The Wine Curmudgeon

CellarTracker and the rise of social media

When Eric LeVine came up with the idea for CellarTracker, the on-line wine inventory system, he thought it would appeal to wine geeks like himself and to people who needed to manage sizeable wine cellars. He never envisioned that he would be helping to make a revolution in the wine business

Because that's what CellarTracker has done. The number of people who visit the site far outnumbers the number of people who use the site to track their wine collections. CellarTracker has about 40,000 registered users, but 90 percent of the site's visitors are not registered -- and it gets a couple of hundred thousand unique visitors a month. Which means people aren't going to CellarTracker to mark off a wine after they drink it; they're going to CellarTracker to read wine reviews written by amateurs.

Which is mind boggling, given the way the wine world works. Wine knowledge is handed from the top down, and we're supposed to drink what our betters -- Robert Parker, the Wine Spectator, and the like -- tell us to drink. But that's not what's happening with CellarTracker. We're looking for advice from people just like us.

"These are real people, spending real money for a real bottle of wine," LeVine says. "There's a much broader audience out there than I thought, and that was my first really big surprise."

More, after the jump.

Wine review: Dancing Bull Zinfandel 2009

Want to see how wine changes over time, taking into account things like vintage difference and consumer preferences, and especially how the big wine companies see consumer preference?

Then taste the Dancing Bull ($9, purchased), which is one of the most popular wines among visitors to the blog. In my review of the 2007 vintage, I wrote that it wasn't "quite as spicy or brambly" as it was when the wine debuted a decade ago, but that it was still more or less a traditional zinfandel. The current vintage has changed even more. It still has some zinfandel character, with pepper on the nose and spice at the back, but there is a huge dollop of sweet red fruit in the middle that wasn't there in the 2007 or when I first tasted it.

Which is where consumer preference -- or what companies like E&J Gallo, which makes Dancing Bull, see as consumer preference -- comes in. One of the big changes in U.S. grocery store wine over the past several years is, for lack of a better term, the addition of sweet fruit. It's not that the wines are sweet, and the Dancing Bull is bone dry. Rather, it's what Eric Asimov of the New York Times describes as not the "actual sugar in the wine, but also (more often) of the impression of sweetness. This impression can be provided by dominant fruit flavors and high concentrations of glycerol, a product of fermentation that is heavy, oily and slightly sweet." And, he writes, California zinfandel exactly fits that description.

Gallo's market research, apparently, has determined that consumers want that sweet fruit in their wine. So the company makes the wine that way, and the Dancing Bull is the result. Is this good or bad? Neither. As the Wine Curmudgeon has said many times, good and bad doesn't apply to wine. It's what each person wants to drink.

The New York Times, local wine and local food

The New York Times travel section ran a decent enough article on Pittsburgh's best local food restaurants on Sunday, highlighting a quartet that emphasizes "what's fresh and what's local."

Did any of this take into account whether any of the restaurants served Pennsylvania wine? Of course not. I'm trying to contact Kathryn Matthews, who wrote the article, to ask her why she didn't include Pennsylvania wine in an article about Pennsylvania food, and if I can reach her, I'll update this post.

But this lack of respect for local wine is not surprising. Those of us who care about local wine, despite the successes we've had over the past several years, still run into too much of this closed-minded approach to what's local. Critics, chefs and restaurateurs bend over backwards to praise and to find locally-raised tomatoes and pigs, but wine? Too many of them can't be bothered. More, after the jump:

Wine of the week: Campodelsole Durano 2009

The Italians continue to amaze. Much of the rest of their wine business may be in crisis, with too much expensive wine made to taste too much like it doesn't come from Italy, but the quality and quantity of cheap, dependable, $10 Italian wine is as good -- if not better -- than ever.

Take, for example, the Durano ($10, sample). It's made with sangiovese, the grape used in Tuscany to make Chianti. But since the wine comes from the less fancy Romagna region (tucked in between Tuscany and Piedmont), it's less expensive. And, since it wasn't aged in oak, it's less expensive again.

None of which makes much of a difference in the quality of the wine. This is not rich or complicated; rather, it's fresh and clean, with lots of sangiovese's trademark sour cherry fruit. The finish is a bit rough -- not especially tannic, but with something that's kind of earthy and that some people may not appreciate.

Drink this with any Italian-American dinner or even mediocre takeout pizza (which was the Wine Curmudgeon's choice after an especially complicated and trying weekend). And a tip 'o the Curmudgeon's fedora to the Italian Wine Guy for sending this one my way.

Winebits 168: Airline wine, pinot noir, budget cuts

• Airline wine quality: Yes, flights are oversold, the overhead bins are crammed, and the seats are uncomfortable. But know what's worse? The wine is lousy, reports the Baltimore Sun, especially for those of us who fly in coach. Which, come to think of it, may be why the Wine Curmudgeon has not had a glass of wine on a plane in years. Typically, they're brands I've never heard of (or avoid because I have heard of them), and the article notes that many U.S. airlines don't much care about wine quality.

• Oregon pinot noir fight: What happens when one Oregon winery says it's the birthplace of pinot noir, the state's national grape? The other wineries that claim they're the birthplace take exception, and nasty fight develops. Oregon's News-Times newspaper has the details, in which the men who run Eyrie and Hillcrest wineries have taken exception to a marketing campaign that says what is now the David Hill winery was the pinot pioneer. This is as sad as it is predictable, a function of the way the wine business works. I've seen these kinds of squabbles in many other states, including Texas. What people lose sight of, said one Oregon winemaker, is that "Boasting about where Oregon pinot was born is really antithetical to the culture of how Oregon wineries sell our wine and educate people about the area."

• New York board will close?: New York's budget crisis could mean an end to the state's wine organization, which would be a huge mistake. The New York Wine and Grape Foundation saw its funding removed from the state's proposed budget, which means it would close in June. The foundation and president Jim Trezise have done miraculous work for New York wine -- and for all of regional wine -- and eliminating the organization will undo much of that success. It's difficult to believe that the state doesn't have $700,000, which the foundation spent last year, for the next budget.