finalanalysis

From reader Eric P. in response to my post on “Top Ten Wines in America.”

sorry.. I like Ecco Domani, okay?

Then after my Thanksgiving Wine Recommendations:

Oh man.. I hope I wasn’t too mean with my last comment. I *do* want suggestions for wine I haven’t tried, really. I just hate shelling out $20-60 for something I’m really gambling on.

No Eric you weren’t too mean. I am just a lazy blogger who hadn’t gotten around to commenting on what you should be drinking for less than $10 other than Ecco Domani.

The ‘Thanksgiving Wine Pairing’ story/post is an annual tradition in food and wine journalism. But there is no “perfect wine for thanksgiving.” The flavors of the various traditional Thanksgiving dishes are widely varying, so food and wine writers will default to either offering the classic turkey pairing (Riesling) or relying on a versatile and popular food-pairing varietal like Pinot Noir.

I get tired of reading these stories, so as a sort of joke I decided to post something self-important telling the reader to, basically, drink whatever he or she wants to. on Thanksgiving

This is a public service announcement from your friendly Atlanta wine blogger:

This Thanksgiving, drink whatever you like to drink, and don’t worry about whether it goes with the turkey, the cranberry sauce or the nuts in the stuffing. Just enjoy whatever you have in the company of your loved ones.

That is all.

I make my living in large part by selling bottles of wine that the end consumer pays upwards of $30 in a retail store, and upwards of $70 in a restaurant. Via reader Tom J., This article from the Los Angeles Times merely confirms what I could have told you already, if you had asked. Did you ask? That’s what I thought. A few sobering (ha ha) quotes:

• “Sales of high-end wine are plummeting, wine merchants say, and once-rationed top California Cabernets are in ample supply.”
• “I still drink wine with my wife every night, but before I might have bought Santa Barbara County Pinot Noirs for $20 to $30; now I am paying $9.99 for a Castle Rock Pinot from Mendocino County,”
• “As retailers and dining establishments cut back, many small wineries — which don’t produce enough to have a large presence in grocery or other chain stores — are seeing their inventories bloat. Distributors and wholesalers are cutting orders because they don’t want to purchase wine that could take months to sell.”

Via Vinography, here are the top ten wines, by volume, consumed by Americans each year:

• 1 Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay USA
• 2 Beringer Vineyards White Zinfandel USA
• 3 Cavit Pinot Grigio Italy
• 4 Sutter Home White Zinfandel USA
• 5 Inglenook Chablis USA
• 6 Ecco Domani Pinot Grigio Italy
• 7 Yellow Tail Chardonnay Australia
• 8 Copperidge Chardonnay USA
• 9 Yellow Tail Shiraz Australia
• 10 Franzia Winetaps Vintner Select White Zinfandel USA

…if you fall into a vat of them from your apartment:

A Ukrainian woman survived a 100ft plunge from her ninth floor flat – into a giant vat of grapes.

Ludmilla Vasko, 29, fell from the balcony of her apartment in Uzhgorod but plummeted straight into the grapes, harvested from the vineyard below.

A police spokesman explained: “She was still sitting in the vat of squashed grapes when we got there. She was very shocked.

“But doctors examined her and said she was absolutely fine apart from the shock. The grapes cushioned her fall.

“She saved the winemakers a bit of work as well in the process because she crushed most of the grapes when she landed on them.”

This is hardly a new point, but John Mariani makes it with panache:

For a five-year-old wine blended from 35 percent cabernet sauvignon, 35 percent merlot, 20 percent malbec and 10 percent cabernet franc, it is very mature, the tannins very soft. The real problem is that it tastes like a hundred other wines of its kind — the global taste you find when a very new, very well endowed winery lacks the tradition to know just what their vineyards may be capable of expressing…Had I tasted Andeluna Pasionado blind, I would no more guess that it was from Mendoza than I might think it came from Mendocino County, California, or Valencia, Spain, or Ragusa, Sicily…This is a wine designed to win awards, the kind of cabernet that California cult wine faddists say will “blow your doors off.” It tastes more of the lab than of the individual vineyard, like prune juice more than good wine, so cloying in its fruit, so lacking in a fine edge of acid, that my wife and I left half the bottle undrunk while having a simple dinner of grilled pork chops and white beans.

In this vein a friend and customer of mine recently shared that he “didn’t have any room in [his] soul for these kinds of wines anymore.” It is a sentiment one hears more and more among the wine cognoscenti, but one that doesn’t seem to have seeped into the consciousness of the general wine buying public. Wine that don’t taste more of the lab than the vineyard risk being tagged as austere, coarse or–insult of insults–”old world.”

From reader Tom J:

Over-priced restaurant wine has been a problem for the thirty+ years I have worked in the business, (NY, LA, SF, , MA, ME, VT, NC, Atlanta). When Chris Campbell, who with his family owned Nauset Beach Club on Cape Cod in the late 1980’s, and with his wife UVA and now Troquet in Boston charged $5 per bottle over his cost and then $10. “Restaurant professionals” said that they would fail. They thrived. Passionfish, a husband and wife owned restaurant in Pacific Grove, CA near Monterey, have a similar philosophy of very fair pricing. The concept works. But I am not holding my breath until other restaurants follow their lead. And don’t get me started about stemware and storage…

This comes as a surprise to about zero people in the wine business:

The longstanding belief that the film Sideways sent Pinot Noir sales through the roof was confirmed today.

For the record, I liked that movie fine. My brother in law called it “Animal House in the wine country” and I think about sums it up.

But the part that is always missing when people bring up Miles distaste for Merlot in that movie is that, at the end of the movie, when he is drinking his cherished 1961 Cheval Blanc out of a styrofoam cup, the wine he is drinking is Merlot.

The book on which the movie is based was written in the early 1990s, when there was a ton of crappy cheap Merlot on the market. Today, guess what there is a ton of that is crappy and cheap?

News that the LivEx 100 index is in the toilet presents me with an opportunity for schadenfreude:

Fine wine prices are at 18-month low, according to recent figures from Liv-ex.com. The Liv-ex 100 Fine Wine Index fell 12.4% in October with highest-end wines being hardest hit.

I find the entire idea of a trading index in wine to be pretty repugnant. Yes, wine is an agricultural commodity and other agricultural commodities are traded on futures indexes all the time. But whereas pork bellies and FCOG are fungible commodities, wine is not.

The value of wine is, in no small part, tied to its provenance. As such, I believe, the wineries should realize the bulk of the profit from sale of their wine. Traders like LivEx create scarcity in the wine market through speculation, driving up prices and realizing greater profit than the producers in many cases.

(Critical acclaim plays a large role in high prices too, but that’s another blog post.)

Plus wine is…wine! You’re supposed to drink it. You want to hoard something precious, buy gold. LivEx traders are the hedge fund managers of the wine world, and I have a hard time feeling sorry for them when half of the properties in Bordeaux are in bankruptcy.

Mike Steinberger thinks so:

Oenophiles are divided over lots of issues—the merits of red Burgundies, the virtues of new oak, the utility of Riedel glasses—but they all seem to agree that restaurant wine prices are, on the whole, abusively high.

This leads to the perhaps inevitable conclusion:

In the current economic climate, gouging on wine is not just unsporting but suicidal. Restaurants looking for strategies to survive the downturn ought to begin by cutting the prices on their wines.

I make my living in no small part selling wine to restaurants, but when I dine out I frequently bring in my own bottle and pay a $15-$25 corkage fee. I justify this by saying that I only bring in wines that a restaurant doesn’t carry (which is true) or older vintages that they can’t get (which is also true), but in the end I don’t want to pay $150 for something I can get for $65.

Some restauranteurs are taking notice:

Richard Betts, the wine director at the Little Nell in Aspen, Colo., instituted an across-the-board 30 percent price cut in wine prices in 2001 and says the restaurant’s seven-figure annual wine sales are now double what they were then. Betts says that people who previously would order only one bottle of wine with dinner began ordering two, there were more repeat guests, and favorable publicity brought scores of new ones to the restaurant.

Hear hear.