by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On
John Cleese of Monty Python is not only one of the funniest people in the world, but he knows his wine: There ?s all ?this awful nonsense that perpetuates all this awful snobbery about wine.
The video, courtesy of InCa Productions at You Tube, is a clip of a documentary Cleese did a couple of years ago. No cheese in it, unfortunately.
by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On
The restaurant business, especially in Dallas, wears me out. It ?s mostly about celebrity chefs and having the most expensive menu, and too often, it seems, the chefs cook for fame and fortune and not to satisfy customers.
This is why I was so sad to learn that one of my favorite restaurants in Dallas, a soul food joint called Vern ?s Kitchen, closed last week. I can almost recite the menu by heart: short ribs, chicken and dumplings, chicken fried steak, meat loaf, stuffed bell peppers, greens, cabbage, smothered corn, white beans and black-eyed peas, sweet potatoes, and lemon pound cake (tightly, tightly, covered with plastic wrap). How much did I like Vern ?s? They didn ?t serve wine, and I still went as often as I could.
So why am I spending time on a wine blog writing about a soul food restaurant that didn ?t serve wine? Because a great restaurant is like a great wine. It doesn ?t matter how much it costs and it doesn ?t really matter what ?s on the menu or what the varietal is. Is the food real? Is the wine honest? Do the people cooking the food and making the wine care?
by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On
The Wine Curmudgeon gets scads of news releases, so it really takes something different to get my attention. And this one did, for a Web site called VinoForDinner.com: ?Vinofordinner.com will soon eclipse over 250,000 food and wine pairings enabling both web and iPhone application users to effectively choose wines under 30 dollars per bottle with ease. ?
We ?ll ignore that the sentence ain ?t all that well constructed and that the Wine Curmudgeon has insisted, for years, that anyone can drink whatever wine they want with dinner.
What got my attention is that this concept, no matter how noble in purpose, seems to be nothing more than the usual sort of wine industry effort to give wine drinkers not what they need, but what the industry thinks they should have. More, after the jump:
by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On
I made my third appearance on Olivia Wilder ?s New Art of Living program Sunday. I ?m the third guest, about 70 minutes in. We chatted about wine for warm weather, how to tell if a wine is sweet, and couldn't avoid screwcaps again. I'm also told the audience was at an all-time high. Click on the The New Art of Living link below to listen.
Technorati Tags: Internet radio,Wine Curmudgeon,Olivia Wilder
by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On
The wine business is in trouble by any number of measurements, but the one that strikes me the most is the Wine Curmudgeon Sample Index.
This summer, I have received more samples than ever before, including samples from wineries that would not have noticed my existence in the past. I have received so many samples, in fact, that I;ve actually declined offers of many more. That’s the first time in my 20-some odd years of writing about wine that I’ve had to do that.
How weird has it been?
• I got four bottles from a major Napa winery, including its $100 and $80 cabernet sauvignons. The catch, of course, is that I almost never write about those kinds of wines, and there was no real reason to send them to me.
• A couple of weeks ago, a leading California sparkling wine producer sent me samples of the same wine it had sent me in the fall.
• Double samples 00 that is, two bottles of the same wine in the same shipment — are rampant. One of the biggest producers in the world sent me a case of wine, two bottles each of six wines.
Why this is happening? What does it mean?
The recession is pummeling the wine business, whether you’re one of the biggest producers in the world, you make expensive wine, or you sell to ordinary consumers (though regional wine, interestingly, hasn’t been hit nearly as badly as California and European wine). Yet there is still a fair bit of denial going on, despite the layoffs and sales declines. Things have been so good for so long that it’s difficult for the business — mostly the producers and the wine media — to believe what is happening.
My favorite analysis comes from Derek Benham, who runs Purple Wine Co. and Sonoma Wine Co. in California, who says the market for $15 and higher wine has suffered significantly. Benham, whose companies make quality value brands Avalon and Mark West as well as private and second labels, was quoted in the San Francisco Business Times:
There’s been a wind sheer at $15 and above — a very serious downdraft. Consequently, some high-end producers are negotiating ‘massive deals’ with retailers or siphoning off production to ‘second labels’ to purge excess inventories of expensive wine they can’t sell at high-end prices.
Which goes a long way toward explaining why I’m getting so many samples of so much wine that I’ve never gotten before.
Producers, and especially those that make wine that costs more than $25, are desperate to move product. So they’re putting pressure on their marketing and public relations people to move the product, and the marketing and PR people are doing things they don’t do when times are good — like sending the Wine Curmudgeon $100 bottles of wine. I’m even getting cold calls from young women at agencies plugging high-end Champagne, asking me when I’m going to write about their $75 this and their $50 that. And then there are the news releases that show up daily in my inbox touting $40 wine, sparkling and otherwise, as affordable. And the double samples? Why not? The wine is sitting around, not doing any good otherwise.
The consensus from the PR people that I’ve talked to is that they are under more pressure than than ever before. So they send me samples of wine or make the cold calls because then they can show the client that they’re making an extra effort. And right now, that’s about the best anyone can hope for.
Technorati Tags: wine sales,recession and wine,Wine Curmudgeon
by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On
Some of you may have seen a post on Sunday with a very bad picture of me and some type about testing blog editors. It wasn ?t supposed to get posted, but did (not quite sure how). Feel free to ignore it, laugh at the picture, or hit delete.
by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On
Olivia Wilder has asked me back for The New Art of Living on Sunday. I should be on around 8:50 p.m. central time (though the show has been running late).
And Olivia ?s effort was the second most popular program on the network a couple of weeks ago. I was on that one, so the question becomes: Would it have been first without me?
