The Wine Curmudgeon

Kickstarter, wine writing, and a Cheap Wine Book update

The Wine Curmudgeon has been remiss in updating the cyber-ether on the progress of the Cheap Wine book, which was scheduled to appear sometime in the next six or eight weeks. That's not going to happen; call it the vicissitudes of book writing in the 21st century. How was I to know the city of Dallas was going to jackhammer my street while I was working on the second chapter?

The good news is that the book might stil make the July 1 Kickstarter deadline, and will certainly be out this summer. Oddly enough, I did some quality work on the airplane when I was travelling to and from Denver over the weekend, which I take as a good sign. Who can write on an airplane? I'm about a quarter of the way through the manuscript, and it's very nicely done. No point in false modesty here, is there? A sample:

We assume our betters know better. Ask an American about football, and they'll have an opinion, and it doesn't matter if the only thing they know about the game is that each team has 11 players. Ask them about politics, and they'll have an opinion, and it doesn't matter whether they vote or aren't sure who the vice president is. Ask them about wine, on the other hand, and you'll get a blank stare. “It's too complicated,” they'll say. Or, “That's too fancy for me. I drink beer.” Or, my favorite, “I don't know wine. What do you think I should drink?”

As part of this, I wrote a story for Palate Press, the on-line wine magazine, about funding wine writing projects tthrough Kickstarter. In the article, I talked a little about my experience, but focused on two of the most successful efforts, Alice Feiring's natural wine newsletter and a series of on-line wine guides written by Lisa Talarico.

The Kickstarter model, transformed into some sort of author's co-op, might well be the future of book publishing, given that there doesn't seem to be much of a future for book publishing. Like-minded writers get together to finance each other's efforts, much the way farming co-ops work. Interestingly, a Kickstarter spokesman declined to be interviewed for the article; I think alcohol-related projects are a touchy subject for them.

Mini-reviews 47: Rene Barbier, Geyser Peak, Esperto, Dashwood

Reviews of wines that don’t need their own post, but are worth noting for one reason or another. Look for it on the final Friday of each month:

• Rene Barbier Rose NV ($6, purchased, 12.5%): Not quite $10 Hall of Fame quality, but consistent, varietally correct and a steal at this price. A little more fruity (strawberry) this time around

• Geyser Peak Pinot Grigio 2012 ($10, sample, 13%): Flabby, with banana fruit and not very pinot grigio in taste or style. You can get the same thing with $6 grocery store wine.

• Esperto Pinot Grigio 2011 ($10, sample, 12.5%): Inoffensive, clean, subtly flavored Italian white without the turpentine of so many other cheap pinot grigios. Much better than I thought it would be.

• Dashwood Sauvignon Blanc 2012 ($9, purchased, 12.5%): Perfectly acceptable cheap New Zealand white; lots of grapefruit up front and not much else. But fresh and clean and not flawed.

Millennials and how they're changing the wine business

Or, as my pal W.R. Tish phrased it in the headline for my story in Beverage Media magazine: “Boom go the Millennials”.

The wine business has mostly accepted that the Millennials, born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, are here to stay; I hardly hear any grumbling about parent’s basements anymore. And, as John Gillespie, the president of the Wine Market Council has said many times, anyone who doesn’t pay attention does so at their own peril.

The story is here. Some of the highlights after the jump:

Wine of the week: Cune Rioja Blanco 2010

How much did I like this wine? I bought another white from the same producer that cost a couple of bucks more, and I didn’t even have to think twice about it. Just picked it up and put it in the cart. That doesn’t happen very often; if a wine costs more than $10, I’m often seen mumbling to myself in front of the shelf.

Even more impressive is that white wines from the Rioja region of Spain have traditionally been pretty awful – badly made and even oxidized.

None of that is the case here. The Cune ($10, purchased, 12.8%), made with viura, has enough white fruit to be noticeable, maybe some lemon peel, and is amazingly fresh and clean – very impressive given the track record for white Rioja. Chill this, drink it in the summer on its own or with salads or seafood. Highly recommended, and a candidate for the 2014 $10 Hall of Fame.

And yes, even though the company name is CVNE, the wine is called Cune. 

Richie Havens, 1941-2013

So long, Richie -- The love you save will be equal to the love you gave. (Video courtesy of Voice of America via YouTuibe.)

Winebits 278: Wine thefts, Aussie harvest, sweet wine

• Back up the truck: I spent a considerable amount of time as a young newspaper reporter writing about crime, and one learned certain truths. One of which was that thieves like simple – simple to carry off, simple to fence. So how to explain this wine theft, the second in the last six months? This report says hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of wine were taken from a San Francisco area warehouse; the difference between this and the previous heist (love those crime writing terms!) was volume – this was only seven cases of wine, as opposed to most of a warehouse. Still, how does one fence wine? It’s not like many pawn shops will take it.

• Tons and tons and tons of grapes: Think California had a bountiful harvest in 2012? Then get ready for the harvest in Australia’s Riverina, where much of the country’s cheap wine, including YellowTail, comes from. The harvest was near record, not a good thing when the Aussies are trying to cut production. One local official said that despite the near-record year, one-half of growers had not met the basic costs of production for 2013.

• Who tells you what to drink? Robert Joseph at the Joseph Report offers a spot-on analysis of the sweet wine trend, noting the differences between the way sweet red and moscato are marketed in the U.S. and Europe. “In the U.S., the wine industry takes the view that making money out of giving consumers what they like is an entirely legitimate thing to do. It's only fair to point out that the wider acceptance of this attitude goes a long way to explaining the success of supersized burgers and some pretty dreadful movies, not to mention a fairly widespread market for firearms. On the other hand, would it really be such a bad thing if the people who are currently drinking flavourless Pinot Grigio and Merlot had the chance to buy the kinds of grapey Moscato and ‘velvety’ red that are giving such satisfaction on the other side of the Atlantic?”

Diet wine, and why we're stuck with it

One of the Wine Curmudgeon’s regular rants is how old-fashioned, unsophisticated, and wrong-headed most wine marketing is. This is the industry, after all, that still sees wine drinking as the province of middle-aged white men.

Innovation? Nope. Education? Nope? Mostly, just cute labels and names, the same thing that has been going on for the past 20 years. The “Let’s appeal to women with a wine called Little Black Dress” approach is what passes for genius around here.

That’s one of the many reasons why diet wine – wine made not to taste good, but to have fewer calories – is so depressing. It’s a 40-year-old concept that wine is embracing because it doesn’t have any better ideas More, after the jump: