Category:Wine rants

Why don’t these wines have screwcaps?

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

scewcapsThe Wine Curmudgeon has been tasting mostly red wine this month, and especially cabernet sauvignon, in an effort to get more wines that I don’t normally drink on the blog. Quality, even around $10, has been surprisingly good, but there has been one major disappointment. Not only do most of the wines have corks instead of screwcaps, but they come in heavy, old-fashioned bottles.

Which raises the question, which I’ve raised before and which is worth raising again: Why don’t these popularly-priced wines use screwcaps and come in lighter bottles? That would make the wines less expensive to produce, lower their carbon footprint, increase profit, and even possibly lower cost. And neither would affect quality.

Consider: The bottle for a 2003 white Burgundy — about as high end as wine gets — weighs 22 ounces and is closed with a cork. The bottle for the $5 Rene Barbier wines, closed with a screwcap, weighs 14 ounces. Yet most of the producers whose wines I’ve tasted use some kind of cork and unnecessarily heavy bottles, often closer to the white Burgundy than the Barbier. Some examples:

? The $11 Pigmentum malbec from France, 19 ounces, artificial cork.

? The $12 Errazauriz cabernet sauvignon from Chile, 15 ounces, screwcap. Ironically, the producer recently changed bottles, cutting the weight by 12 1/2 percent. Otherwise, it would be 17 ounces.

? The $12 Josh Cellars cabernet sauvignon from California, 22 ounces, natural cork.

? The $16 Bonterra zinfandel from California, 23 ounces, artificial cork. The irony? That Bonterra is one of the best selling green wine brands in the country.

? The $17 Downton Abbey claret from France, 19 ounces, natural cork.

In these cases, sadly, appearance is all. The Downton Abbey is the most obvious example, but even the others work from the assumption that consumers expect quality wine to come in heavy bottles with some kind of cork. We can argue forever about screwcaps vs. corks, but the one thing that isn’t in debate is that screwcaps are perfectly acceptable for most of the wine we drink. And there is absolutely no debate about the bottle. This isn’t 1890, when bottle weight mattered, protecting the wine from the perils of 19th century shipping. Lighter weight, given today’s bottle technology, is just as effective. Fifty million cases of Two-buck Chuck are proof of that.

Obviously, what’s in the bottle matters most. At some point, though, the bottle and closure itself is going to matter, whether producers believe it or not.

If you thought winespeak was bad, how does potspeak sound?

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

If you thought winespeak was bad, how does potspeak sound?The Wine Curmudgeon, whose crusade against winespeak has been a cornerstone of his work, can only shake his head and sigh. Call it an example of the law of unintended consequences — legalized marijuana in Colorado may well bring with it product reviews written in potspeak.

Or, as the humorist Garry Trudeau imagines it: “This limited-edition artisanal cannabis delivers an unexpectedly smooth high, with just a touch of paranoia. …”

I cringe as I edit this. Artisanal? Limited-edition? Where have we read those before? And how did Trudeau overlook the possibility of “boutique” weed? Or that that the toke had hints of cypress and evergreen with spicy overtones?

What’s next for legalized dope? Scores? A terroir debate? The Potstream Media? The Marijuana Spectator? Blogs called Potography and 1 Dope Dude? Or, and let me warn anyone who thinks of this, because I have lawyers on standby, The Maryjane Curmudgeon?

Downton Abbey claret — wine merchandising for dummies

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

downton abbey claretLet’s get the review of the Downton Abbey claret ($17, purchased, 13%) out of the way first: I liked it. It’s a Bordeaux blend with some blueberry fruit and a rough, gritty style that’s typical of cheap French red wine, the sort of thing I’ve been drinking most of my life. In other words, plonk.

The catch, of course, is that it isn’t cheap, costing about twice as much as it’s worth. But that’s the point, isn’t it? That $17 pays for more than the wine. It pays for the experience, and that’s what Carnival Film & Television Ltd., the show’s producers, are counting on. That, and that wine drinkers are as stupid as we’re supposed to be.

This is not a rant about TV and movie tie-ins; I own a Captain Kirk action figure and two Star Trek coffee mugs, and I’m proud of it. Rather, it’s about the wine business and the way it insults the intelligence of its customers, something that we see all too often. Call it celebrity wine or cult wine or whatever, it’s based on the assumption that wine drinkers don’t know anything about quality. Flash a shiny object in front of us, and we’ll reach for the debit card every time. Which, as regular visitors here know, is an attitude that makes me crazy.

And I got crazier reading the claret’s back label and promotional material. To paraphrase Dashiell Hammett, “I was trying to count how many lies could be found in them, and had reached four, with promise of more. ?”:

? This “is an elegant, dry wine. … ” “… with a silky finish.” Dry yes, but about as elegant as a summer day in Dallas and as silky as late-night diner coffee.

? The wine is made with “grapes from the renowned Entre-Deux-Mers (‘between two seas’) region of Bordeaux, France.” Yes, Entre-Deux-Mers is in Bordeaux, but it’s hardly renowned for claret, or even red wine. It’s a bulk wine region with some decent, cheap whites, more or less the French equivalent of California’s Central Valley.

? The wine was put together by a negociant, Grands Chais de France, founded in 1979, hardly “one of France’s great Chateaux.”

? Perhaps the worst: that the claret is age-worthy. It will age about as well as any other $8 wine, which means not at all. Legitimate claret, writes British wine critic Tom Cannavan, “can be the epitome of fine wine. The best wines exhibit a wonderful complexity of aromas and flavours, great elegance and refinement and an ability to age gracefully — some for a hundred years.” This ain’t that.

All of this is about words and terms that most consumers expect from wine in the vague way we do, but know very little about (because, of course, the wine business doesn’t care about wine education). Great wine is supposed to age, but most of us have never had an aged wine and don’t know why it makes a difference. Great wine is supposed to be elegant, but how many of us could describe what an elegant wine tastes like? And to expect most of us to know Entre-Deux-Mers is cynical even for a TV tie-in. No doubt the marketing types figured it was French, and that would be enough for the stupid Americans.

If Carson served this wine at a Downton Abbey dinner, he’d get a proper talking to; Hudson never would have let it in the house. If you want quality claret-stye wine for about $17 while watching the fourth season, try Bonny Doon’s A Proper Claret or Hess’ Treo Winemaker’s Blend. Or, if you want to spend $8 or $10, there’s Little James’ Basket Press Red, the kind of wine that entitles you to giggle at others who spend more for lesser quality because someone flashed a shiny object in front of them.

Rudy K. and neo-Prohibitionism

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

neo-ProhibtionismRudy K. is Rudy Kurniawan, the con man convicted last month for bilking wine collectors out of millions of dollars by passing off cheap wine as rare bottles worth thousands. The story, not surprisingly, was huge among the wine writing fraternity, both traditional and on-line, and a Google search yesterday turned up 1.8 million references to it.

On the other hand, a story that could affect every wine drinker — and not just those who can drop a couple of grand for a French first-growth that may or may not be real — was mostly ignored last year. That was the National Transportation Safety Board’s proposal to cut the legal drinking limit, which would be two glasses of wine for most women and three for men. Yesterday, there were just 37,000 Google references to the plan.

And some of us wonder why no reads wine blogs anymore. This contradiction, and what it says about wine writing and the wine business, is after the jump:
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The Do-it-yourself New Year’s wine resolutions for 2014

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

new year's wine resolutionsNew Year’s wine predictions, wine advice, wine trends, and the like are as common as $10 grocery store merlot. How does the Wine Curmudgeon know this? Because I’m almost as guilty as everyone else in doing them — almost being the key, of course.

Hence this opportunity for you to make your own predictions, in the spirit of the very popular Do-it-yourself wine review. Just click on the drop-down menus and your resolutions for 2014 are set (although those of you who get the blog via email or on Facebook may have to go the website to use the menus).

In 2014, I’m going to drink:

In 2014, I’m going to try to learn more about wine by:

In 2014, I’m going to spend:

In 2014, the most important wine trend will be:

In 2014, regional and local wine:

New Year’s resolution image from Joe’s Cafe and wine diet image from Chicane Pictures, using a Creative Commons license

The 2013 Curmudgies

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

Welcome to the second annual Curmudgies, presented each year to the people and institutions that did their best over the previous 12 months to make sure that wine remained confusing, difficult to understand, and reserved for only the haughtiest among us. The 2012 Curmudgies are here; the 2013 awards are after the jump:

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Two wines from Aldi, and the differences in cheap wine

by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On

There are two kinds of cheap wine — those made to hit a certain price, like Two-buck Chuck, and those made to taste like wine, like the bottles in the $10 Hall of Fame. This is often a difficult concept to explain, since consumers assume price is price and don’t think much past that.

That’s why I was so intrigued by two $5 wines I bought at Aldi, the national discount grocer (and where most of the wine is private label). The wines — a Spanish tempranillo and an Italian red from Montepulciano — demonstrated this contradiction perfectly. The former was everything great cheap wine should be, enjoyable and a value, even at $5. The latter was made to cost $5, and I was reminded of that with every sip.

The quality of wines made to hit a certain price are notoriously inconsistent. That’s because, if the price of grapes increases, the wine contains cheaper grapes of lesser quality so it can maintain its price. Wine made to taste like wine is usually made with better quality grapes, so that it tastes the way it should. The producer either raises the price if grapes become more expensive or takes a smaller profit.

The tempranillo, Vina Decana 2010 ($5, purchased, 12.5%), tasted like tempranillo — cherry fruit balanced by crispness and some sort of combination of vanilla and earthiness. No, it’s not a Gran Reserva Rioja, and I realize all those adjectives might confuse the issue. The point is that the wine has a lot more going on than one would expect for $5, and someone paid attention to this when they made it. In this, it reminded me of the much beloved and sorely missed Solaz, perhaps the greatest cheap red wine of my wine writing career.

The Montepulciano, Violescent Montepulciano d’Abruzzo 2011 ($5, purchased, 13.5%), was just the opposite, made to cost $5 and that what it tasted like wasn’t as important as how much it cost. The wine was rough and acidic, almost green and unripe in an old fashioned “This is the way we churned out cheap wine in Italy before the winemaking revolution of the past two decades” style. It was drinkable, but we want more than that, don’t we?

The other thing this illustrates is that wine quality is not always a retailer’s top concern, and this is especially true for retailers like Aldi that sell on price. Their thinking is centered around product mix, shelf space, what’s available, and what has the best margins. The burden is on the consumer to decide if the wine is a value, and given how little time most of us have to worry about these things (and little experience and education, as well), that’s not as easy as it should be. What’s worse is that retailers count on that, and which is why too much wine is like the Violescent and not the Decana.

More about Aldi wine:
? The Aldi wine experience
? Wine of the week: Aldi private labels
? The Five Day, $3 Wine Challenge: The results