewhere, and in Europe it doesn’t really matter anyway.
For other fun related crafting projects (for those crafty and/or their husband or wife) check out the Craft site—including the project to make stamps out of discarded corks.
I now stand fully re-calibrated on wine and ready to go back to normal programming, but I wonder if Russ from California Wine Hikes has this as a part of his program?
digg this | toast this! | add to del.icio.us | add to newsvine | add to furl | add to reddit
Posted in, Free Run: Field Notes From a Wine Life. Permalink | Comments (0) | Print | Email This
July 6 2007
Or, the headline could read, “Screwcaps gain mass acceptance,” according to a proprietary Good Grape online poll. Though, it could’ve been, “1 in 5 polled are Concerned about Franken-Wine.” Or, if I wanted to be sensational, “Wine Industry poll indicates a lack of concern for labor issues.” It depends on how you look at it.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, “there are lies, damned lies and polls.” In utterly unscientific fashion, the poll on the front page of this site ran for enough time to gather 25 responses. It’s still relevant, however, based as much for what it says as what it doesn’t say.
The question was: What is the Most Important Issue Facing the Wine Industry?
The results are as follows, based on a closed response format:
Closures – 0%
Manipulation – 20%
TCA/Cork Taint – 8%
Labor Issues – 8%
Terroir – 4%
Wine Shipping – 56%
Other – 4%
The results are not at all surprising, if anything, online wine bloggers and those that read blogs are in tune with small brands of wine and on the cutting edge of having wine shipped to their door—so the wine shipping and wine manipulation responses, as the greatest percentage of respondent answers are to be expected. And, as a matter of collateral poll pick-up, a respondent having no concern about closures is expected because most wines sold online, by price point, from smaller wineries are probably finished with cork. Or, at least that’s my best guess.
But, what is surprising to me is that labor issues didn’t register a higher response rate or that “terroir,” or, more specifically, a wine continuing to cultivate a sense of place wasn’t more important, particularly for a very savvy and enthusiast-oriented online audience.
Check out the new poll. Please feel free to vote.
digg this | toast this! | add to del.icio.us | add to newsvine | add to furl | add to reddit
Posted in, Wine: A Business Doing Pleasure. Permalink | Comments (2) | Print | Email This
July 4 2007
Since we’ve been talking about medals, wine ratings and such, I think it’s time to re-visit Justwinepoints.com
Back in March, when the wine blogosphere was doing a post-mortem (Good Grape included) on the train wreck that was WineX magazine, Tom at Fermentations did something of a redemptive post on WineX founder Darryl Robert’s penultimate act, Justwinepoints.com.
I’ve come to trust Tom’s opinion and leadership, so I mentally backed off my own vituperative response … and I subscribed to their weekly newsletter.
While re-visiting the Tom’s original post (found here) and then reading through the comments in which co-founder Jenna Corwin claims their dead serious intentions and not the satirical nature that Tom suggests (perhaps in good p.r. spokesperson mode he’s attuned to always looking for the silver lining), I decided it’s time re-review this thing.
As a quick refresher, Justwinepoints.com’s position to market is eyebrow raising, to say the least. As excerpted from their home page:
You never settle for less, and you’d prefer never to drink another wine that has scored less than 90 points. But who has time to filter through hundreds of pages of excess “information” during their ultra-busy day to try to find the right wine? justwinepoints to the rescue!
justwinepoints represents 20 years of research into why and how wine aficionados purchase wine. After examining and categorizing our data, we believe our easy-to-use, risk-free system presents wine reviews exactly the way you – the wine savvy consumer – want them: by the numbers, and numbers only.
So use justwinepoints to find the highest-rated wine without any distractions. Use our convenient, quick-access system to cut through the clutter of magazines and newsletters that spew descriptors as if someone might actually use them. Use justwinepoints to find that near-perfect wine before someone else does… or your lifestyle may be compromised by drinking sub-90s wines.
Um, okay. Pull this leg and it plays jingle bells. Except, unfortunately, just as Tom thought this was satire, I, too, want to think this is some sort of farce, but it’s not. They play it true which is cause for my blood pressure to rise to a near boil.
A friend tipped me off with a forwarded email from Sam’s Wines and Spirits that Justwinepoints.com is, obviously, reviewing wines for Sam’s, evidenced by the 95 point rating they gave to a Zinfandel, the 2004 Sobon Estates “Rocky Top” Zinfandel, more on this in a second.
As I was reviewing some files from last year, I noticed an advertorial that I had clipped, coincidentally, from Saveur magazine that talked about Sam’s and wine sales online. The brief article says, in part:
“Selling via email is great,” says Chris Durbin, head wine sales specialist for e-commerce sales. “We have the ability to send information immediately to a customer base of more than 33,000 people. We can sell 100 to 150 cases of a wine in a matter of hours.”
Durbin loves the email “perfect storm” of “a good price, a review over 90 points, and a wine that people are looking for.”
Understanding this context, quotes from last year, before Justwinepoints.com came on the scene, becomes important when you consider the email offer for the Sobon Estates that I received in the Sam’s email forwarded from a friend—which, typifies, to me, what seems to be a MANUFACTURED “perfect storm” so eloquently described by Mr. Durbin:
Durbin intros his passion for all things Tennessee football and goes on to say, “… being a sucker for all things Big Orange, when I first saw the Sobon Estates “Rocky Top Vineyard” Zinfandel, I knew that would be bringing a bottle home with me. Just because of the name. I am sure I did not need another excuse to bellow “Rocky Top” loudly and tunelessly, but I could not pass it up. I had no idea about the wine inside the bottle, nor did I even really care for Zinfandel, as I had never tried a good one. This one, however, did not disappoint.”
The email goes on to give a tasting note for the Sobon Estate and this parting word,
To top off all of that, Justwinepoints.com just awarded this beautiful bottle a staggering 95 point rating.
So, let me get this straight, we have a guy emailing a Zinfandel wine offering that admits that he loves a “perfect storm” of “a good price, a review over 90 points” in addition to noting, “nor did I even really care for Zinfandel, as I had never tried a good one …” and we have an online service dedicated to providing scores for a vacuous audience in order to, “use justwinepoints to find that near-perfect wine before someone else does… or your lifestyle may be compromised by drinking sub-90s wines” and we’re supposed to believe and buy this wine, however good, based on this garbage charade?
Maybe I’m starting to get old and steeped in minding the boundaries between right and wrong, but this just smacks me as wrong--manipulative, disrespectful of wine consumers and a complete error in judgment. Is it too strong of a statement to say that somebody in this equation is morally bankrupt?
Maybe it’s me that’s wrong and manipulative—maybe I’ve done a pastiche of quotes that isn’t representative of the situation, but somehow I doubt it.
I defy Justwinepoints.com to say that they proactively rate wines that ARE NOT sent to them. And, I defy Justwinepoints.com to say that they aren’t getting paid to rate wine for Sam’s, specifically. Should I find out that I’m wrong, I will gleefully fall on my sword, but I worry that I won’t have to.
So, my overall point is, just as we’re wondering whether fair competition medals are meritorious and the finer points of a wine rating system to use in the blogosphere, know and understand that people are absolutely snowing consumers with a tap-dance of bullshit that, ultimately, will paint a lot of people, perhaps you and I, with a broad brush of bad behavior—when these things blow up they don’t cut surgically, they cut gaping wounds and it will make our review of medals and talk of rating systems seem like girl scouts selling cookies compared to an ethical blowout of the entire 100 pt. system and its interpretations.
digg this | toast this! | add to del.icio.us | add to newsvine | add to furl | add to reddit
Posted in, Around the Wine Blogosphere. Permalink | Comments (10) | Print | Email This
July 4 2007
It’s interesting to me, very interesting, that two of the biggest conversations in the wine blogosphere over the last two to three weeks have been about a unified wine ratings system for wine bloggers AND multiple posts and comments about the alleged canard that is wine competitions.
Seemingly conflicting points of view, these are. On the one hand we’re saying let’s bring some legitimacy to wine blogger reviews by using a system that brings a semblance of professional orientation. On the other hand, some are saying that already established and legitimate vehicles for rating wines (like medal competitions) are not suitable qualifiers for a wines quality.
“Houston, we have a problem.”
Something is very out of whack here. It’s like the boozy pretzel logic argument you used to get into in college, whilst playing a drinking game. How can we at once deride the establishment, but make an organizational call to order in our own house, without somebody calling this into question. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, “subjectivity is as subjectivity does.”
While I’m never shy on opinions, I usually tend to err on the side of progress under the veil of “live and let live.” In that vein of benevolence, I think wine competitions are legitimate forms of wine review AND I think that the time is right for a wine blogging wine review system.
The wine reviewing system, if a unified format can be agreed upon, represents the opportunity for significant progress. Mind you, I very rarely do reviews, but I haven’t ruled it out in the future, so while really don’t have a dog in this fight, I do feel some small sense of stewardship to be a voice that promotes progress in the wine blogosphere. And, really, what I’d like to make sure we promote is progress for the entire wine blogosphere. With vision and influence, can you imagine something occurring like Lenn’s Wine Blogging Wednesday, whereby there is a “Wine Review Thursday?” What if, every other Thursday, the wine blogosphere came together to taste the same three wines, provide reviews and tasting notes and then the organizer sent the aggregated end result to media outlets in a quasi-syndicated column.
That would be the wisdom of crowds come to life.
Tim from Winecast, along with Lenn from Lenndevours, have done a nice job of galvanizing support for a 5 star system, of which I have no dissenting voice. My only point is I would like to see widespread usage of the same organizational nomenclature, standards, descriptors, etc—creating something of a house-style review, even amongst differing palates. In my opinion, the more quantitative or measurable this review style can be, then it will be all the better for creating legitimacy.
While recently scouring my hard drive for something else, I ran across a paper that I received from George Vierra from Napa Valley College. He was featured in this Wine Business Monthly article in ’05 and I sent him a note for the full text of his research summary on building a better Wine Scorecard. The following excerpt acts as a summary:
During the spring of 2005 at Napa Valley College, students enrolled in “Sensory Evaluation of Wine” took on the task of answering these questions. The class contacted several university enology departments, wine merchants and experts and evaluated the methods of many reviewers for periodicals, newsletters and online services. As a final project, the class developed an improved scorecard, the Napa Valley College Wine Scorecard.
The Napa Valley scorecard, to me, seems interesting because it takes the best of the legacy (UC Davis 20 pt. scale) and improves it with more comprehensive sensory evaluation options. This comprehensive approach would also serve as a studied approach and buffer from less diligent reviewers willy-nilly passing out 5 stars to wines of dubious character. The point is they’d have to work out doing a review and as in most instances in life effort separates the wheat from the chaff.
If you’re interested in receiving your own copy of this excellent overview on wine rating systems email George Vierra at: gjvnapa@inreach.com For some additional, excellent background on the origins of ratings systems, and the breadth of available options, check out the following link from Delong wine:
In the meantime, I’ll keep an eye on this movement and hopefully Tim, Lenn and others can come to some sort of consensus this summer.
digg this | toast this! | add to del.icio.us | add to newsvine | add to furl | add to reddit
Posted in, Around the Wine Blogosphere. Permalink | Comments (0) | Print | Email This
July 2 2007
I did a post late last week for the Inertia Beverage Group blog that got caught in the middle of three or four other worthwhile posts. At the same time, I read the San Francisco Chronicle article online in which Chef Mario Batali rebukes irresponsible bloggers. The Yelp.com post I did for my employ and the nature of blogging and online conversations, vis a vis the Batali rant, kind of go hand in hand, so I’m doing pretty much a full cross-post here of my post from last week. I’ve annotated and edited the entry that was previously meant for wineries, for relevance here.
There are some intractable truths in life:
1) Mario Batali is the only Food Network chef with still intact day-to-day in the restaurant cooking chops
2) Word of mouth marketing can drive business (or a restaurant)
3) If an article is published in USA Today, you can be certain that the topic of the article has reached a critical mass
So it was a couple of weeks ago when I read an article in the June 13th issue of the USA Today that highlighted the online user review site Yelp.com. Last week, I read this tasty nugget from a blog post Chef Mario Batali wrote on the restaurant blog site Eater. Batali says, in part:
blogs live by different rules. Many of the anonymous authors who vent on blogs rant their snarky vituperatives from behind the smoky curtain of the web. This allows them a peculiar and nasty vocabulary that seems to be taken as truth by virtue of the fact that it has been printed somewhere.
This is germane because of a new user-generated review site called Yelp.com.
Yelp is bringing the Amazon.com concept of user-generated reviews to the local business market. Now, Bob’s Dry Cleaning, Joe’s Auto Repair, a restaurant or a tasting room can be exhorted or skewered for everybody to see in a democratizing populist kind of way.
According to the article, “Yelpers” as the users are known, have written more than 1 million reviews since the site launched in 2004. And, more importantly, 500,000 reviews have been written in the past four months—indicating critical mass.
In addition, according to the article, the Yelp’s audience has grown 124% from May to May, according to Nielsen/NetRatings and monthly visitors have increased to over 1M
I did a quick search on the traffic rankings at http://www.alexa.com and Yelp is the 1,777 highest-trafficked web site on the web. This is encroaching elite site status.
Not sure what to expect, I went to Yelp.com to do a search on “wine” for Napa, Healdsburg, and Paso Robles, CA.
You better believe that people are talking about restaurants and winery tasting rooms, their visit and their experience at Yelp.com—many, many people are doing so.
Just as most if not all of the readers of this blog who have purchased a book from Amazon.com have been dissuaded from purchasing a book that got a lousy consumer review, so too are people reading Yelp before they plan their dining excursions or their tasting trip to Napa Valley, Sonoma or the Central Coast.
I won’t name names, but your own search will yield some of the same reviews that I saw regarding winery tasting rooms. Just for reference I checked New York, NY and Batali’s lead restaurant, Babbo, where the restaurant received 4.5 out of 5 stars in aggregate.
Overall, I think Batali might be over-reacting. Online word of mouth is the same as regular word of mouth, except you can now be privy to it--kind of the way Simon Cowell gives the medicine straight, with no chaser on American Idol. Most everybody has a tender sensibility in some form.
For a completely different take on Batali trying to cut-out an online disintermediation play, read this current Business 2.0 article.
What do you think about user-generated reviews? Do they influence your decision-making? Would they stop you going from a winery tasting room, a restaurant?
digg this | toast this! | add to del.icio.us | add to newsvine | add to furl | add to reddit
Posted in, Free Run: Field Notes From a Wine Life. Permalink | Comments (1) | Print | Email This
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!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Design by The Blog Studio
 of 04 A Rafanelli Cab_thumb.JPG "A Rafanelli Cab")
