The Wine Curmudgeon

Holiday wine gift guide 2011 redux

Still stumped? Never fear. The Wine Curmudgeon has you covered:

• A wine club membership, which doesn't have to be expensive and can offer the person on your list a chance to try wines they might not normally try. Wine club do's and don'ts are here.

• Our annual holiday gift guide, which has links to several previous gift guides, as well as a link to the Wine Curmudgeon's gift giving guidelines.

• The holiday wine category, which has links to all of the posts about holiday wine. And yes, it's allowed to adapt a Thanksgiving wine for a Christmas or New Year's gift.

• The expensive wine category, which has links to all of the posts and reviews about expensive wine. Because, frankly, if it's an expensive wine that I liked, odds are that it would make a nice gift.

Screwcaps: More in use, and more accepted than ever

Two recent studies show that consumers and wineries really don't mind screwcaps -- actually like them, believe it or not -- despite the best efforts of the cork business to convince us otherwise. More, after the jump:

Wine of the week: Protocolo Blanco 2009

The Spanish have been making vin ordinaire for what seems like forever, but given that Spanish wine has traditionally been overlooked in the U.S., the only cheap Spanish table wine that most of us know is Sangre de Toro.

Which is too bad, since the company behind Protocolo does a more than decent job as well. The red was a little boring -- mostly fruit that had been too heavily handled, though not nearly as overdone as some. The Blanco ($7, sample, 12 1/2 percent alcohol), on the other hand, was a nice little surprise in the midst of holiday wine tasting. It's made with two Spanish grapes -- airén and macabeo, which is also used to make cava. The Blanco had a little lemon fruit, some earthiness and even a bit of minerality, though not as much acid as I expected. This was probably because it was a previous vintage; even so, it held up well.

Chill this and keep a bottle handy for wine with dinner (chicken comes to mind, though takeout that's not too spicy would work, too). It's mostly a warm weather wine, but I'm not going to pass up a chance to drink good cheap wine just because it's cooler in December.

Winebits 207: Wine sales, Gruet, wine names

• What wine companies think: We spend a lot of time on the blog talking about why wine producers do what they do, but we rarely get an inside look as revealing as this, an interview with the man who runs the company that owns Seghesio and Pine Ridge, among others. Says Erle Martin of Crimson Wine Group: "The recession has given consumers an opportunity to explore outside their comfort zone. If they used to fill the cart with $50 Napa Cabernet, now Argentine Malbecs are looking good, or Garnacha from Spain, or other full-bodied alternatives retailing at $10 or lower." The business jargon might slow the piece down a bit, but if you stay with it, you'll get a good sense of how these guys think and why they make the decisions they do.

• Gruet off the hook: A judge has ruled that New Mexico's Gruet Winery can't be included in the lawsuit to recover money from the the 2010 Cap*Rock bankruptcy auction debacle. That's when Laurent Gruet, whose family owns the winery, bid money he didn't have and won the auction to buy Cap*Rock. Walt Nett in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal reports that the judge said the winery didn't actually participate in the auction and didn't give Laurent permission to bid on its behalf. The trial for damages is supposed to start Dec. 21. Who knew bankruptcy could be this much fun?

• Wine names and labels: An odd story in the New York Times detailing the trend towards cute wine labels and names, including several wines called Bitch. Why odd? Because this has been a trend for at least a decade, and there's nothing in the Times story that is especially new. And it fails to mention Randall Grahm, who pretty much invented this sort of thing. It's one of those stories that one reads and wonders why it was written; nothing in it is especially new. The cranky ex-newspaperman in me wonders if someone from the Times was wandering through a liquor store, saw a wine labeled Bitch, and thought it would make a good story -- not knowing that it has been a good story for a long time.

The wine geek quiz

Wine types love to write posts that celebrate their geekiness, and a Google search turns up any number of "You know you're a wine geek when. ..." efforts.

This is not one of those. Rather, in the Wine Curmudgeon's on-going effort to offer perspective to an industry that spends way too much time navel gazing, here is a quiz anyone can take to find out if they are, in fact, a wine geek. Which may or may not be a good thing.

Like I said, it's all about perspective. The questions and scoring rules are after the jump (and no, you don't get any points for knowing that the picture is Dionysius, the Greek god of wine and the first wine geek). Feel free to leave your score in the comments:

Wine review: Domaine de Chevaunet Touraine 2010

In the old days, sauvignon blanc from the Loire region of France was among the best sauvignon blanc in the world. It was the original anti-chardonnay: crisp, fresh, minerally, and not much fruit. Then the modern wine business happened, and Loire's wines became, if not irrelevant, a lot less important. New Zealand became the predominant sauvignon blanc region, and the rest of the world mostly copied what New Zealand was doing.

This always depressed the Wine Curmudgeon; as much as I like New Zealand's wines, I miss the old style Loire whites. Some of them are still around, of course, but they cost $30 and often difficult to find. The less expensive ones, if not complete knockoffs of New Zealand's grapefruit style, have still morphed into something they never used to be.

That's the dilemma I found myself in with the Chevaunet ($10, purchased). There is nothing wrong with it -- clean, well made, pleasing and refreshing. It's nice by itself, and shines as a food wine, especially with some shrimp marinated in olive oil and garlic. But there is too much grapefruit and lime fruit and not enough minerality to mark it as traditional Loire wine. So I'll keep looking for Loire the way I remember it, and let you make your own judgments about this.

Followup: The backlash against cheap wine

Three things are clear after last week's post detailing the controversy over the increasing popularity of cheap wine. First, it's a topic that wine drinkers care about; the post totaled the third most number of visitors in blog history. Second, it deeply divides the wine business, with comments praising what I wrote as well as emails telling me I know nothing about the wine business and should pretty much shut up.

Third, and most importantly, the post and the reaction to it shows just how fragmented the wine business is, and that those of us who write about wine don't necessarily reflect -- or address -- the concerns of the vast majority of wine drinkers. The Winestream Media never pretended to do this, but the Internet was supposed to change that, to make wine writing more accessible to the masses. It is beginning to look like that has not happened, and the odds get longer every day that it will.

Most Americans, for whatever reason, don't drink wine. Forty percent of Americans don't drink at all, and the Wine Marketing Council, which tracks these things, says 20 percent of the U.S. adult population accounts for 91 percent of all wine consumption. Or, to put it as simply as possible, 8 out of 10 adult Americans have almost no interest in wine. The wine business, and by extension wine writing, focuses on the 20 percent, and mostly ignores everyone else. After the jump, how this affects our view of cheap wine: