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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 9 2007
Instead of long, analysis based post, I will keep it short and sweet and simply draw your attention to something that at once seems interesting and curious—curious in terms of marketing in the wine industry.
The wine blogosphere should soon be ablaze about Secret Salmos. Maybe.
I saw the ad in Wine Enthusiast magazine, intrigued enough to rip the page and check it out online.
Found at www.secretsalmos.es, an author named Javier Sierra has created a mystery game online, replete with impressive graphics that takes readers through an adventure game/viticulture learning adventure.
Created for the Spanish wine company Torres, Secret Salmos is a clue based game that seems to be intended to draw consumers in and engage them around understanding the Priorat wine region.
The entreaty to begin goes,
Brother,
A long time have tarried to get here, but you have given proof of merit to begin the path, since you have wisely passed the test of contemplation
I’m going to spend some more time on this, in greater detail, but in the meantime check it out and leave a comment. Is this cool, a wide miss of the mark on what wine consumers would find interesting or is the jury still out?
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May 2 2007
Remember when you were at that college party at 4:00 am? Few, very few stragglers are left in a foggy machismo haze, clinging to the bravado of draining the keg? The detritus of an evening sweaty and cramped in a friend of friend’s basement litters the ground. In the background the clamorous bellow of the soused is echoing in your head as some knuckleheads try to tie together the shreds of a philosophical debate that doesn’t have an answer.
Your head hurts and you have made it to the point in the evening where you have been simultaneously over-served and begun your hangover—without the benefit of any respite in between the end of your evening and the beginning of your morning. Aspirin and water seems like a good idea.
I feel like that—I have started my hangover, but I haven’t gone to sleep yet. Soooo tired. Must rest.
This technology/terroir debate can do that to a man.
A week or two back I blogged in a post found here about the blogging fury that started with a couple of Eric Asimov posts on technology in wine. Appellation America subsequently took up the conversation in a two-part article by Alan Goldfarb and gave a final postscript by respected wine writer Dan Berger.
Mercifully, (and hopefully) the Clark Smith, technology “Frankenwine” conversation will go into hibernation for 6 months or so, or at least long enough for Alice Feiring to write a book touting natural and non-interventionist wines.
My take on the entire technological intervention (Micro-oxygenation, alcohol reduction, etc) debate was that I couldn’t form an opinion because I hadn’t yet tasted any wine that I knew had been manipulated.
So, I bought some vino from Clark Smith and his label WineSmith—a Syrah, a Faux Chablis and a Cab Franc.
I now kind of get Smith’s philosophical musings about being a cook and using ingredients to create a dish, as the below excerpt indicates:
“If you haven’t had an education in what wine is and how it can be worked with, then you’re basically bottling cocoa powder because you don’t know what the Aztecs taught the Belgians – how to transform cocoa powder into chocolate; how to transform something nasty into something profound.
“It’s like when you open up your window one morning and look out on your front lawn (and) somebody’s dumped 25 tons of bricks,” he says in one of his many digressions. “Most guys will just call up a trucking company and have them load the bricks up and take them off to the dump. Now you’ve got your front lawn back. But if you’re a mason, you put an addition on your house and you say, ‘thank you very much.’
“If you know how to work with the raw material to build a structure, you don’t strip it out of the wine. You use it to make wines that have much more presence and much more depth and much more longevity.”
The Syrah, especially, straight out the bottle had a nice, well developed peppery nose—varietally correct. From popped cork to my gullet inside of 60 seconds, the Syrah drank like it had been decanted for three hours. It offered integrated tannins and a full explosion of flavors—it was very soft, velvety, enjoyable.
Even the Faux Chablis tasted less like a Chardonnay from the Napa Valley College student vineyard and more like a nice Chablis—with a steely undercurrent.
And while both wines are pleasant drinkers, they just don’t seem normal.
In the Dan Berger article he notes:
Last year on a trip to Australia (my 14th), one of the top wine makers in Australia said, “Look, there is just no substitute here for time. Micro-ox is a great technique for [tannin management in] low-priced wine, but you’d never want to risk doing it with anything like fine wine.”
A second Australian wine maker told me that micro-oxygenation is a fine technique to reduce tannins in cheap wines, but that the process tries to speed up the polymerization of tannins and can leave a fine wine lacking some of the stability wine makers prefer for wines that will be aged—which is the goal of many fine wines.
Ultimately, I view this technology vs. terroir debate through the mental filter that wines that age, fine wines with forbidding young tannins, will probably be exposed for the use of MicroOX over the long haul and consequently they won’t use the technique, or will use it in an understood, transparent kind of way.
It seems to me, in a speculative manner, that some of the cult cabs that are immediately drinkable, but also can be laid down for a few years surely use MicroOX to soften the tannins.
To me, it seems that the Syrah from WineSmith would not be good for anything but short-term gratification. For lesser quality wines I can see where it has its merit. This is the difference between art and pop culture—the difference between a something designed for immediate consumption like a tabloid magazine versus a literary book. There’s room for both, it just depends on what floats your boat.
And, as most of us know, when we chase short-term gratification, a hangover of some sort usually entails. Maybe those bellowing and soused students can take up the debate …
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April 17 2007
I love these Wine 2.0/internet/Generation Y wine stories. I’m not sure if this is kind of a developing scene, or a revolution, but these brands seem to be proliferating at rate that is growing and they always have a good angle with some interesting momentum behind them.
By way of background, a couple of weeks ago I did a post on Bret Lyman who works professionally for a series of short films he is producing under the pseudonym of B. Napa.
Bret is striving to create the definitive documentary of harvest and he premiered a short film at the recently concluded Sonoma Valley Film Festival.
Interestingly and unbeknownst to me until I was tipped off (and I separately saw a Wines & Vines article), another documentary premiered at the festival called “Harvest Young.”
The premise of this documentary is the wine industries ignorance of Generation Y.
You can watch the trailer here.
While I haven’t seen the documentary, I understand that a wine called Sacre Bleu is principally featured in the documentary as a brand that targets young wine consumers.
I found out from a local Indiana distributor that Sacre Bleu is going to be introduced in Indiana in May.
Funny how these things collide from different corners of the wine universe.
Sacre Bleu, depending on which version you believe, is a stereotypical French cuss word for “Holy Crap” that nobody actually uses—similar to the notion that all French men are great lovers and the French love Jerry Lewis.
The wine appears to be something of a negociant brand from a company based in Minnesota, though the positioning fits into the statistic that Gen. Y/Millenials are attracted to import brands. The wine line-up includes a Cab., Pinot, Merlot, Chard, and a red and white blend.
An article on the “Young Harvest” filmmakers elaborates on their happenstance trip into Minnesota to talk wine with the folks behind Sacre Bleu.
“We’re making a movie about the wine industry in California and we end up going to another area, Minnesota, where you don’t even think about wine,” he said. “We got their views about wine and we’re finding out they’re basically wondering the same things.”
The brand Wilson referred to is Sacre Bleu, a company that imports and specifically markets a brand of wine to 21-28 year olds.
Sacre Bleu uses marketing methods previously unheard of in the wine industry, like a MySpace page and wine parties, to appeal to a younger crowd.
Sacre Bleu is also 90 point-a top-rated wine-and sells at a price that doesn’t break the bank, a big plus for the younger demographic.
I’m going to poke around on this one and see if I can’t get in contact with Sacre Bleu, in advance of their Indiana launch. Until then, check out their site and their Myspace.com page and contemplate the notion that this trickling of new brands aimed at younger consumers that are more holistically appealing than, say, a critter brand, is actually the emergence of the next brand of wine marketing.
Of course, from a marketing perspective, hot chicks on your Myspace page don’t hurt, either.
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