Archive for January, 2008

Italian-Americans seemed to dominate the program Monday night in New York City when Wine Enthusiast honored its 2007 Wine Star Award winners at a well-orchestrated reception and dinner for more than 300. Ray Chadwick, the CEO of multinational wine company Diageo Chateau & Estate was Man of the Year, and I doubt if he’s Italian, but many of the other award winners were.

It got me thinking about the powerful influence Italians have exerted on the world of wine, and especially in the US.

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Led Zeppelin, like a Ravenswood Zinfandel?

We all know the arguments against the 100-point scale, but the question is, what’s better? Some years ago, Kermit Lynch, the Berkeley wine merchant and importer, who was definitely not a fan of the points system, suggested in a seminar that people get creative with how they convey the style and quality of wine.

He recommended that people compare wines to art, to architecture and other forms of creativity instead of reducing them to digits. It was a fun idea, and I spent the rest of the day rating wines by architectural styles. Something like a 1961 Haut Brion would have been the wine equivalent of a Georgian townhouse in D.C. A Hanzell Chardonnay 1990 conjured a Bel Air contemporary mansion, and so on.

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You may remember my post about the book, The Red Wine Diet, back in November. Author and cardiologist Dr. Roger Corder clarifies the relation between red wine, what you eat and heart health in a revealing and memorable way.

He debunks a number of accepted platitudes on these subjects, and makes a bold argument that a previously little known group of compounds, procyanidins, is the key found in certain foods and in certain types of red wine that can open the lock to better cardio health and potentially longer life. But are these healthy wines good for your palate, too?
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A study at the California Institute of Technology came up with scientific backing for the widely observed phenomenon that people tend to like expensive wines more than less expensive wines.

The interesting part, to me, is not just that knowing you are drinking a high-priced wine makes you say that you like it better, but that something happens in the brain so that you really believe it’s better. You’re not simply being consciously snobbish.

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I may hate myself in the morning, but here goes: There’s another way to look at Wine.com’s practice of ratting out other retailers than the scathing treatment I’ve read in Vinography and elsewhere, condemning the flailing Internet wine retailer as anti-consumer for its admittedly hardball tactic of reporting to authorities the direct-shipping transgressions of some of its fellow retailers around the country.

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I’ve drunk wines over a century old. I’ve drunk wines aged in 50-year-old casks. I’ve drunk wines aged in barrels whose stave wood had been aged for four years before a cooper assembled it into barrels.

But until the holidays I had never knowingly drunk a wine aged in a barrel made from an oak tree more than 300 years old. On top of that, the oak tree had been planted under orders of Louis XIV of France at his over-the-top country place, Versailles.

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