Archive for March, 2009

This weekend I took the opportunity presented by two relatively neutral meals–roast chicken Saturday and pan-roasted pork chops Sunday–to taste two California Pinot Noirs from the same vintage and vineyard, but made by different winemakers. As you might expect, there were some interesting similarities and some more interesting differences…

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Pizza isn’t tops on the list of foods my doctor wants me to eat, but when I don’t get home until 8 pm and it’s already on the table, who cares what he thinks? At least I can have some red wine with it and hope any antioxidants will offset the carbs and fats.

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One of the great things about writing on the Internet is the ability to come up with new acronyms at will, without some persnickety copy editor questioning all of them. Starting today, I am inaugurating my own WIADE (pronounced Y-ade) blog entries. I’ll try to update the blog daily (but no promises), so I can twitter you on my daily consumption. It’s a chance for me to post tasting notes on wines I might not otherwise get a chance to write about for the magazine–and hopefully a chance for you to let me know how wrong I am.

To get this started, here’s two days’ worth of entries.

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I frequently get emails and phone calls from various friends and relatives asking about wine recommendations. What wine pairs best with Chicken Marsala? What’s a good $15 Cabernet? Do you think a $29 Brunello would be any good? All these questions are good and fine, but the thing that I have come to realize about the majority of these recommendations is that 9 times out of 10 my friend or relative is going to purchase a bottle, go home and drink it that night (or at least within a week).

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The Internet has led to a great democratization of wine reviewing. No longer do consumers need to rely on just a few published critics for advice on what wines to buy or when to drink wines that they already own. Not only are there hundreds of wine bloggers offering buying advice, but bulletin-board and forum software, found at such sites as Brad Harrington’s West Coast Wine Network and The Auswine Forum, allow thousands of users to publish their own tasting notes. Web sites like Cellartracker and Snooth let users track their wine collections and review wines. The next generation of the Wine Enthusiast wine-ratings database will allow users to compare their impressions with those of our expert tasters, and share their own wine reviews with the world.

Given the enormous proliferation of wine tasting notes available on the Internet, will the public continue to support professional wine critics? Should they?

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People ask me for wine recommendations a lot. I enjoy being the go-to wine person for friends who need guidance. It’s flattering that people trust my taste. I would bet that a lot of you serve the same purpose. The challenge though, is that I’m never given any specifics. I’m never approached by a friend who wants to give a gift to a person who only likes Austrian Pinot Noir or medium-bodied Italian reds. Instead it’s: “can you recommend a really good $50 bottle of wine?” No region or taste preference is ever specified, or a favorite wine shop to make the selection from. I’m lucky if I get an answer to the “red or white” question.

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For centuries, Bordeaux wines have stood among the world’s best. Such historic figures as Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Pepys applauded them, and even today, top Bordeaux wines are regularly featured in international wine publications.

But only a tiny proportion of Bordeaux’s wines live up to these exalted standards. Today, Bordeaux is in crisis. Growers are giving up, unable to make a living selling their grapes to the local cooperative and without the resources to improve quality and change over to estate production.
Even at the top of Bordeaux’s quality pyramid, there are cracks in the foundation. There’s a popular perception that Bordeaux is full of fat-cat chateau owners charging exorbitant sums for their wines and completely out of touch with reality. Rumors persist that first-growth Château Latour is for sale. And there’s talk that the 2008 en primeur campaign may be eliminated or at best abbreviated.

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I have a playlist on my iPod devoted to music I think I like but I’m not completely sure; I’ll need a few more listens before I decide to keep the songs or jettison them. Some of my favorite songs and movies are those that I wasn’t completely sure of the first time I heard or saw them. That was true of books, too, back when I had the patience to read a couple hundred pages of something that was mystifying or irritating, just because I had a feeling that I held greatness in my hand, if I could only persist.

That’s the wonder and glory of the arts: sometimes the works we resist, those that are most difficult and alien, will move us most deeply and stay with us long after, the plays of Shakespeare being the most obvious example.

That’s true of wine, too.

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We’ve all noticed the boom in imports from such value regions as Chile, South Africa, and most notably Argentina (for more on this, be sure to check out our upcoming May feature “The Argentine Tiger”).  These countries have been categorized as having excellent wines at a tremendous value, something that almost every wine lover is desperately looking for given the current economic climate.  No one wants to sacrifice quality, and finding the best bang for your buck seems to be the wine buyer’s motto these days.  

So, when you’re tired of drinking the same Chilean Sauvignon Blanc, South African Pinotage, or Argentinean Malbec, where do you turn to next?  The answer, my friends, lies in the largest wine-producing region in the world: Languedoc-Roussillon.  With more than one third of France’s total wine production coming from the region, it is truly amazing that more people don’t know about the fantastic and widely varying wines of the Sud de France.

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