Category:Podcasts

Winecast 52: Jessica Dupuy, The Wines of Southwest USA

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Jessica Dupuy

Jessica Dupuy

Her new book, “The Wines of Southwest USA,” is a candid look at wine in Texas, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico

Jessica Dupuy, through her work with media outlets like Texas Monthly, has been fighting the good fight for Drink Local for more than a decade. Her latest effort: “The Wines of Southwest USA” ($40, Infinite Ideas). It’s a candid assessment of regional wine in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. We’ll give a copy of the book away during the blog’s 13th annual Birthday Week, beginning Nov. 16.

Overall, she says, wine quality is much improved — but that is still much room for improvement. “We’re still not at the point where people see local wine the same way they see local spinach from the farm down the road, or peaches or whatever. So in that respect, we still have a lot of work to do.”

Among the topics we discussed:

• Arizona may offer the highest upside among the states in the book, thanks to a core of impressive young producers.

• Colorado remains one of the most fascinating states in the country, since so much of its grapes are grown at altitude.

• The pandemic has hit regional wine hard, and there remains doubt about how well it survive when things return to normal.

• And finishing a book during a pandemic, with home schooling, is not the easiest thing in the world.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 16 minutes long and takes up about 11 megabytes. Quality is mostly excellent.

Winecast 51: Ray Isle, Food & Wine magazine and wine during the pandemic

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ray isle

Ray Isle: “Producers are doing anything they can to keep prices from going up.”

“It’s a complicated time for sure, and especially complicated for small producers. … It’s not a time I’d want to be starting a winery.”

Ray Isle, the executive wine editor of Food & Wine, has a unique perspective on wine during the pandemic. He not only writes about wine for one of the country’s leading food magazines, but he brings a practical sense to the job that many of his colleagues don’t bother with. Or, as he said during our chat: “I got into wine as a poor graduate student, and my budget for wine was about $14.99 a month, and I’ve never abandoned that. You have to write about the affordable stuff. That’s what people like to drink.”

We talked about that, and Ray offered a variety of value wine suggestions, including the Sokol Blosser Evolution No.9 white blend (in a 1.5 liter box, no less, which I also liked); a South African red and white; and an $11 Chianti. We also touched on:

• Wine prices and availability during the pandemic — both seem to be better for domestic wines than for imports because of the tariff.

• The future of the tariff; he, too, is cautiously optimistic about getting rid of the 25 percent levy regardless of what happens in November.

• The state of restaurant wine, and why we should be worried about the future of the U.S. restaurant business because trouble there means trouble for or wine.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 18 minutes long and takes up about 12 megabytes. Quality is very good to excellent.

Winecast 50: Churro, the blog’s associate editor, and why Millennials and wine don’t get along

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Millennials and wine

“I know I need the computer bag, but why are you making me wear the damn hat?”

“We can pay off our student loans or we can buy wine. What do you think we’re going to do?”

One reason I hired Churro as the blog’s new associate editor was his perspective – he isn’t a Baby Boomer, and brings a younger, more fresh approach to the blog. Which is the topic of this podcast: Why Millennials aren’t as interested in wine as their parents and grandparents. Our conversation included:

• Wine prices, and that wine is too expensive for many younger consumers.

• How to make wine easier by using wine apps like Vivino.

• Wine’s competition from craft beer and cocktails. As Churro noted, “they’re doing some amazing things with craft beer these days.” And, by omission, not so amazing things with wine.

• That it’s OK to sniff and swirl and spit, as long as you don’t make a production out of it.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 12 minutes long and takes up about 4 megabytes. Quality is very good to excellent.

And for the doubters in the audience: I’ve interviewed a dog before — Wishbone, the 1990s PBS TV star. In addition, dog whisperer Amanda Smith lent her much appreciated support.

Winecast 49: Janie Brooks of Brooks Family Winery and enduring the pandemic

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Janie Brooks

Janie Brooks: “We have to be creative, and we have to go outside the usual winery audience.”

Janie Brooks’ forecast is blunt: Small family wineries aren’t doing well and their plight could get even worse

Janie Brooks doesn’t mince words: The pandemic could force a lot of family producers out of the wine business, and anyone who expects things to get better any time soon is going to be disappointed. She paints a picture of lost sales, consumers trading down, producers skipping vintages because they can’t sell what they’ve already made, and way too many grapes in the supply chain.

In other words, Brooks told me, everyone who isn’t a big producer — which is about 90 percent of the 10,000 wineries in the U.S. — is in big trouble.

“If you’re not at sensible price points, and that’s $25 or less, your wine just isn’t moving,” she says.

Brooks perspective is clear, sharp, and national. Not only does she run her family’s self-named, 20,000 case winery in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, but she is the board chair for Wine America, a winery trade group that includes producers across the U.S.

We talked about how consumers can help family wineries, as well the wine business’ need to do something other than market to the same old aging Baby Boomers. This is a subject Brooks is smart and passionate about. Her vision includes cross-marketing, something the wine business has mostly ignored for 20 years. In cross marketing, producers reach potential customers by sharing information with companies that make similar products; in this case, beverages like coffee and sustainable and green products.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 13 minutes long and takes up almost 9 megabytes. Quality is very good to excellent; in fact, would that my interviewing skills were up to the subject.

Winecast 48: 1 Wine Dude Joe Roberts and the Wine Taster’s Guide

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joe roberts

Joe Roberts, 1 Wine Dude

1 Wine Dude Joe Roberts and his new book, the “Wine Tasters Guide”

Joe Roberts of 1 Wine Dude was of the first wine bloggers, and remains among the best-known and most successful. And why not? As he told me last week when we recorded the podcast, “If a wine doesn’t give you pleasure, what’s the point of drinking it, regardless of what I think about the wine?”

Hence his new book — and his first, the “Wine Taster’s Guide: Drink and Learn with 30 Wine Tastings ($14.99, Rockridge Press).” There is also a companion tasting journal ($10.99).

Joe’s goal? To make wine fun again by tasting it, and without the foolishness that passes for so much wine writing today. Joe is passionate about the failings of post-modern wine writing, and especially that we spend too much money on wine we may not like because we are too intimidated by the process.

We talked about how the book works, why Joe wrote it (given that he didn’t think the world needed another wine book), and how many times one checks the Amazon best-sellers page to see one’s book’s ranking. Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 15 minutes long and takes up 5 megabytes. Quality is good to very good (save for a few seconds at the beginning).

Winecast 47: Bay area retailer Debbie Zachareas and the new normal

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Debbie Zachareas

Debbie Zachareas

Debbie Zachareas: Trading down is going on, even for people who buy $100 wine

Debbie Zachareas is a long-time San Francisco-area wine retailer; currently she helps oversee three wine stores and wine bars in the Bay Area. And of all the surprises during the coronavirus pandemic, among the most surprising has been that even people who buy $100 wine have been trading down. A $15 to $30 bottle, she says, seems to be what they’re looking for these days, what with staying at home and social distancing.

We talked about trading down, as well as what wines are popular — lighter whites instead of the heavier reds that had been in vogue, as well as imported wines instead of California wines. One exception: The incredible wines from California’s Jolie-Laide, a small but, unfortunately, hard-to-find producer.

Plus, customer service has improved during the duration — an odd, if unintended side effect during the duration that I’ve heard about from other retailers.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is almost 13 minutes long and takes up 5 megabytes. Quality is mostly excellent (save for a few seconds at the beginning). We’re back to recording on Skype.

Winecast 46: Richard Hemming, MW, and why wine writing isn’t necessarily objective

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richard hemming

Richard Hemming, MW

“Why should [consumers] trust us? They shouldn’t, necessarily,” says Singapore-based wine writer

Richard Hemming, MW, a Singapore-based wine writer, wrote one of the most amazing blog posts I’ve ever read: Wine writers can’t be objective given the incestuous nature of the wine business, and consumers need to know that this prevents us from always being objective.

It’s one thing for me to write that, which I’ve been doing as long as there has been a blog. But if Hemming, firmly part of the Winestream Media — initials after his name, consulting work, and articles for important magazines and websites — writes this, it speaks to how messed up wine writing is.

Hemming doesn’t disagree. But he also doesn’t see a solution, since it’s difficult to make a living as a wine writer. So we have to depend on the kindness of strangers, with all of the compromises that entails. In this, Hemming notes, there’s a difference between a compromise, like not writing something that would offend a source, and corruption, such as taking money for a positive review.

Needless to say, I don’t agree. But Hemming’s point is well taken, and he hits on one of the key questions facing post-modern journalism, wine or otherwise: What’s going to replace the ad-supported model that paid for newspaper and magazine reporting in the second half of the 20th century? Because, so far, it isn’t the Internet.

The other thing worth noting? The post was easily the best read on Hemming’s blog, and most of the comments — from wine writers, of course — agreed with him.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 15 1/2 minutes long and takes up 9 megabytes. Quality is good to very good; I still haven’t figured out how to get the most out of Zoom.