The Wine Curmudgeon

Wine scores: The Wine Trials author strikes again

Thursday update: The cyber-ether is atwitter with reaction, much of it supporting The Wine Magazine. The magazine has slammed Goldstein, calling him a publicity seeker and worse. One of the best discussions is at Dr. Vino.

The Wine Curmudgeon is in awe. I knew Robin Goldstein, whose Wine Trials has been chronicled here several times (and is one of the most popular posts), was a clever man. But this clever?

He pulled one over on The Wine Magazine, getting it to give a fictitious restaurant one of the magazine's awards for the quality of its wine list. It's one thing that a restaurant that doesn't exist won an award. But the best part? The fake restaurant's "reserve wine list" was mostly some of the magazine's lowest-scoring Italian wine from the past 20 years.

Scores don't matter. Right, Robin?

Wine scores: One more time

The Wine Curmudgeon can’t believe he missed this one: Retailers sometimes put the wrong scores on wines. A Washington Post spot check in January found that 25 percent of 100 displays did not truthfully represent the wines they advertised.

Shocking? Perhaps. But not surprising. I have spent a lot of time lately discussing wine scores, and this is just another fault. And, believe it or not, I’m not the only one who feels that scores are a scourge on the Republic. Others are out there, fighting the good fight”

• The Wine Camp Blog, which calls itself a wine free zone.

• My pal, W.R. Tish, the Abraham Lincoln for all of us who oppose scores.

• The great Jancis Robinson, whose piece discussing scores is among the best I’ve seen.

• The legendary Dan Berger. Not everyone has the guts to write that “I refer to the prejudice that some reviewers have for lower-priced wine. Their reasoning goes: ‘If the wine isn't selling for a lot of money, it's probably not very good. So it probably deserves a score of 85 or so. Now let's taste it.’ ”

Technorati Tags: wine scores,wine retailers,W.R. Tish

Tuesday tidbits 40

• Texas case at center of wine shipping dispute: Expect to hear the results of an appeal by wine wholesalers later this year or early next challenging a federal court decision that overturned a Texas law that restricts Internet wine sales. In January, a federal judge said that the 2005 Supreme Court decision that allowed wineries to sell to out of state customers should also apply to retailers. Currently, most states forbid retailers not in that state from selling wine to state residents. And, just to show how weird the world is, the lawyer representing the retailer group is Ken Starr. Yes, that Ken Starr.

• Wine scores again: A Wine Curmudgeoner forwarded this, after my post about an alternative to wine scores. Beverages & More, a leading national retailer, has a unique approach to scores – the chain does its own. The article does a nice job discussing the benefits and dangers of this approach, though it overlooks the solution: Get rid of scores.

• Wine and Facebook: The Wine Curmudgeon, who is reasonably cyber adept (wouldn’t be here otherwise), will admit that he that he doesn’t quite understand Facebook, the social networking site. So when I see that Four Napa and Sonoma producers are launching a Facebook campaign for green wine, I’m intrigued. Can it really change our behavior? Or is this just some marketing fluff to get mentions like this?

Technorati Tags: wine shipping,wine scores,Facebook

Buying wine: Getting the best price

No, this isn’t a post about snagging that $100 Bordeaux for $97.50 or slipping one over on the wholesaler. It’s some solid, consumer-oriented advice about saving money on wines people really drink.

Wine scores and price: What really matters

Last night, I tasted the Sterling Vineyards Pinot Noir Vintner's Collection 2006. As I always do, I tried to guess how much it cost while I was tasting it. And I figured the Sterling was around $18, which I thought made it an OK wine – nothing more.

Turns out the suggested retail is $13, which means it’s probably available for as little as $11 in some parts of the country. Which means the Sterling is a heck of a wine. Which is when the Wine Curmudgeon had a brainstorm: Wine scores don’t matter – prices matter. Shouldn't there be a way to take that into account when evaluating wine?

Wine of the week: Yellow + Blue Malbec 2007

The Wine Curmudgeon has been looking for a great, cheap Argentine malbec for years. The Yellow + Blue ($10 for a 1-liter box) may be it.

A couple of caveats: Availability could be limited, and there’s no guarantee that the wine will be around after this vintage. That’s because it’s the project of a startup importer called J. Soif, and wine importing is a difficult business. What works one year may not work the next year.

Having said that, the Yellow + Blue is a $10 Hall of Fame candidate that delivers more than $10 worth of wine. It has well-done tannins, something that’s rare in cheap malbec, and the fruit isn’t so over the top that it covers everything else else up, another flaw in $10 malbec.

So what about the box? Soif boss Matthew Cain, who has worked for Kermit Lynch, one of the best importers in the world, says his focus is not only on quality wine, but on green wine. Hence organic grapes and the box, called a TetraPak, which is supposed to be less harmful to the environment than a glass bottle.

This is an interesting sales pitch, but the problem with selling wine as environmentally friendly is that most of the wine that makes that claim doesn’t taste this good. Consumers are stuck with a tradeoff between quality and carbon footprint, and what’s the point of that? If all I cared about was the environment, I’d drink boxed Franzia.

The green wine discussion deserves its own post, which I’ll get to soon. Until then, enjoy the Yellow + Blue.

Technorati Tags: malbec,Yellow + Blue,wine reviews,Argentine wine

Grape Creek Vineyards

This is one of an occasional series detailing Texas wineries. The complete list is here.

Jason Englert, the winemaker at Grape Creek Vineyards, has done an impressive job in his three years at the Hill Country winery. His wines have won a bunch of medals, the prestigious San Francisco International and Dallas Morning News competitions included.

In addition, he has used new owner Brian Heath’s resources to put together a professional and competent wine program, moving Grape Creek close to the first tier of Texas wineries. Heath, a financial services executive, has expanded the winery’s tasting room and upgraded its production facilities.

The catch, though, is that Englert has done this by making a lot of wine with grapes that aren’t from Texas. That Grape Creek uses non-Texas fruit is neither good nor bad, given the state’s grape shortage. Rather, it raises the question of what will happen when there is enough Texas fruit for Englert to use.