Dave McIntyre's WineLine

Hear Ye, Hear Ye! DLW11 is Coming!

DLW 2011: Missouri will feature some of the top names in Missouri and regional wine as well a live Internet radio broadcast and an expanded version of our trademark Twitter Taste-off on April 2, 2011, at the Doubletree Westport in suburban St. Louis.

The  schedule for the third annual event includes Doug Frost, MS, MW, the godfather of American regional wine; Eric V. Orange, the founder and CEO of LocalWineEvents.com; Missouri winemakers Andrew Meggitt of St. James and Cory Bomgaars of Les Bourgeois; Todd Kliman, author of The Wild Vine, the best-seller about Missouri’s norton grape; St. Louis sommelier extraordinare Glenn Bardgett of Annie Gunn’s; and DLW co-founder Dave McIntyre of the Washington Post. [That's me!]

Olivia Wilder, host of the top-rated Olivia Wilder Times, will do her radio show live from the Missouri Twitter Taste-off on the blogtalkradio.com network, interviewing the winemakers and wine personalities in attendance.

Some two dozen Missouri wineries will pour two wines each for the Twitter Taste-off on April 2, where participants will blog or Twitter about what they've tasted.  We’ll give awards to the best wines, as voted by the taste-off participants (who must be 21 or older).

“Every year, we put together a great program, and I wonder how we’ll ever do better than that,” says DLW co-founder Jeff Siegel, the proprietor of the Wine Curmudgeon blog. “And the next year we always do. I think that has a lot to say about the quality and depth in regional wine.”

Ticket packages start at $35, which is the price for the Twitter taste-off and a buffet reception with the winemakers and wine personalities at the conference. Go to DrinkLocalWine.com for a complete schedule and to order tickets. For information, call (214) 727-1992.

DLW 2011 follows the success of the group’s first two conferences -- in Dallas featuring Texas wine in 2009 and in Leesburg, Va., featuring Virginia and Maryland wine in 2010. DLW also holds an annual Regional Wine Week in October, in which more than 40 wine bloggers, writers and columnists from the U.S. and Canada write about their favorite regional wines, ranging from Ontario to New York to Florida to Texas to Colorado.

DrinkLocalWine.com's goal is to spotlight wine made in the 47 states and Canada that aren't California, Washington, and Oregon. It's the brainchild of Washington Post wine columnist Dave McIntyre and wine blogger Jeff Siegel, the Wine Curmudgeon.

Conference sponsors are the Missouri Wine and Grape Board; LocalWineEvents.com; Annie Gunn’s;  the Doubletree Westport; and the St. Charles County Convention and Visitors Bureau.

USA Today on Regional Wine

USA Today, the nation's newspaper, dropped at hotel room doors across the land every morning, last week endorsed the regional wine movement with a travel feature on 10 "local" wine regions to visit. This is a great idea - if your business or pleasure takes you to St. Louis, consider a detour to Hermann. Heading to New York? Linger awhile in the Finger Lakes. Taking your family to Washington, DC, for some American history, or Charlottesville, to see Jefferson's Monticello? Guess what? Wine country is just around the corner.

The article is also a tribute to Regional Wine Week and DrinkLocalWine.com, as Jeff Siegel and I were interviewed about emerging wine regions across the country.

Momentum for Local Wine ...

The "drink local" movement is gaining steam. When my buddy Jeff Siegel, aka The Wine Curmudgeon, received a press release last week touting a dinner with cookbook author Diana Kennedy to be held next month at the Modern Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, he immediately asked the organizers if Texas or Mexican wines would be among the "carefully selected" wines for the Mexican menu. The museum's chef emailed him that although the menu had not been finalized, Texas wines would be involved. Maybe Mexican wines, too.

In April, the Park Hyatt in Washington added a Virginia winery to its Masters of Food and Wine program after I criticized the all-California selection for an event touting regional Mid-Atlantic agriculture. The Lettuce Entertainment restaurant group did the same for a Chesapeake Bay-themed dinner at their Wildfire restaurant in Tyson's Corner, Va, scheduled for July 27. Once I inquired about it, they quickly lined up Barboursville Vineyards as a co-sponsor and featured winery for the dinner.

The message is getting some big media play, too. Jon Bonne wrote about "justifying local wine" in the San Francisco Chronicle - "local" meaning California, of course. And Steve Heimoff, a senior editor and very distinguished wine writer with Wine Enthusiast magazine, recently blogged about a plea from a vintner for wine lovers to support their local wineries to help them through hard times. Heimoff lives in California wine country, and "local" for him also means California wine, but the message translates. The vintner Heimoff cited was Oded Shakked of Longboard Vineyards, who criticized restaurants for touting their local produce but ignoring local wines.

And that is precisely the message Todd Kliman eloquently espouses in a withering essay posted last week on The Daily Beast. In "The Locavore Wine Hypocrisy," Kliman takes on some of the most famous restaurants in the country for talking a good local game on their menus and not following through on their wine lists.

Here's an excerpt:

"... if these are heady days for the local cheesemaker, butcher, and farmer, they're head-scratching days for the local vintner, who has been largely shut out of the feel-good foodie fad. If the wine lists at the country's most prominent locavore restaurants tell us anything, it's that 'what grows together, goes together'—the mantra of the movement—is meant to refer to what's on the plate, not what's in the glass. Local and regional wines are seldom to be found."

Kliman, the food and wine editor of Washingtonian magazine and author of the tremendous new book, The Wild Vine, rips apart the most common excuse for ignoring local wines - that they are too expensive and better values abound from California. Chefs are willing to pay extra for organic eggs from chickens just up the road, he points out. And sommeliers are supposed to align their wine lists with the chef's menu, even if it means a little extra work to suss out the better wines from the area. But many somms seem unwilling to take a chance on local wines that don't seem trendy.

"The idealism of their mission statements notwithstanding, what locavore restaurants are telling us is that quality matters much less than cachet when it comes to assembling a wine list—the perception that a given product is the best, most exquisite example in its class," Kliman writes.

Maybe once local wines gain a little more cachet, the sommeliers will wake up. What's interesting to me, however, is that momentum for local wine is coming from writers - bloggers, especially - and consumers, rather than retailers or sommeliers. When I eat out, I want my sommelier to be taking chances and to seek out unusual wines - even if they come from just up the road. Don't treat me with kid gloves - dazzle me.

DrinkLocalWine.com 2010 - THIS SUNDAY!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s still time to register for this Sunday’s DrinkLocalWine.com 2010 conference and Twitter Taste-Off in Leesburg, Va. This conference – for bloggers, Tweeters and wine lovers of all kinds – will highlight issues facing local wineries in the Mid-Atlantic, plus the chance to taste wines from about 25 of the best wineries in Virginia and Maryland.

 

The conference is modeled after the one held last August in Dallas, which of course featured Texas wines. The Twitter Taste-Off is a real treat and not at all as silly as it sounds. There will be free WiFi onsite so anyone with a smartphone or a laptop or – gasp! even an iPad! – can instantly tweet each wine review. All the tweets will be displayed on a big screen at the event and of course will become part of the Library of Congress’ Twitter archive! It’s a great chance to taste these wines and meet some winemakers, and of course it’s a great opportunity for the wineries to generate some Twitter buzz on the Internet.

 

If you can’t join us, you can still follow the fun at http://twitter.com/drinklocalwine and the hashtags #DLW10 and #DLW10VA.

 

Registration is $65 in advance, $75 at the door, and includes three panel sessions discussing Virginia and Maryland wine, social media and the wine industry, and why locavores aren’t locapours. You also get lunch and the afternoon Twitter Taste-Off. A full conference agenda, plus a list of participating wineries and attending media members and the all important registration link, are available at DrinkLocalWine.com.

Wines from Where?

Wines are now made in all 50 states - but would you know that by looking at a typical wine list or store shelf?

Andrew Stover, the hyper-energetic millenial generation sommelier at two hip Washington D.C. restuarants, is trying to change that perception. Working with a D.C.-area distributor, Stover is bringing high-quality and high-value wines from aorund the US to the DC-area market. These include Arizona Stronghold from Cochise County, Arizona, and Sawtooth Vineyards from the Snake River Valley in Idaho.

Let go your prejudices. I did - I'd never heard of Maynard James Keenan, the rock star behind Arizona Strongholds. I didn't let that stop me from appreciating these delightful wines.

You can read more about it in my wine column in The Washington Post.

Number of U.S. Wineries Continues to Grow

The number of wineries in the United States continues to grow, reports Wine Business Monthly. The total at the end of November was 6,223, up 122 over the past year. That equals the 6% growth pace of 2008 and shows some resilience in the wine industry despite the bad economy. To be sure, the “launch” decisions for many of these new wineries were probably made in better times, and the growth was much more modest than the explosive 10% in 2007 and 15% in 2006. But still, we need to drink even in hard times, right?

“We had explosive growth in past years; but if wineries grow 5 percent a year, that’s still pretty good growth,” Bill Nelson, president of the U.S. wine trade association WineAmerica, told WBM. “These are still big numbers. At 5 percent a year, the number of wineries doubles in 15 years.”

While I and other bloggers and writers have trumpeted the rise of “regional wines,” the magazine reported that California continues to have about half of the nation’s wineries, a figure that has remained steady over the past four years. California has 3,047 wineries, followed not so closely by Washington state with 564, Oregon with 453, New York with 229, Virginia with 163, Texas with 157, Pennsylvania with 141, Ohio with 120, Michigan at 104 and North Carolina at 101.

The WBM article did not give last year’s rankings, but Virginia’s growth has been phenomenal in 2009 and I’d wager the Old Dominion overtook the Lone Star state last year. These rankings overall show the vitality of the wine industry in the Eastern United States.

Regional Wine Week - half way point

If you haven't yet checked out REGIONAL WINE WEEK on DrinkLocalWine.com, you should. We've got harvest updates on the Finger Lakes and Niagara from Lenn Thompson's New York Cork Report, plus a post from Paul Vigna on how the bad economy has some prime Pennsylvania vineyard land languishing on the market. Rémy Charest has reported on the current scandale in Canadian wine - a legal loophole that allows wine from elsewhere to be labeled "cellared in Canada". Brian Kirby is scouting out some exciting developments in Maryland. And Richard Leahy writes about wines produced from goofball grapes that will surprise you with their quality.

Remember - Think Globally, Drink Locally. And support Regional Wine Week by visiting DrinkLocalWine.com!

Regional Wine Week Coming, Oct. 11-17

Calling all wine bloggers! The second annual Regional Wine Week will be October 11 through 17. This is the week we encourage all wine bloggers, newspaper columnists, radio or TV talking heads, to feature “wine from around here – wherever here happens to be.”

Regional Wine Week was created last year by Jeff Siegel (The Wine Curmudgeon) and myself to highlight the impressive growth in quality of wine that is not made in the usual places (such as California, Oregon and Washington State.) This year we are hoping to get 50 or more bloggers to participate, and we will link to their posts on DrinkLocalWine.com. By leveraging Facebook and Twitter, who knows how many people we’ll be able to reach!

So if you blog about wine and would like to participate, please let us know. If you know someone who blogs about wine, please forward this post as an invitation for them to participate.

This is an exciting time for local wine – the Eat Local movement is beginning to realize that Drink Local is a logical part of any reasonable campaign for local agriculture.

DLW Conference Gets the Message Out

The DrinkLocalWine.com conference attracted about 70 people from around the country to discuss ways to promote regional wines against market preconceptions and the vagaries of the distribution system. The day culminated in the “Texas Twitter Tasteoff,” which you can follow on Twitter at #dlw09.

The audience at Le Cordon Bleu Institute of Culinary Arts in Dallas included local wine enthusiasts, Texas grape growers and winemakers, and bloggers not only from Texas but from as far afield as Colorado, Arizona, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, and even California, many of whom tapped away at their laptops during the presentations and the tasting. Bloggers were a key audience for the conference – after all, DrinkLocalWine.com was created last year (by Dallas writer Jeff Siegel, aka “The Wine Curmudgeon,” and myself) as a portal site to link to bloggers covering regional wines from around North America.

And bloggers are an idea channel to reach regional wine’s key market – millenials. Richard Leahy, East Coast editor of Vineyard &Winery Management (the best wine magazine you’ve never heard of), made a persuasive argument that millenials are more open-minded about regional wines than older drinkers because they don’t care about which wines are endorsed by Robert Parker or the Wine Spectator and they want to experience wines for themselves rather than let someone else tell them what to drink. Fer Servadou, anyone?

Leahy, who blogs at RichardLeahy.com, also argued that wineries should avoid planting cabernet and chardonnay simply because of their popularity and focus on grape varieties suited for their climate. For our Texas hosts, that meant Mediterranean varieties such as tempranillo or sangiovese, Leahy said.

This ruffled Greg Bruni, winemaker at Llano Estacado, the second-largest winery in Texas (which boasts 177 wineries altogether, despite having fewer than 4,000 acres planted to vines). Bruni said any winery that wants to be commercially successful needs to grow cabernet because the consumers want to drink it.

Indeed, Bruni poured a delicious cabernet during the Twitter Tasteoff – at $12 a bottle it represents a tremendous value. That said, several wineries poured delicious tempranillo. And perhaps in the spirit of harmony, the winning red at the tasting was a tempranillo-cabernet blend from Inwood Estates in northern Texas.

The other winners included a racy and vibrant pinot blanc from Flat Creek Estate, a “port” styled sweet red from Sandstone Cellars, and a nearly unanimous crowd favorite, a “Madeira” from Haak Vineyards & Winery made from an exotic hybrid grape called blanc de bois.

Many people asked me, “Where are you going to do this next year?” Any wine regions want to step up?

The Texas Twitter Tasteoff