Dave McIntyre's WineLine

Wine Follies and Cheap Wine Hall of Fame

Who thinks these things up? Elin McCoy of Bloomberg News reports on an Oregon winery that recruited an elephant to stomp grapes as part of a fund raiser for a wildlife park. Talk about “natural wine”! Winery owner Stephen Reustle of Reustle-Prayer Rock Vineyards was not worried that the pachyderm would crush the grape seeds and exude harsh tannins once he saw the beast’s “soft, fleshy pads,” McCoy reports.

In her roundup of wild and wacky wine stories from 2010, McCoy notes a British Columbia cattle rancher who gives her cows a liter of red wine a day for the last 60 days  before slaughter. At least they die happy, and supposedly more tender and flavorful. The steaks are high on that venture, to say the least.

“It really has this umami thing,” says Janice Rayndahl of Sezmu Meats. Isn’t umami Japanese for “je ne sais quoi”? You know, that flavor you can’t really pinpoint or put a name to?

McCoy also highlights sales of the “Wine Rack” bra, for the woman whose cup runneth over. It conceals an entire bottle of wine to be sipped inconspicuously through a tube. I can see this catching on with guys, too - we no longer need be ashamed of our man-boobs!

Jeff Siegel, my co-conspirator at DrinkLocalWine.com has posted his annual “$10 Wine Hall of Fame” on his Wine Curmudgeon blog. Jeff revels in cheap wine, and has since even before the recession, so he can spot the extreme values. I don’t share his fondness for Barefoot Merlot, which almost made the cut this year, but Jeff has a keen eye for everyday wines - the type of wines most people actually drink.

 

 

 

For the past few years, the cork industry has fought back against screwcaps by playing the global warming card - buying cork-stoppered wines helps preserve the Mediterranean cork forests and their natural wildlife habitats. Now cork producers are playing the sex card, too - their latest ad campaigns (primarily on the Internet and savaged by wine bloggers such as Alder Yarrow at Vinography) show a guy striking out with a hot babe when he pulls a flaccid plastic “cork” from a wine bottle. Another video has a woman scorned as a “brown noser” when she twists open a screwcapped wine at an office party. I guess they think we wine lovers are really shallow.

 This post appeared in similar form on The Washington Post's All We Can Eat blog on Jan. 6.

NostraWINEus predicts 2010 ...

What's up for wine lovers in 2010? Here are a few prognostications ...

An increasing emphasis on value over stature as the recession maintains its downward pressure on wine prices. Consumers will continue to "drink down" and look for wines that cost less than they used to spend, but still taste expensive. This will reverberate across the price spectrum - those who could comfortably spend $120 in a restaurant two years ago will continue to look for quality in the $60- $80 range, while those who may be cutting their restaurant budgets altogether will look for the $30 - $40 wines that taste like the $80 they used to praise a sommelier for recommending.

The sweet spot in value in the retail market will continue to be in the $15-$20 range, especially for imported wines. Although the average price paid for 750 ml of wine in the US continues to hover in the $5-7 range, the "bang for the buck" is still in the teens.

More wineries will downblend their reserve wines into their basic blends - so we will see fewer $50 cuvées and more in the $30 range from places like California, Oregon and Washington. While these will appear expensive, they will often provide great value.

Bargains in imported wines? Portugal and Spain - more emphasis on the Iberian peninsula for sheer value. Why? Quality price ratio, of course, but also because these wine regions manage to bridge Old World sensibilities with New World preferences for riper, sweeter wines. Argentina will continue to shine, too.

More emphasis on "natural" wines - whatever that means. It means organic, and biodynamic, and - depending on who you read or talk to - even using ambient yeast instead of cultivated yeast. All well and good, and I applaud winemakers who want to preserve the environment and protect their vineyard workers from pesticides, fungicides, and the like. However, I worry that "natural wine" is becoming a buzzword that is more a reflection of marketing than viticulture. Wine has enough polemics - the pendulum may be swinging too far to the left.

The anti-alcohol movement will continue to grow - not an anti-wine (or beer or booze) movement, but a swing against the high-alcohol, high-extraction wines that have dominated the high end of the market the past several years. Consumers will favor moderate-alcohol wines well balanced with acidty, even from areas and wine types we now associate with syrup.

Regional wines will continue to gain in prominence. The Millenial Generation will continue to explore and expand its wine palate, and this rising consumer group appears to be unfettered by its elders' preference for cabernet, chardonnay and merlot. As local wines improve in quality, more consumers will ask for them in restaurants, stores, etc.

For better or worse, wine writing will trend towards new media. The recent demise of the popular Wall Street Journal wine column by Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher emphasizes the shift toward blogs, Facebook and Tweeter as mainstream media - newspapers - cut costs. This will mean a decline in substantive, thoughtful wine articles, but an increasing visibility for individual wine reviews in "tweets" or blog posts. Some familiar names from newspaper columns (Gaiter and Brecher, perhaps?) will gravitate toward blogs and "word of mouth" media like Twitter. But will they have the same market pull? Psst, buddy, wanna try a nice Zinfandel? ...

Happy New Year, everyone!

Wine Bores and the Great Cork Taint Conspiracy

I was having dinner the other night with a winery rep and another wine writer when I ventured the opinion that not only are natural corks better today than they were just a few years ago, but that the cork taint problem had been overstated. Fifty percent? Fifteen percent? Even five or ten percent was higher than my experience suggested, I said.

 

“Well, maybe you just can’t detect TCA,” my wine writing “colleague” smirked, referring to the chemical compound that causes cork taint.

 

SLAM! BAM! Down for the count! I had stepped in front of an oncoming locomotive, grabbed the third rail, whatever corny metaphor you want to use. I stammered that of course I can detect TCA, but it was no use. I had set myself up, and had no choice but to swallow hard and nurse my humiliation through the rest of the meal.

But here’s the rub: Any self-respecting wine bore (is there any other kind?) believes he is expert at detecting minute amounts of cork taint. There is an incentive to exaggerate the problem because no one wants to be vulnerable to the “you can’t detect TCA” insult.

 

I’m not saying cork taint doesn’t exist. I’m merely suggesting that oenomachismo, the dark side of wine appreciation, may lead poseurs to overstate it in order to “prove” their wine tasting prowess and their own vinous superiority.

And well, I guess I’m saying, don’t have dinner with wine writers. They’re such bores.

 

We tasted seven wines with dinner. All had been sealed with natural cork, with nary a trace of cork taint. Yet somehow, they all tasted off to me. Perhaps nothing pairs well with bile.