Tag Archives: Dave McIntyre

studio microphone

Winecast 74: Dave McIntyre and what’s coming for wine in 2023

Dave McIntyre
Dave McIntyre: The beginning of the end for bottles?

Don’t necessarily expect good news about pricing, availability, and smaller producers in this year, both here and in Europe

There’s a bit of light at the end of the wine tunnel, but we still have a ways to go before it gets actually light. That’s the forecast for 2023 from Washington Post wine columnist Dave McIntyre, whose measured analysis facing wine this year was quite impressive.

Dave and I have known each other since the before Drink Local Wine, which means we’ve seen a lot of wine trends come and go. In this podcast, we talk about what wine is facing in 2023, That includes:

• Expect higher prices for a variety of wines, including those from areas where the 2021 harvests were poor. That includes several popular regions in Europe.

• Also pressuring prices higher: Increased costs for glass bottles, as well as continued high-ish shipping costs. Dave says he has been told the pandemic’s supply chain shipping woes are starting to ease, but we’re not quite there yet.

•  The biggest losers in all of this? Perhaps the smaller, more interesting producers, wholesalers, and importers. who don’t have the margins or the economies of scale to adapt to this changing marketplace as well as the biggest wine companies. Dave says he would not be surprised to see some close this year.

• One piece of good news in all of this? Dave says higher glass prices could hasten the move from glass bottles to other, more environmentally friendly packaging — and that it’s past time for the chance to start. He says he has seen some fine examples of quality box wine.

• And Dave — because he is my friend — added his plug for putting ingredient and nutritional labels for wine. Conumers want to know, he said.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 15 minutes long and takes up 10 megabytes. Quality is good to excellent. And there is even a grimace from Dave, which I describe because no one can see it.

More wine podcasts:
• Winecast 73: Randall Grahm and ingredient labels for wine
• Winecast 72: Denise Clarke and the progress — and challenges — for Drink Local
• Winecast 71: Paul Tincknell and solving all of wine’s problems

Will listing bottle weights in wine reviews help save the planet?

wie bottles
“Bottle weight.. we don’t need no stinkin’ bottle weight.”

Maybe not, but it’s much more effective than giving yet another 92 to yet another overpriced wine

Who knew wine bottle weights would be one of the next great battlegrounds in the fight against climate change? But that appears to be the case.

• In February, wine critic Jancis Robinson announced she would list bottle weights in her reviews, with the idea that great wine doesn’t need to be in a heavy bottle.

• In June, a variety of wine writers (myself included) got an email with an open letter from Italian producer Max de Zarobe, asking that we take a winery’s sustainability efforts into account when scoring their wine.

• Last week, Dave McIntyre wrote a piece in the Washington Post decrying heavy wine bottles for the environmental obscenity that they are – low recycling rates and carbon footprint among many faults. And which, frankly, made the most sense of almost all of the stuff I’ve read on the subject, and I’d say that even if Dave wasn’t my friend.

Heavy wine bottles once mattered – say, 200 years ago, when wine was shipped in horse carts over rutted European roads and the bottle needed to be robust enough to stand up to the punishment.

Today, the heavy bottle is nothing more than marketing – call it an enological phallic symbol for an industry dominated by men who sell big, expensive bottles of wine to other men. A woman executive, whose company uses the lightweight PET bottle (made of plastic), told me her harshest critics weren’t consumers, but older men in the wine business who were aghast that her company didn’t do what tradition demanded.

Which, of course, speaks volumes about how effective listing bottle weights in reviews would be. I’m not against it; in fact, I ranted about the subject seven years ago — yes, seven years ago. Two of the worst offenders then were Bonterra and its “organically-farmed wine” and a Downton Abbey wine. What better way to convince consumers you’re making “real wine” than with a heavy bottle?

In other words, the people who make decisions in the wine business could care less about bottle weights. If they did, they would have downsized years ago. Lighter bottles mean cheaper production and shipping costs and less wear and tear on equipment. If saving serious money didn’t convince them, then why would the bottle weight in a review?

And, frankly, I don’t think the wine drinkers who read Robinson and rest of the Winestream Media care much, either. What matters to them are points, not how heavy. If it’s 94 points and a heavy bottle, who cares?

Having said that, I’ll start listing bottle weights for the most egregious offenders, if only to follow Dave’s example. Most of the wines I review, given their price, long ago gave up any heavy bottle pretense. And though listing weights may not do much, it’s still more than most of the rest of the wine business is doing.

Photo: “Two boxes of green wine bottles” by wuestenigel is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Winebits 561: Drink Local, three-tier, Dave McIntyre

drink local
Cool… a book about local wine trails

This week’s wine news: Drink Local gets a book, plus three-tier and the Supreme Court and Dave McIntyre celebrates his 10th anniversary at the Washington Post

• All over the country: One more sign that drink local has become mainstream – a travel guide from one of the world’s leading travel publishers. Lonely Planet’s “Wine Trails: United States and Canada” includes 40 wine trails: The usual California, Oregon, and Washington suspects, plus Texas, Virginia, Vermont, Nova Scotia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Arizona, North Carolina, and Maryland. Again, if someone had told me I’d be writing about this book when we started Drink Local in 2007, I’d have laughed. And rarely have I been so glad to be wrong. So glad, in fact, that we’ll give a copy of the book away during Birthday Week next month.

• Bring on the Supremes: The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a key three-tier case this term, though it may not be as important as many people are making it out to be. The court will decide the constitutionality of a Tennessee law that requires anyone who wants a retail liquor license to be a state resident. Residency laws are often used to keep out-of-state companies, like Total Wine, from opening in a new state (and was used in 2016 in Indiana to stop an Illinois chain from opening stores). This Tennessee case is a big deal, given how few three-tier laws get to the Supreme Court. But there has also been a lot of cyber-buzz that the court will use it to allow direct shipping from out-of-state retailers, so that someone in Texas, for example, can buy wine from a store in Illinois. Currently, that’s illegal in most of the U.S. I checked with the blog’s liquor law attorney, and he says it’s too early to tell if a residency case could transform into a direct shipping case. If anything develops, I’ll write more.

• Congratulations, Dave: My pal Dave McIntyre, who was a co-founder of Drink Local Wine, recently celebrated his 10th anniversary as the Washington Post’s wine critic. This is most welcome news, and not just because Dave and I have been friends for a long time. He possesses a fine palate, cares about quality and value, and wants to share those things with his readers. Would that more people who do this thought the same way.

Winebits 529: The making wine easier and more fun edition

making wine easier
“I wish I had sound advice about how to make wine easier.”

This week’s wine news: How to make wine easier and more fun, including a terrific rant from Dave McIntyre of the Washington Post

• You’re not stupid: This column from the Washington Post’s Dave McIntyre is brilliant, and I’d say that even if we weren’t long-time friends. “Are you tired of being wine shamed? There are plenty of people who will tell you what you’re doing wrong with wine. … Who needs that sort of criticism? We are judged on so many things in life. Wine should not be one of them.” Or, as regular visitors here know, drink what you like, but be willing to try different kinds of wine. Dave offers three pointers to help you do that: Quality glasses, the correct serving temperature (with an aside to restaurants and their propensity to do this so wrong), and learning how to tell flawed wine. All sound ideas, and not one revolves around price, varietal, or appellation.

• Death to scores! The Wine Curmudgeon is always happy to pass along another indictment of wine scores, and this is one of the best. Writes Katie Finn on the Coachella Valley Independent website: “Your house is lovely, but there’s no pool, so you get an 83.” Which I wish I had written, and will use from now on. Finn’s point? That scores make wine more intimidating and more difficult, instead of easier. Which is their reason for being. “Points give consumers the false idea that there is such a thing as a ‘perfect’ wine,” she writes, as accurate a criticism as possible.

• Everyday wines: Eric Asimov, writing in the New York Times, laments the difficulty in finding quality everyday wine amid wine’s confusion: “As much attention as is paid to the rare and profound bottles that fire the imagination, far less is devoted to the sorts of wines that people might actually consume at any given weeknight meal.” Guess he needs to spend more time on the bog, yes? Asimov’s advice is spot on, and especially in finding a good wine shop – which we’ve always advocated here.

Winebits 522: Cheap wine 2018 edition

cheap wine 2018This week’s wine news: We survey cheap wine 2018 wine developments

• The best cheap wine? My pal Dave McIntyre, showing his heart is as big as his talent, reviewed 29 grocery store wines in the Washington Post. Is it any wonder we’re friends? Dave’s conclusion? The best were the Woodbridge and Robert Mondavi chardonnays and the Santa Rita, Cousino-Macul, and Los Vascos cabernet sauvignons. What struck me, other than Dave’s endurance, was that he thought that many of the 29 wines were as poorly made as I do. Would that the wine business did, too.

• Cheap sparkling wine: Eva Moore, at the Free-Times weekly, does another great service: ranking nine sparkling wines that cost $10 or less. Her conclusions are about the same as mine, too; what does that man, wine business? Her top-rated bubbly is German, and not easy to find, but an old favorite is also highly-ranked, the legendary Cristalino.

• Bad wine is bad wine: Eric Asimov, writing in the New York Times,also understands what the wine business doesn’t: “Few things have been as damaging to the American wine industry as its homogenization.” And this, too: “Anyone who is in the business of examining wine critically needs to actually be critical, not simply validate consumer choices, and looking at wine critically means understanding the chasm between mass-produced wine products and wines that are an expression of a place, a people and an aesthetic.” Is it any wonder I consider Asimov to be the best wine writer in the country?

Winebits 343: Dave McIntyre, wine scores, and wine in the movies

Dave McIntyre
That’s Dave in the middle, and he should be smiling.

? More than well deserved: Who knew the Wine Curmudgeon would know someone who had won the same award as a Mondavi? Or the legendary Konstantin Frank, without whom U.S. regional wine would not have been possible? But that’s my pal Dave McIntyre, who was given the Monteith Trophy over the weekend for his work as a wine writer. Dave has done much for the cause of wine, including co-founding Drink Local Wine with me when people thought we were crazy. So it’s more than time that the wine world recognized the effort Dave has made, not only for regional wine, but for wine drinkers everywhere. Dave will be in Dallas in a couple of weeks, and I have laid in some Texas wine that we will celebrate with. Congratulations, my friend. But couldn’t you have worn a tie for a big deal like this?

? End the tyranny: Or so says Michael Woodsmall at the Grape Collective, calling for an end to the 100-point scoring system. “It should be duly noted that these scales don ?t take actual wine’s nuanced characteristics into account; they merely assigned values to general traits. … Also, it is no longer the seventies and eighties.” This sentiment is something the Wine Curmudgeon has long advocated, and Woodsmall makes an intelligent argument for the end of scores, even throwing in a little political theory to explain why the debate generates such controversy. This is a revolution, and the scoreists will defend the ancien regime until the bitter end.

? Hollywood and wine: The Wine Curmudgeon, in discussing U.S. wine culture in the cheap wine book, talked about Hollywood’s complete indifference to wine for most of the 20th century, and how this indifference reflected American views of wine. So I was more than pleased to see an academic study of the subject, supporting my views. Raphael Schirmer of the University of Bordeaux, writing for the American Association of Wine Economists, has found that as wine has become more popular in the U.S., so has wine become more popular in film. This is not just about Francis Ford Coppola owning a major wine company or movies like “Sideways;” rather, it’s the idea that we drink wine as part of our everyday lives, and the movies that are made reflect this.

Even the Germans know who to call about sweet red wine

The Wine Curmudgeon, of course. There I am, on page 20 of the current issue of Meininger ?s Wine Business International, a German-based trade magazine, quoted in a story discussing the popularity of sweet red wines. And how do we know this is a big deal? Because the magazine costs ?20 ? about US$25. I don ?t waste my time being quoted in those cheap $5 and $10 magazines.

It ?s an interesting story, though not quite as thorough as the piece I wrote for Beverage Media. It gives credit for the sweet wine movement in the U.S. to the regional wine business, and specifically to Texas ? Llano Estacado. I don ?t know that Llano is the only regional winery that had something to do with this (St. James in Missouri, Oliver in Indiana and Duplin in North Carolina, among many others, come to mind), but it ?s intriguing that a European publication recognizes the role of the regional business.

More, after the jump:

Continue reading →