The Wine Curmudgeon

Is Fetzer's Zipz glass the answer for portable wine?

As usual, the answer depends on how much the wine costs. If you have to pay some concessionaire bandit $11 at a baseball game, absolutely not. But if you can find the wine in the plastic glass for $3 at a grocery store, and you’re not fussy about what it tastes like and you want the convenience, you could do worse.

More, after the jump:

All the wine statistics you'll ever need

This ties in nicely with the various Big Wine discussions we’ve had on the blog over the last month, and it also puts many of the numbers that I’ve reported over the years in one place -- wine consumption, wine production, and most popular wines according to grape variety. The chart is courtesy of the Statistic Brain website, compiled in August; just ignore the misspellings.

Pay careful attention to the most popular restaurant wines, listed near the bottom of the chart, which is as Big Wine as it gets. Click here for a PDF -- it's the only way I could get the chart on the site and make it readable.

Big Wine: 5 companies, 60 percent of sales, 200 brands

Call it serendipity. Shortly after my blog posts about Big Wine at the end of last year, a Michigan State study offered even more data about how Big Wine works and how it has changed the business.

The paper, “Concentration in the U.S. Wine Industry,” was compiled by Phil Howard, an associate professor who studies consolidation. After doing soft drinks and beer, he told me, wine was the next logical step.

“And even I was surprised by what I found,” Howard said. “Wine was much different than what I thought. If you go to the stores, it seems like you have all these choices, because the shared ownership is not very apparent. We wanted to help consumers understand what they were really buying.”

More, after the jump:

Wine terms: Flabby

A flabby wine has a lot in common with this fellow.

A well-made wine should have structure, and this is something that holds true regardless of price. Just because a wine is cheap doesn’t give it an excuse, and the best cheap wines do just that.

Structure means a wine should have a pleasing aroma and a beginning, a middle, and an end when you taste it. You should be able to taste the tannins (if the wine has any), as well as the acid, and the alcohol will stay in the background. In this, the wine is in balance, and that should be the goal for every winemaker.

A flabby wine doesn’t really have any structure, and one part – usually the fruit – predominates. The wine can taste almost syrupy, or more like grape juice than wine, and everything you taste sort of runs together.

The best analogy is an overweight man, whose muscle tone long ago went wherever muscle tone goes. It’s important to note, though, that – like people – a wine doesn’t have to cut and buffed to do its job. Too much structure can be just as bad as not enough, producing a wine that may be technicially correct but that offers little pleasure when you drink it.

Wine terms: Grocery store wine

One of the biggest changes in the wine business over the past decade has been the growth in wine departments in grocery stores. Just a decade ago, they were often small and cramped and dirty, and there wasn’t much to choose from – even among the biggest national chains.

Today, they look like this. More, after the jump:

Five wine facts that aren't necessarily facts

The wine world is full of people who know exactly what they’re talking about, even when they don’t. My pal John Bratcher loves to tell the story about the guy at a wine tasting who said in no uncertain terms that blended wines were inferior to varietal wines (those made with just one grape, like chardonnay or merlot, instead of more than one). John then mentioned that all of the great French red wines were blends; how did that fit into the man’s world view?

So the next time you’re buying wine, don’t be afraid to be skeptical. Taste is in the palate of the beholder, but there are objective truths about wine and the wine business. After the jump, five of the most annoying facts that really aren’t:

Wine terms: Wine glasses

Pretty pictures notwithstanding, wine glasses affect the taste of wine.

This may seem like a silly topic for a post. How are we supposed to drink wine unless we use a glass? Would that it were that simple. The concept of wine glasses can be as complicated as wine itself; how else to explain something like Riedel's $139 sommelier black glass?

The trick, then, is to approach glasses with the same skeptical eye that we approach wine with. Do you need a decent wine glass to get the most out of wine, even if you're drinking $10 bottles? Yep. Do you need to go overboard and spend hundreds of dollars on a glass? Probably not.

After the jump, a few thoughts on buying and using wine glasses: