The Wine Curmudgeon

The federal government's three-drink limit

The logic behind the proposal by the federal National Transportation Safety Board is impeccable: Cut the legal drinking limit to about three glasses of wine in 90 minutes, and fewer people will drive drunk and so fewer people will die.

But logical doesn’t always mean sensible. More, after the jump:

Winebits 281: Wine glasses, direct shipping, Italian wine

• Brushes for sale: There are three intriguing things about this post at Forbes about cleaning wine glasses. First, that Forbes would mess with it, given that it doesn’t seem like something their high-dollar readers would worry about. Don’t they have someone to clean their glasses for them? Second, that the best solution costs $4, using a baby bottle brush. This reinforces the Wine Curmudgeon’s theory that most wine accessories aren’t worth the money they cost and would be better spent on wine. Third, that the baby bottle brush company could have cared less about this new us, which points to the insignificance of the wine glass market in the greater scheme of things. Tip ‘o the Curmudgeon’s fedora to the great W.R. Tish, who sent this my way.

• Impressive numbers? The Wine Spectator analyzes the latest sales gains for winery to consumer shipping in the U.S. in such a breathless fashion that even I was impressed. And, given the legal restrictions, the almost $1.5 billion in sales is impressive (and that regional wine does more direct shipping than Washington and Oregon was pretty amazing). The catch, though, is that the $1.5 billion was just 4.4 percent of the total wine market. Until we see serious reform in three-tier, which hardly anyone is optimistic about happening anytime ever, direct shipping looks to remain a tiny, if lucrative, part of the wine business.

• Italian sales woes: Not in the rest of the world, where a leading Italian producer saw exports salvage its 2012 sales figures. Frescobaldi reported a 3 percent increase last year, despite a 5.1 percent decline in domestic sales. Once again, for everyone writing about wine, prices are a function of supply and demand. If demand decreases, as it has in western Europe over the past two years thanks to the euro crisis, then there must be a matching decrease in supply to raise prices.

Wine studies, wine analysts, and wine foolishness

A couple of months ago, I wrote about what I thought was the dumbest thing ever written about the wine business: That chardonnay was declining in popularity because more Hispanics were drinking wine.

Turns out I was the dumb one, because a study released last month was even sillier – that the Internet and big retailers would eventually put the local wine store out of business. Where do people get these things? And who is goofy enough to pay them to write this stuff? More, after the jump:

Winebits 280: "Value" wine, blind tasting, wine scores

• Missing the point:The Wine Curmudgeon does not like being cranky all the time. I would much rather be happy, secure in the knowledge that the wine world’s foolishness is a thing of the past. And then I run across stuff like this, which explains why a $200 bottle of wine can be a value. So can a Ferrari, I suppose, if it’s the previous year’s model with low mileage. The point, of course, is that blog posts and stories like these scare the hell out of most wine drinkers, and particularly those wine drinkers who are just getting started or haven’t really started yet. They see advice to buy $200 wine and run, in panic-stricken terror, for the soft drink aisle of the supermarket.

• The power of blind tasting: Mike Veseth at the Wine Economist talks about several recent tastings, where “where the wines easily fooled us (or perhaps we just fooled ourselves). ..” The point being that the tastings were done blind, and the results did not jive with what was expected. Wrote Veseth: “Our perception of wine is sometimes less about truth and more about  context and expectations than we might want to think. That’s not the conclusion I thought I would find when I set up this tiny experiment.” He also writes interestingly about the power of cheap wine (in this case, Two-buck Chuck) to skew the results. This is why blind tasting is the most powerful tool the reviewer – or any wine drinker, for that matter – can use.

• Coffee-flavor those wine scores: W. Blake Gray, who isn’t thrilled with wine scores but long ago made his peace with them, can offer a much more refreshing take on the subject than those of us who think scores are the spawn of the devil. He analyzed the scores that 29 California cabernet sauvignons and red blends received in a recent Wine Spectator, and found that that the wines that mentioned mocha in the tasting notes got at least 92 points; those that didn’t didn’t break 89. Yes, it’s a small sample size, and so on and so forth, but telling nonetheless.

Winebits 279: Wine telemarketing, tasting notes, booze laws

• Wine over the phone: Never thought you would see the words wine and telemarketing in the same sentence, did you? But several California companies are making the concept work, reports the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa. VinoPRO handles phone sales for 50 wineries, including Jackson Family Wines, Constellation Brands and Treasury Wine Estates, and totaled in $8 million in sales in 2012. Growth over the past three years? 1,800 percent. An official from another wine telemarketer reports that he's always surprised that customers will stop what they're doing to talk to someone from a winery. Was never like that when they called at dinner to sell long distance, was it?

• Academics take on tasting notes: Spanish researchers are collecting a data – some 12 000 tasting notes from places like the Wine Advocate, Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast and Decanter. The words used will be compiled in a database so we can tell how they’re used, reports Jamie Goode of the Wine Anorak blog (whose notes will also be included. It’s not so much that this isn’t a good idea, but that I’m not sure what it will accomplish. Do we really need to know how many times leathery is used for a red wine? Or toasty and oaky for white? The answer, without a need for research, is too many.

• British booze taxes: The man who runs one of Britain’s biggest retailers says the government, in its curb to cut binge drinking through taxes and sales restrictions, will destroy the country’s wine business. Wine, he says, will become a luxury available only to the rich: “Having established this culture of food and wine, you know, which is a sea change from where we were 30 years ago, why would we want to stop that?” I have been following this debate for the past several years for a couple of reasons, one of which is that the English always seemed so sensible about drinking compared to us. The other is that just when I think the three-tier system is bad, I see another example that is almost makes it seem sensible.

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: