Tag Archives: Wine buzz

The Web’s latest wine buzz, 10/21/07

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Tune in to what top wine bloggers and experts are decanting into cyberspace with handpicked highlights of their latest and greatest.

Proving once again that the selection of fine but affordable wines may be never-ending, Food & Wine serves up the ‘zine’s American Wine Awards ’07. And it comes with menu pairings.

You’ll find seven wines of popular varieties for $20 and under. If you’re feeling a little extravagant, that’s complemented by a list of best wines running over $20. There’s also a winery-of-the-year award going to Washington State’s Long Shadows, which, ahem, is “devoted to producing luxury wines from Washington vineyards in partnership with international winemaking superstars (i.e., people who cast long shadows).”

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the American Wine Awards and features lots of surprises (among them a top Chardonnay from Oregon) and all kinds of labels we bet you haven’t heard of before — plus several you may know very well, including a few repeat award winners.

Think you know the basic ground rules of wine? Maybe not, according to Wine Enthusiast’s fable-busting piece entitled 5 Wine Myths Debunked. Hint: has to do with things like smelling the cork and letting the wine “breathe” a little after uncorking.

To novices, the culture of wine can seem a rarified, untouchable realm best left to sniffing, postulating experts. But delve a little and you’ll find that basic wine appreciation is not only fun, but not all that complicated. The first step? Debunking these popular myths …

A whiff of eucalyptus adds an unexpected aromatic dimension to certain Australian wines, something the vines pick up from the leaves that fall and decay on the vineyard soil. One of the delights highlighted by the 30 Second Wine Advisor in this review of seven down-under winners.

I hadn’t anticipated turning this into an all-Australian week on the 30 Second Wine Advisor ranch, but when the hits just keep coming, it makes sense to go with the flow.

And so it was for me this week, when the tasty Australians that I picked off the shelf for Monday’s and Wednesday’s editions were followed coincidentally by an unexpected visit from an Australian-wine importer who came to town bearing a stellar cluster of beauties from the Antipodes.

At Business Week, Robert Parker focuses attention on what he calls one of white-wine’s best values (the dwindling value of the dollar notwithstanding) — Muscadet from France’s Loire Valley. “Bone-dry” and at their peak, these wines are well within Wine News Review’s fairly frugal affordability index.

The following wines, reviewed by my colleague David Schildknecht, are ‘naked’: unoaked, low in alcohol, and with no residual sugar. They’re from the Muscadet Sèvre et Maine appellation and are sur lie, meaning the wine has been bottled directly from the tank, where the lees (dead yeast cells and remnants of grape skins) remain. That gives the wine freshness and complexity. Muscadets are best during their first three to four years, so these reviews are for the 2005 vintage.

Need more reason to try out a Muscadet? Mary Ewing-Mulligan at Wine Review Online, decrying the “misunderstanding” about Muscadets, recounts her recent encounter with a couple terrific examples over a dinner of raw clams and bouillabaisse at a French bistro.

Muscadet, it seems, has been relegated to a remote fringe of the wine world populated by wines for special needs rather than the more desirable neighborhood of good quality, great-tasting wines. Two things are wrong with this situation: one, it is unfair to the fine Muscadets that exist; and two, it deprives many wine lovers of experiencing the tremendous pleasure they might get from a bottle of Muscadet.

The Web’s latest wine buzz, 10/3/07

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Tune in to what top wine bloggers and experts are decanting into cyberspace with handpicked highlights of their latest and greatest.

A recent trip to central New York state’s Finger Lakes region served as a double eye-opening experience for Financial Times wine columnist Jancis Robinson — first, the “exceptional quality” of the Rieslings made there and, second, “how little they seem to be appreciated, or even known, in New York City.” An abundance of tourists and the warming effects of the lakes have helped an increasing number of wine producers sprout up in the essentially white-wine area, says Robinson. And they’re getting an assist from their U.S. Senator, Hillary Clinton, seen by locals as a “true missionary” for the wine-growing industry because of her advocacy in Washington. Robinson’s column also cites six “excellent” regional wines, including dry and sweet Rieslings.

Speaking of Rieslings, Food & Wine serves up a “brilliant” Australian pairing of, well, food and wine. The focus is on renowned Riesling maker Jeffrey Grosset and superstar chef Neil Perry, both of whom, well, like to eat and drink. And eat and drink they do — with the meeting’s menu including the kind of chicken curry “you find bubbling in a blackened pot on fishing boats throughout Asia” to go with a 2005 Grosset Piccadilly Chardonnay — one of a half-dozen wines (all recent releases, because, Grosset explains, “I don’t rate older wines as being necessarily better than younger ones, just different”). About as mouth-watering as a food/wine story can be.

Maybe the cork ain’t dead yet? It’s becoming increasingly clear to winemakers that using screw caps means being “extra careful” during their wine making, according to this New York Times piece by Erik Asimov: Screw caps prevent the dreaded cork taint that causes an estimated 5 percent of corked wines to go bad, but it turns out that screw caps are now recognized by some as occasionally having their own problems — something called “reduction,” which in layman’s terms translates into aromas such as burned rubber, cabbage and rotten eggs.

The Web’s latest wine buzz, 9/24/07

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Tune in to what top wine bloggers and experts are decanting into cyberspace with handpicked highlights of their latest and greatest.

“The great wines of the world are expensive and often hard to find,” says Food & Wine. Okay, your first reaction may be, tell us something we didn’t know. This article, however, is well worth a read for what it goes on to say — namely, that it’s possible to find affordable wines that “echo the characteristics of the truly extraordinary.” If, of course, you look hard enough, which is what Ray Isle did for us in his piece aptly entitled Superstars & Super Steals. Nine different pairings are offered — with prices as low as $13 for the affordable-steals class and and as high as $114 for the extraordinaries — for types ranging from Alsace Riesling and white Burgundy to red Bordeaux and Oregon Pinot Noir.

Another penny-pinching reason to drop by Food & Wine is an additional Isle report, this one focusing on an assortment of top Italian wines under $20. Isle wise-crackingly demands our pity for having to taste his way through 187 under-$20 Italian wines. An “exhausting” job, he declares, but eventually admits the assignment was “entirely enjoyable.” Most intriguing of his picks, perhaps, is the 2004 Librandi Cirò Rosso ($10) from the southern Italian region of Calabria. It’s made from the Gaglioppo grape variety, which is obscure virtually everywhere else in the world, Isle observes.

Speaking of penny-pinching, Eric Asimov at The New York Times spotlights a variety of wines that the headline touts as Happiness for $10 or Less. In addition to providing a “Tasting Report: Structure and Personality, With a Small Price Tag” for 10 national and international picks, Asimov serves up some worthwhile insider factoids, such as this interesting peek into restaurant mentality: “The restaurant industry has a longstanding belief that the lowest-priced wine on the list will never sell. Nobody wants to be seen as cheap. But the second-lowest-priced wine, that’s the one people will gobble up.”

There is absolutely nothing cheap about wines produced in the California vineyard sketched by Jay McInerney in House & Garden. This is the story about how the former CEO of Northrop Corporation decided to start a vineyard in what “may qualify as the most unlikely patch of vines in the world.” Or at least the ritziest — the Los Angeles suburb of Bel Air. But make no mistake, Moraga Vineyards is not a rich man’s plaything. We learn that the former sommelier at Alain Ducasse’s three-star restaurant in Paris, Stephane Colling, now the wine director at the Modern in New York, calls Moraga his favorite California winery.

A different winemaker altogether is profiled by Jerry Shriver at USA TODAY: Randall Grahm, who officially calls himself “President for Life” of Bonny Doon Vineyard in Santa Cruz, Calif. “But a more apt title would be ‘Supreme Seeker/Philosopher/Gadfly/Court Jester,’ ” Shriver observes. Now Grahm says he is rethinking his direction, heading into the realm of biodynamics. Grahm’s metamorphosis-in-progress, aka “existential crisis,” is a clicker.

The Web’s latest wine buzz

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Tune in to what top wine bloggers and experts are decanting into cyberspace with this handpicked weekly review that highlights their latest and greatest. You can also dig into specific things these folks and other wine experts are writing about with WNR’s All-In-One Wine Search tool (motto: "avoid info-overload—just gimme the wine").

 

Italy takes a spotlight in the wine blogosphere, where, to begin with, Wine Spectator’s Joe Cook informs us that the “jury is still out” on the quality of the wines, just as the harvest is getting started. The basic problem is that although the growing season has seen mostly excellent weather, “cool, wet condition” have set in, Cook reports. But, ah! – the Italian optimism knows no clouds: Not only are vintners cheery (as long as the weather clears quickly) but it might even be an “extraordinary vintage if you took care of your vineyard and cut back on grape yields," said Riccardo Cotarella, one of Italy’s leading enologists quoted by Cook.

Meanwhile, at Wine Enthusiast, Monica Larner gushes that the Montalcino-based Castello Banfi wine estate and castle inaugurated a much-anticipated boutique hotel, “bringing it closer to its goal of creating the ultimate Tuscan wine destination.” It’s not just the wine, it’s the view, too: “Because of the castle’s high elevation, most rooms benefit from long views over iconic Tuscan landscapes of rolling hills and cypress trees.” The photo alone is worth a visit to this page.

But other bloggers are always ready to remind us that the culture of wine does not end at the Italian border. Remember California’s Napa Valley?

Jeff Lefevere at Good Grape recounts a day of wine tasting in Napa, where at one site he “could feel my wallet separate from my back pocket.” The stop at Mondavi was “akin to a Catholic going to the Vatican” (“I mean, you kind of have to go, don’t you?”), but pleasant enough. But the tasting at the V. Sattui Winery turned into a love affair.

Napa’s Patz & Hall wineryIt’s not just the wine: Napa’s Patz & Hall winery tasting room rocks.

At Wine Review Online, Robert Whitley confides that tasting wine on some days just seems “a bit too much like work.” (Poor guy!) But then other days are “pure, unabashed joy.” Figured out the reason? “It’s the wine, silly!” The object of Whitley’s affection is Napa’s Patz & Hall winery, whose wines are “among the best…of their type made in California.” Even the tasting room rocks.For some reason, glasses (the kind you drink out of) also made a mark in the wine sector of cyberspace.

Saint Vini at The Zinquisition opines on the perennial fuss over the wine prices being charged by restaurants, with the added twist of the markup if you buy it by the glass (btg). Vini does the math and parses the rationale. But don’t get him started on corkage fees!

Donald A. Dibbern, Jr., at the Wine Lovers Page, sets his sights on glasses, too. You know you’ve found a wine lover when he says that “the event we all have been waiting for has at last occurred” – and that would be glass maker Riedel’s introduction of its twelfth different Pinot Noir wineglass shape. All kidding aside, an astute review of why wineglasses have different shapes, and why you should care.

And thus ends this week’s virtual tour of the wine blogosphere. I’m going to go look at that castle in Tuscany again.