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September 9 2007
In baseball a triple-threat is a player that can run, field and hit. In the world of dating a triple-threat is a girl (or a guy) that is attractive, smart AND has something on the ball related to a career. In wine, my view of a triple-threat is a wine that is delicious, a value AND has some sort of message or cause related to it that I can rally behind.
A triple-threat in spades, let me introduce you to the ’04 Fairvalley Pinotage.
Still something of a mystery in the U.S., Pinotage, South Africa’s signature grape, is a viticultural cross between Pinot Noir and Cinsault and, according to the web site winepros.com, can be made in several different styles: young, light, and fruity, like Beaujolais, deep and rich like a Cotes du Rhone or Zinfandel, or elegant and restrained like Bordeaux.
The Fairvalley is definitely more in line with a Cotes du Rhone, with an immediate richness that may actually have you thinking Central Coast Pinot and not imported Pinotage.
Adjoining Fairview Estates in South Africa run by Charles Back, vintner of Goats Do Roam, a tongue-in-check South African play on Cotes du Rhone, is Fairvalley, a post-Apartheid winemaking community of 60 + black families dedicated to crafting high-quality, reasonably priced wines.
The Fairvalley Workers Association was set-up in 1997 with a government grant and land donated by Back in order to create a profit entity that would support the families of the Association members and create a profit stream to create housing for those same families.
Imported by Vinnovative Imports (www.capewine.com), Fairvalley is one of the very first wines to support a social cause to receive wide distribution in the U.S.
With just 3,300 cases made of the ’04 Pinotage, there isn’t enough of this stuff to be an end-cap kind of wine, but at just $9.99 this wine is such a tremendous and delicious value that it’s hard to pass up, especially when you add the third, social justice element to the equation. Don’t pass this up if you see it in the store.
My review of the ’04 Fairvalley Pinotage is here.
*UPDATE*
Posted in, Good Grape Wine Reviews. Permalink | Comments (0) | Print |
September 7 2007
I think it was poet laureate and musical rapper Ice-T who named a 1989 album, “Freedom of Speech … Just Watch What You Say.” That seems appropriate given the story that wine writer W.R. Tish related in his email newsletter about his recent experiences on the Wine Spectator message boards.
Tish, in his occasional email newsletter from his web site, www.wineforall.com, noted a startling tale of being booted OFF of the Wine Spectator message boards for challenging the venerable James Laube. Freedom of Speech, apparently, rings through the halls of democracy at the Wine Spectator offices as long as they agree with what you say and they are not challenged.
In the interest of fairness and balanced blogging, I will say that message boards are usually policed with a vigilance that would make an angry lynch mob in a dark alley look tame by comparison. Usually there are plenty of rules, regulations and codes of conduct and while often spirited, most posters are sycophants to the people that run the message board. And, finally, Spectator being a profit-loving entity (They charge for their online content, after all) can pretty much do what they want. In addition, I can’t actually fact check against Tish’s account of the proceedings because, well, Wine Spectator erased ALL posts from Tish.
Now that fair and balanced is out of the way, I’ll say that this reminds me of the Presidential “Advance Manual” that has been designed to squelch any type of negativity or protest at any presidential speech. In fact, it took the ACLU to get involved to even have the manual released publicly and even at that point it was heavily edited. Unbelievable. Excerpted from this Washington Post article:
The manual offers advance staffers and volunteers who help set up presidential events guidelines for assembling crowds. Those invited into a VIP section on or near the stage, for instance, must be ” extremely supportive of the Administration,”
To counter any demonstrators who do get in, advance teams are told to create “rally squads” of volunteers with large hand-held signs, placards or banners with “favorable messages.” Squads should be placed in strategic locations and “at least one squad should be ‘roaming’ throughout the perimeter of the event to look for potential problems,” the manual says.
“These squads should be instructed always to look for demonstrators,” it says. “The rally squad’s task is to use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform. If the demonstrators are yelling, rally squads can begin and lead supportive chants to drown out the protestors (USA!, USA!, USA!). As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site.”
Advance teams are advised not to worry if protesters are not visible to the president or cameras: “If it is determined that the media will not see or hear them and that they pose no potential disruption to the event, they can be ignored. On the other hand, if the group is carrying signs, trying to shout down the President, or has the potential to cause some greater disruption to the event, action needs to be taken immediately to minimize the demonstrator’s effect.”
Ahem. Real democracy in action … for the people, by the people. My point is that people in power positions—real or perceived most frequently do not like to be questioned, second-guessed, or challenged when they’re on the throne. That’s too bad, too. I’m not sure if WS and Bush keep company, but their sovereign rule, insulated from detractors, seems similar.
Below is the entire story from Tish on his experience on the Spectator boards:
I got kicked off the Wine Spectator blog comments board this summer too! Yes, I am officially persona non grata, after responding strongly in response to Jim Laube’s inane two-part post about Napa Cabernet-maker Randy Dunn’s “open letter” to the industry regarding rising alcohol levels in wines (read more), particularly in his own ’hood.
I may never really know exactly what the tipping point was (perhaps it involved the word “cop-out”?), but basically I challenged JL and WS in general to take Dunn’s suggestion that alcohol levels be included in reviews. Laube’s second post, which referred to “one reader” (apparently moi) making that point, rejected the notion simply because alcohol-by-volume measurements by definition are imprecise. My point was: SO WHAT? The percentages printed on labels are accepted as legal data, and moreover represent the only concrete alcohol information we have at our disposal. I added that I thought the real reason WS wouldn’t want to do this might be that people would see a clear correlation between high scores and high alc wines. Duh!
In sum, Wine Spectator doesn’t like non-fawners bothering their thin-skinned critics. I had been an earnest contributor to the Spectator blog boards for months, and in fact at several points had had certain posts rejected—with explanation. I did not always agree (for instance, they nixed my comment asking James Laube to explain why he called Kendall-Jackson’s $100+ Cardinale a “Bordeaux knockoff” when it seems no more of a cheap copy than any other Napa Cab-Merlot), but whatever. On the other hand, when I caught James Suckling throwing around ratings like confetti, seemingly in conflict with “official” ratings of the same wines in the WS Buying Guide, the blog editors actually went back and inserted “(non-blind)” after each of his flaming numbers, to make the distinction obvious. Most important of all, I participated in the boards under my own name (albeit misspelled as Willim Tisherman) and never even once referred to my pen name, my web site, my past position or my current status in the industry; I was a subscriber, period.
I can live without being part of the WS blog boards, but the surreally hilarious part of my getting the ol’ cyberspace heave-ho is the fact that I have now been erased completely from WS blog history. ALL of my past posts (20+, I estimate) evaporated, not unlike the way Communist regimes used to erase all mention of historical figures they didn’t want people to read/hear/think about. I was told this total removal was a technical issue, not a political statement. Maybe so, but it certainly fits with the Spectator’s well-earned reputation as an 800-lb. gorilla.
Kudos to Tish for publicizing this little Godfather-like shakedown. This is just a simple reminder to me that Wine Spectator, the 600-lb Gorilla to Parker’s Silverback 800-lb Gorilla, still isn’t in touch with the fact that the way to operate in an online environment is to give control over to the people. They want to continue with their subscription model and rule from an ivory tower—it’s obviously working to a certain extent, but I wonder what would happen if they opened the gates to more freedom and less restriction earning some friends along the way and engendering some goodwill and, of course, some freedom … of speech.
Posted in, Good Grape Daily: Pomace & Lees. Permalink | Comments (4) | Print |
September 6 2007
*UPDATED*
The recent news in Indiana that now allows out of state wineries to ship to consumers is welcome news—both in the ongoing state-by-state wine shipping wrestling match that is occurring, and also for Hoosier consumers, of which I am a card-carrying member.
I am, however, hopeful that wineries will seize the opportunity to ship and not alarm themselves with too many concerns about “Big Brother” legal action.
The Six88 blog, a noted and respected compliance solution serving the wine industry, had this to say in regards to Indiana law and (likely steeped in first hard awareness of how these things have an impact):
This is a very important decision, and many are rightfully celebrating the victory for wineries and consumers. However, a major roadblock to shipping wine into Indiana remains in place. HB 1016 stipulates that “A consumer may not receive more than two hundred sixteen (216) liters of wine in total from one (1) or more direct wine sellers in a calendar year.”
As we’ve discussed before, most wineries will continue to choose not to ship to Indiana consumers because they can’t possibly know if the consumer has already received their 24 case allotment. FedEx and UPS will continue to ship to Indiana, and some wineries will likely assume the risk and ship to Indiana consumers anyway. But the majority of wineries will opt out until the Indiana ABC clarifies their enforcement policies on this matter. Hopefully the Indiana legislature will address this issue directly in the next session.
Here’s the thing: I hope that most wineries will CHOOSE to ship to Indiana. In an industry that is so built on “trusting your neighbor,” wineries not shipping seems like a possible outcome based on word of mouth. But, more importantly, we don’t know to what level the case restrictions are unenforceable. Trust me when I say that our state gov’t can’t even properly calculate property taxes, the bedrock tax base. Does anybody really think Big Brother has a way of tracking wine shipments from thousands of different wineries to individual purchasers? And, even if they did have a way to organize and keep track of micro-excise tax payments to individuals do we really think that the state government would be punitive in going after the wineries if a random winery sends the 25 case to a consumer who is likely not in tune with the law himself? Perhaps if it were an underage sting operation and a phony 18 year old bought 25 cases in a single shot from a producer, but other than that short answer is “no.” In fact, the long answer is “no,” too.
I’m not advocating that anybody break any laws, but what I am saying is that if there are no tools from the state to manage this on the winery side so somebody doesn’t illegally do something they have no intention of doing and if the consumer isn’t going to be held accountable to understand a small piece of a law, then it’s not much of a law to be heeded, or, most importantly, one that can be enforced.
So, I say to all wine producers desiring to ship to Indiana, come one, and come all. I’d like to buy your wines, particularly if you’re a small “boutique” producer not present by three-tier distribution, which is about 95% of the available wine in the U.S.
UPDATE From Free the Grapes:
For example, Indiana law still includes a provision that limits shipments to 24 cases per individual, rather than a limit on shipments per winery per consumer. The difference, and the problem, is that Winery A is not aware of how many cases Winery B has shipped to a consumer. If Winery A ships one case to that consumer, and it’s the 25th case the consumer has received that year, then Winery A has unknowingly broken Indiana law and could have its federal license revoked. That is a very serious consequence, to say the least.
We’ll keep you informed of developments. Industry representatives are in touch with Indiana state alcohol regulators who, hopefully, will clarify regulations in favor of consumer choice.
Sincerely,
Jeremy Benson
I also communicated with Jeff from Six88 about this post yesterday. Nobody seems to be able to address how a winery would, unknowingly, be caught by accidentally overshipping to a consumer, but the allusion is that regulators may be savvier on shipment tracking than I may want to give them credit for. The net of it is, this is beer drinking country, I hope for two things: 1) a speedy legislative resolution to this sticky wicket and 2) Wineries will take their chances. I have to put myself in the top 1% of wine consumers in the state and I can’t fathom buying 24 cases direct, so hopefully other wineries realize how slight the actual risk may be. Or, perhaps, I should start an Indiana Defense Slush Fund for said wineries in the event they get caught in some example-making crosshairs.
Over at Lenndevours, Lenn hits on a topic that I’ve given some thought to, as well. He notes that boutique is an incredibly nebulous word with little inherent meaning and he asks questions around the word “boutique” in usage. Is “boutique” a winery that only produces a certain amount of cases a year?
When I was at Mondavi a couple of weeks ago the tour leader was asked how much wine Mondavi makes, and the answer was “Oh, we’re pretty small, about 300K or so. We’re not one of the big guys like Kendall-Jackson.” Well, if you’re a consumer and not in tune with case production sizes from American wineries, that’s a perfectly reasonable answer to you, until the day somebody taps you on the shoulder and asks you try a wine from a “boutique producer that makes 500 cases of wine.”
I wonder if we haven’t reached the point in time where a simple label metric isn’t useful for consumer decision-making.
Does it make sense to classify wine, not legally, or by appellation, or in the vinification sense, but from a marketing perspective into pre-defined buckets? This could be on the back label of a bottle of wine, in a small, tasteful manner and would certainly provide more value to consumer making a relatively uninformed decision on a bottle of wine at a $12.99 or above price point. Something like:
Micro Winery: 1 – 1000 cases
Boutique: 1001 – 10,000 cases
Artisan Producer: 10,001 – 15,000 cases
Mid-Tier Producer: 15,001 – 50,000 cases
Large Producer: 50,001 - Above
This wouldn’t be executed by the TTB, but more likely by a winery-centric Association.
Unless it’s a sales point and a winery wants to emphasize their small nature, consumers usually have no idea what production is for a particular wine. Some people will continue to not care, but for me, if I’m choosing in between two Zinfandels each $15.99 and one only has 1000 case production and the other has 10,000 case production, I’m going to choose the smaller brand.
I think a lot of others would as well.
What do you think? Would it impact your purchasing behavior if you knew production size? Please leave a comment.
Posted in, Around the Wine Blogosphere. Permalink | Comments (9) | Print |
September 4 2007
Okay, purposefully provocative headline; I really don’t mean to say that the Internet wine movement is dead. I mean quite the opposite, actually. Pardon me for a moment as I ease my way onto the soapbox.
I was driving up to beautiful South Bend, Indiana this past Saturday to attend the Notre Dame football game, (as a brief aside, if you’re a college football fan then you know that the highlight for this Notre Dame fans day was not the outcome of the ND game, but rather the outcome of the Michigan game. Ahem.) and on the drive up, my brother mentioned the Mark Cuban blog post, which I had not yet read, where Cuban stated that the Internet was “dead and boring.”
Excerpted from his post, the kernel of what he says is:
Applications like Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, etc were able to explode in popularity because they worked. No one had to worry about their ISP making a change and things not working. The days of walled gardens like AOL, Prodigy and others were gone. The days of always on connections were not only upon us, but in sufficient numbers at home, work and school, that the applications ran fast enough to hold our interest and compel us to participate. In other words, the Internet stabilized. Great software was developed to run on the software.
The days of the Internet creating explosively exciting ideas are dead. They are dead until bandwidth throughput to the home reaches far higher numbers than the vast majority of broadband users get today.
John from Quaffability picked up on this blog post and agrees in a post found here. I should note that John caveats his perspective with his own take, so I mention it only to point out that another wine blogger read Cuban’s treatise. It’s not my intention to paint Quaffability with my contrarian brush.
I think Cuban is fundamentally right in his assertion that the next wave of innovation will only occur when bandwidth increases and that the Internet is currently stabilizing like a utility, electricity for example.
Cuban’s stock in trade has been seeing trends far, far away. Afterall he made his billions on broadcast.com, about 8 years prior to Youtube.com. However, his assertion that the Internet is dead is saber rattling at its finest and is damn near akin to hurling a Molotov Cocktail at the Wine 2.0 world.
What Cuban fails to acknowledge—utterly, completely and foolishly, is the fact that he invested in a company called Ice Rocket that was something kind of like Technorati, a blog search engine, but nobody uses Ice Rocket and nobody can figure out Technorati, so much for him being the Oracle for Internet trends. Nevertheless, at one point Cuban saw and understood the value of the democratization of content and social networking in the Web 2.0 world … a fact he fails point out for the lemmings that take his post at face value.
And, the other “it’s as obvious as the nose on your face” point Cuban misses is the fact that Myspace, Facebook and Youtube didn’t explode in popularity because “they worked” they exploded because we’re in an era of user empowerment with tools that have made it easy for the layperson to develop their own web site and connect with others.
Is the Internet dead? Absolutely not. Is the Internet boring? It’s more dynamic and interesting everyday. Is Wine 2.0 going to get lumped into the inevitable backlash to this mini-riptide of Internet enthusiasm? Yes. Should it? No. Is this period of time for the wine world akin to the birth of the commercial Internet in the ’94 – ’96 time period. Yes.
The next most popular question is, “Well if the Internet isn’t dead, how can I capitalize on what you say is there.” Ah, good question, but rare is the person that holds the wisdom in the midst of the maelstrom. What I do know is that wine blogs continue to explode in growth, Facebook, at this very moment is growing astronomically, new wine business models continue to proliferate, new wineries continue to open their doors, more wine is purchased online, and the barriers to shipping continue to tumble. The answer is to try a couple of things, not everything, and commit yourself to making them work and understand that mindshare doesn’t equal sales, but it equals influence which can be more important then a single transaction.
Stormhoek sampled 100 bloggers a ½ dozen bottles of wine—maybe 600 bottles of wine total—50 cases maybe. And, well over a year later, we’re still talking about them … that’s influence.
The wine world is changing and those wineries that heed the winds of change will be rewarded, consumers like me will be tickled pink and Mark Cuban can go back to being head cheerleader for the Dallas Mavericks.
Posted in, Around the Wine Blogosphere. Permalink | Comments (3) | Print |
September 3 2007
The rest of the American wine industry not named California, Oregon and Washington has long been a humble lot, taking their wins gracefully and growing, growing, growing, quietly, respectfully even. To borrow from President Theodore Roosevelt, they’ve been walking softly and carrying a big stick. The size of some Midwestern wineries would shock and startle many in the industry, but it’s not in the Midwestern ethos to do a lot of chest puffing. In fact, in Missouri the motto is explicitly, “Show Me.”
Well, they’re getting ready to.
Move over ZAP, Rhone Rangers and other consumer/industry collaborative varietal aficionado groups. There’s a new sheriff in town and his name is Norton.
Dr. Norton, that is. And, he’s come to take what’s his—a place on the national stage of wine reputation, notoriety, consumer acceptance and sales.
Norton, “The Cabernet of the Ozarks,” from its namesake, Dr. D.N. Norton, is credited with being a true American original grape varietal and the First Annual National Norton Wine Festival takes place this Saturday, September 8th in St. Louis, Missouri.
This is notable for a couple of reasons:
First, all wine consumers are familiar with vitis vinifera grapes, the scientific classification for grape varieties commonly used to make wine—Cabernet, Riesling, others.
However, lesser known and more indigenous to the eastern half of the U.S. are vitis labrusca grapes—Catawba and the like. Chances are if you live in California, you look down your nose at these varietals—mostly, likely, because we automatically don’t like that which we don’t understand.
Trust me, as an Indiana native and somebody who has drunk a lot of wine from a lot of different local and regional wineries, a lot of it completely forgettable. But, Norton is different.
Different, perhaps, because the first clue is that the Norton grape is actually a slightly different species then vinifera and labrusca and is scientifically known as aestivalis.
From Appellation America:
Norton, also known as Cynthiana, is the oldest native North American varietal in commercial cultivation today. The cultivar belongs to the aestivalis species of vine, which by American wine standards is ancient. As early as 1770 renowned Philadelphian botanist John Bartram made note in his horticultural journals of a native vine type that was popular amongst mid-Atlantic colonist who domesticated it for its usefulness in winemaking – the cited vine type is now reasonably believed to be Vitis aestivalis, and is quite likely the antecedent to the variety we know today as Norton.
Secondly, the Festival is notable because, Midwesterner’s, a humble lot, aren’t known for fantastic chest beating, especially in the name of shameless promotion, even if that was the right course of action.
I’ve long thought that Midwest grape growers, sometimes lost in the shuffle on a national stage against quality from the West Coast, should play up the “we’re different” card to a greater degree, especially if the quality is in the bottle. Where other varietals fall short against a baseline of California wines, Norton shines.
The analogy I would use is relative to any public fascination—music, sports, fashion, acting, etc. The unknown new star that rockets out of nowhere to gain fame and awareness is always asked, “where did you come from?” Often times the answer is, “I’ve been working hard to get to this point and I’m going to make sure my hard work is going to pay off.”
Sipping on a flagship wine from Missouri’s most famous (and oldest) winery, the ’04 Stone Hill Winery Norton, is a beauty—delightfully spicy bouquet, dense color saturation, and mouth-filling fruit reminiscent of a Shiraz/Merlot blend with fruit, earth, spice and a gorgeous finish. In short, it’s a great wine, and a wine, in a blind tasting that would confound experts who undoubtedly would be baffled by its quite elegance and understated beauty.
From Appellation America:
As Norton, the variety typically produces rich deeply pigmented wines with spicy, raspberry-scented aromas, hints of coffee and bittersweet chocolate, good aging potential, and little ‘native’ character.
So, in the lead-up to the First Annual National Norton Festival, it pleases me, as a Midwesterner, an egalitarian and an advocate for the offbeat to see that Norton, long an unrecognized grape varietal star east of the Mississippi is making a grab for attention, kind of like the starlet who says, “I’ve been working hard … and my hard work is going to pay off.”
Us Midwesterners, we might not brag, sure, but there’s something to the First Annual National Norton Wine Festival.
They surely could have left the “National” out of the name. But, that’s how we do things around here and I’m sure if you don’t notice now, we’ll show you later.
For Additional Reading:
American Wine Society article on the Norton grape
Wikipedia article on the Norton Grape
Posted in, Appellation Watch: Midwest Regional Review. Permalink | Comments (0) | Print |
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