Tag Archives: blue wine

Winebits 492: Corks, wine trends, wine gadgets

wine trendsThis week’s wine news: Another winemaker says corks are outdated, plus more silly wine trends and wine gadgets

• One more for our side: Cork is “a completely outdated“ technology, says a top Australian winemaker. Thedrinksbusiness website reports that Kym Milne, chief winemaker at Bird in Hand in the Adelaide Hills, told the London Wine Fair that “As wines age cork gives enormous variability – try 12 bottles from the same case and you’ll have 12 different wines. There’s too much variation from putting a piece of wood in the end of a bottle.” Needless to say, all of the wines at Bird in Hand – including the US$70 Nest Egg shiraz – use screwcaps.

• Who knew? Who says sommeliers can be stuffy and are out of touch with ordinary wine drinkers? That certainly isn’t the case for the trio of wine professionals who appeared in this Food & Wine article about wine trends, which included the dreaded blue wine. They didn’t exactly hate blue wine, which surprised me, but I was impressed with this: “The trend of making wine for people who hate wine confounds me.” Welcome to the wine business, pal, where that seems to be the goal entirely too often.

• Who is kidding who? How do you not get drunk? Don’t drink too much wine. Unless, of course, you’re an entrepreneur in Dallas who says you should put his magic wand in your booze. Read the story at the link at your peril; I don’t have the energy to comment on it. What I do know is that I have many better things to do with $25 – or even $70 – that the gizmo costs. Many, many, many better things.

Winebits 487: Big Wine and Meomi, terroir, blue wine

meomiThis week’s wine news: Big Wine scores with Meomi, plus the terroir debate and – shudder– blue wine

• Meomi success: Many of my colleagues continue to wonder what the fuss is about with Big Wine, since they don’t drink any of its products. So perhaps this item, from the Shanken News Service (subscription required) will help them understand. Sales of Meomi, which is the pinot noir that they love to hate, grew almost 40 percent last year to 1.1 million cases. Not coincidentally, Constellation Brands, the second-biggest wine company in the country, bought Meomi in 2015. Since then, sales have almost doubled, attesting to Big Wine’s clout in the marketplace and why we need to know what it does and how it does it. Because its brands are the ones that may displace the brands that we’re drinking.

.• Whither terroir? Bianca Bosker in Food & Wine offers an intelligent, balanced view of whether terroir – the idea that wine depends on a sense of place – exists. This debate has been going on for as long as I have been writing about wine, and each side is more entrenched than ever. The Wine Curmudgeon believes in terroir, because wine from Rioja in Spain should taste like it comes from there, just as wine from Napa Valley should taste like it comes from Napa. But technology has made the anti-terroir argument more tenable – no one pretends that Meomi, for instance, is terroir driven. It’s made to taste a certain way, using the most advanced winemaking techniques, and to appeal to the broadest swath of the marketplace. All I ask is that we know the difference, and judge the wines accordingly.

• Orange wine wasn’t enough: How about blue wine, from Spain’s Gik? It’s supposed to be a combination of red and white grapes, “sweeter and easier to drink.” The Wine Curmudgeon hates to rain on Gik’s parade, but we already have something like that. It’s called white zinfandel, and save for the shade of blue, it’s sweeter and easier to drink — and sales are from what they used to be. But what do I know? I just drink wine; I don’t market it.