Tag Archives: Wine Curmudgeon

The final post

man making a point
Ah, the WC look. Who else could get away with that?

“My necessaries are embark’d: farewell”

Yes, the quote is from Shakespeare (“Hamlet,” Act 1, Scene 3). And why not go out by stealing from the best?

Today’s is the blog’s final post, and it has been a grand and glorious run — some 4,700 posts over more than 16 years. Which, actually, was even longer than my time in the newspaper business (and I didn’t have to cover one high school football game in the process).

Who knew that would happen?

The blog survived the Trump wine tariff as well as the worst recession in 45 years, and it even survived all those people – and there were entirely too many — who never understood why I didn’t want to write about $40 wine. “Because most of us can’t afford it!” “No? Really?”

What it couldn’t survive was the 21st century wine business, and that I wrote about entry level wines at a time when there were fewer and fewer entry level wine drinkers. Or, as my brother told me when we discussed this, “It’s so hard to stay fresh when the industry you cover is so stagnant and status quo.”

Which I wish I had written, say, 10 years ago.

As noted, I’ll take the paywall off the old blog at winecurmudgeon.com later this week, so anyone who wants to can pick and choose and hopefully get a chuckle from some rant back in 2011. The Substack will go away, also later this week; I’ve been assured that paid subscribers will get refunds for their unexpired terms.

Thanks to everyone for the kind and more than gracious remarks they’ve emailed, commented, and even posted elsewhere on the cyber-ether since I decided to close the blog. I am flattered and even a little embarrassed. At heart, I guess, I’m still a newspaperman, and we’re not used to that sort of attention.

In the end, I have my cheap wine – my quality cheap wine, I should add — and I have my memories. They are fabulous, wonderful memories of drinking and writing about the wine that most of us drink and sharing it with everyone who read the blog.

We had a marvelous time, didn’t we? Which, in the end, is all that really matters.

2024 $10 Hall of Fame

woman drinking wine at dinner
“Thank you, WC, for another terrific $10 Hall of Fame.”

10 wines entered the Hall of Fame this year, while 5 dropped out

The blog’s final $10 Hall of Fame reflects all of wine’s troubles and travails over the past several years — supply chain woes, even more availability conundrums than usual, and the scourge that is premiumization.

Yes, 10 wines entered the hall, the most since 13 joined the Hall in 2018. But five dropped out, mostly for availability, and only a dozen or so merited consideration. That was down from the 18 I considered last year, and it’s only a third of the three dozen or so that were usually good enough to be considered in the blog’s pre-pandemic days.

The reason for the latter is simple: There are fewer and fewer quality wines that cost less than $15, as the wine business continues to ignore everyone who doesn’t consider $30 or $40 affordable and just the thing for a week night dinner. Nothing illustrates this more than the lack of decent rose for $15 or less — and that is actually available. That only one rose made the Hall this year is an affront to wine drinkers everywhere.

Nevertheless, the Hall is going out in style. The wines that earned selection demonstrate that it’s possible to make quality wine costing $10 or $12 — and that there is a market for such wines.

The 2024 inductees include:

• Six whites: Three French wines, including two picpouls — the Jadix and the La Chapelle du Bastion — and the Domaine Bel Air Muscadet; two Spanish whites, the Protocolo Blanco and the Marques Cacera verdejo; and South Africa’s Wolftrap white blend.

• Two reds: California’s Shannon Ridge Vineyard Wrangler Red and Wolftrap’s red blend.

• A sparkling: The Italian Jeio Bisol Prosecco Brut, a Prosecco.

• A rose: France’s Paul Mas Cote Mas Aurore — and in a 1-liter bottle, no less.

The dropouts: The French Le Petit Gueissard and the Chilean Tres Palacios roses, both for availability. The 1-liter Azul y Garanza tempranillo from Navarre in Spain and the French Little James Basket Press white blend for quality, prices increases, and because they’re  more difficult to find. The French Mont Gravet carignan is, apparently, no longer made.

The complete 2024 $10 Wine Hall of Fame is here. The Hall’s selection process and eligibility rules are here. Know that I considered wines that cost as much as $13 to $15 to take into account price creep and regional pricing differences.

Photo: “Kyla at dinner tonight at Cobre eating tacos and drinking Rose (not cougar juice)” by Chris Breikss is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

 

Turner Cheap Wine of the Year 2024 shortlist

women at Zoom wine tasting
“We need to look for the wines on the Turner shortlist, yes?”

One of these six wines will be named the Mack Turner 2024 Cheap Wine of the Year

The 2024 Turner Cheap Wine of the Year shortlist only has one red wine, but that’s probably not surprising. It has always been more difficult to make quality red wine for less than $15, and — given wine’s trends — it seems there is less reason to do so.

The award’s selection process and eligibility rules are here. I considered wines that cost as much as $15 to take into account price creep and regional pricing differences. The award is named for the late Mack Turner, to honor one of the WC’s dearest friends and a terrific cheap wine advocate. Mack (known on the blog as The Big Guy) died at the end of 2022, and he has been much missed.

Three South African wines are on the list, but it’s in no particular order; the winner will be announced Jan. 11:

Stemmari Grillo 2022 ($8, purchased, 13%): My tasting note is simple: “Damn.” I haven’t had a grillo, the Sicilian white grape, that tasted this good in years.

The Wolftrap White 2021 ($10, purchased, 13%): How can this Rhone-ish white blend from South Africa be so layered and fresh and yet cost only $10?

Moulin de Gassac Guilhem Blanc 2022 ($11, purchased, 12.5%): This vintage of the French white blend is even better than usual, and it’s always top notch.

Excelsior Cabernet Sauvignon 2020 ($9, purchased, 14%): Another South African gem — $10 cabernet that tastes like cabernet, and how often do we see that?

La Vieille Ferme Blanc 2022 ($9, purchased, 13%): This French white blend from one of my favorite producers elicited this tasting note: “Oh, baby!”

The Curator White 2021 ($12, purchased, 13): White South African blend (mostly chenin blanc and chardonnnay) that is both oily, fruity (stone fruit), and fresh.

More Turner Cheap Wine of the Year:
2023 Turner Cheap Wine of the Year: Matchbook Cabernet Sauvignon 2020
2022 Turner Cheap Wine of the Year: Scaia Rosato 2020
2021 Turner Cheap Wine of the Year: MAN Chenin Blanc 2019

Photo: Nataliya Vaitkevich via Pexels

It’s a Wonderful Wine Life 2023

One last time: The WC’s holiday wine traditions, video and literary

I wrote three Christmas parodies during the blog’s run —  my take on “It’s a Wonderful Life,”  as well as A Wine Curmudgeon Christmas Carol and ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas: The cheap wine version. Needless to say, all are brilliant. And I should add that Eddie Murphy recently told Jimmy Kimmell he loves “It’s a Wonderful Life,” so I can only hope Eddie — and his pal, Dick Cavett — will like my version, too.

The video is the WC’s quintessential holiday wine advice video, made with the incomparable Michael Sansolo for the Private Label Manufacturers Association. This was supposed to be a series, but then the pandemic happened and my work with the association came to an end. Ah, but we came so close to making the WC a YouTube star.

The original video post ran here. The video is age-restricted, since it’s about alcohol, but click the link to watch it on YouTube.

The WC’s career as the WC

Small boy making faces
Even then, the WC had no use for premiumization and overpriced wine.

A brief history of the blog, its origins, and all the rest

My career as the Wine Curmudgeon started more than 20 years ago. That’s when the food editor at the Star-Telegram newspaper in Fort Worth, Amy Culbertson, wanted to name the occasional wine column that I wrote. I offered the usual stupid suggestions — several of them used the word “grape,” if I recall correctly — when Amy came up with “Wine Curmudgeon.”

The rest is history.

Two points to note here: First, that was also the nom de plume of a renowned wine writer named Jerry Mead, who died around the time Amy named the column. However, Amy didn’t know that, and choosing Wine Curmudgeon was more about my approach to wine writing than anything else.

Second, many, many people have helped me over the years, not only teaching me about wine but offering wisdom and advice about the blog. Amy is the only one I‘m going to mention publicly, since most of the rest still work in the wine business and the last thing they need these days is a compliment from me. But they know who they are, and thank you.

So, the blog’s history and my career as the WC:

• There were actually three versions of the blog — the first, using a TypePad address (winecurmudgeon.typepad.com) and which still shows up every once in a while in a Google search; the free version at winecurmdgeon.com that ran from 2007 to 2021; and the Substack newsletter.

• I taught wine and beverage management at the Cordon Bleu in Dallas before the school went bottom up in the U.S., as well as at El Centro College in Dallas (now called the El Centro campus of Dallas College). I taught off and on five or six years; I loved teaching, and still miss it. The students, almost all of whom were fun and attentive, didn’t care much about the blog, which I never understood. And yes, I had to attend faculty meetings, which — as my mother warned me, having taught on the college level — were even worse than could be imagined.

• Wine talks at the State Fair of Texas. Yes, the WC was a draw, and people still ask me when we’re going to do them again.

• Two Wine Guys. My pal John Bratcher and I did home wine classes in the Dallas area, and we had a steady business before the recession. There was even a website, though it’s long gone.

• Consulting for the Private Label Manufacturer’s Association. I still run the video we made featuring holiday wine advice every year around this time. And there is a video or two of me somewhere doing a TV-style stand-up from the trade group’s annual convention: “This is Jeff Siegel, the Wine Curmudgeon, reporting for the PLMA.” We were going to change the wine world and convince supermarkets to sell quality cheap wine under their own label. But the group’s legendary president, Brian Sharoff, died and then the pandemic hit.

• Drink Local Wine. I was the president for a while, as well as one of the co-founders with Dave McIntyre. We did some of the best work anyone in wine has done in getting regional wine its due.

16 years on the blog, part II

reporter at desk
Who knew this guy wold morph into the WC?

These nine posts weren’t necessarily the most popular in the blog’s history, but they were among the best and most important

This is the second of two parts looking at some of the best posts that appeared during the blog’s 16-year history. Today, the best of the best. Part I: The posts no one appreciated, even though they should have.

Picking the best posts I wrote over the blog’s past 16 years and 4,700 entries was much more difficult than I thought it would be. Chalk that up to lots of quality content, right?

Or just a bad memory.

Nevertheless, these nine posts were among the best — as well as some of the most important, offering a perspective rarely found elsewhere and about as far from toasty and oaky as wine writing gets.

In no particular order:

Wine writing accreditation. Yes, only people with “credentials” should be allowed to write about wine. You can imagine how I felt about that proposal. This 2011 post was one of the most popular in blog history; in those days, I could have written about wine writing every week and made myself a star.

The red wine bias study, in which Neal Chaudhary and I showed — using math, even — that the Winestream Media and its 100-point scoring system favored red wine over white, regardless of quality.

Convenience store wine. Yes, people buy wine at convenience stores. Shocking, isn’t it?

Cooking shows and wine’s fall from grace. The Baby Boomers’ cooking shows — Julia Child, et al — featured wine with their recipes. Today’s video chefs — Alison Roman, Frankie Celenza, and so forth — rarely do. As I wrote: “Hence, the youngest generations have never learned that wine is just as much a part of dinner as plates and letting the pots soak.”

Arty, the first AI wine writer. Quite brilliant, actually, foreshadowing the uproar over artificial intelligence five years before it happened — and quite funny, too.

Welcome back, restaurants. This post spurred one of the most important members of the Winestream Media to write a not-so-nice rebuttal, taking me to task for suggesting that restaurants lower prices, offer BYOB, and write more interesting lists to lure diners back after the pandemic. How dare I?

Cheap wine vs. wine made cheaply made. This concept plagued the blog for years, since most people assumed they were the same thing. I never really understood it until New Orleans’ Tim McNally explained it to me in 2014. So I wrote that cheap wine should be more than “Two Jack in the Box tacos for 99 cents. … [which] are both cheap and a value, but why would you eat them unless it’s 2 a.m. and you’ve been drinking all night?” Because the best cheap wine is more than fast food, as I like to think we’ve shown over the years.

Ingredient labels. We’ve almost won this one — the first labels should appear in the next 18 months or so. The first mention of ingredient labels on the blog came in 2008, about six months into its existence.

Iran and the neo-Prohibitionists. Want to know what Prohibition is like? Look to Iran, where alcoholism is rampant and there are AA chapters — even though booze is illegal and you can be flogged if you drink it. Ask the next Neo you meet if that’s what they have in mind.

Ask the WC 41: Final edition

Fans Wearing Yellow T-Shirts Watching a Match
“He’s really going to do it, isn’t he?”

This, the final edition, of Ask the WC: What to do after the blog ends

Because the customers always have questions, and the Wine Curmudgeon has answers.

Dear Jeff:
Is there anything we can do to get you to reconsider ending the blog? I understand your reasons, but there is an audience for what you do.
Loyal reader

Dear Loyal:
Thank you for the kind words, but no, not really. I checked with some very smart people, and we considered a variety of ways to keep the blog going (including asking Churro, the blog’s associate editor, to take my place). But, in the end, there just seems to be little reason to write about quality, affordable wine when the wine business has very little interest in making any.

Say it ain’t so, WC:
Who do you suggest we read instead of you?
Need suggestions

Dear Need:
My pal Dave McIntyre at the Washington Post is one of the best. Joe Roberts, the 1 Wine Dude, has the proper perspective on the wine business. And, perhaps surprisingly, there are still plenty of local newspaper types who write about the sorts of wines most of us drink..

Hey, Wine Curmudgeon:
Can’t believe you’re leaving. What will you miss the most?
Gobsmacked

Dear Gobsmacked:
You, and the rest of the blog’s readers. Yes, I long ago tired of the arguments about availability, but other than that, you’re the reason I did this for so long. You love wine as much as I do, and you want to find something to drink that doesn’t taste like it came from an industrial spigot.  How could I not appreciate that? And, though you didn’t ask, I won’t miss writing tasting notes. I’m almost giddy with the thought that I will never have to do it again.

More Ask the WC:
• Ask the WC 40: Gallup poll, premiumization, RTDs
• Ask the WC 39: Drinking less, affordable wine, cheap wine
• Ask the WC 38: More about negative reviews, inflation, availability

Photo: Juliano Ferreira via Pexels