Homesick for Spain--Again.

I just watched the first episode of the new PBS series Spain--On the Road Again.

Can somebody please book me a ticket to Madrid ASAP? I miss it, and I was only there a few months ago.

The concept behind the series was that Mario Batali and Mark Bittman decided to eat their way through Spain. Then Gwyneth Paltrow decided to join the roadtrip. On the philosophy that three was a difficult number, they invited Spanish actress Claudia Bassols to join the crew. The result, if the first episode is any indication, is a wonderful glimpse into the sights, sounds, smells, and--most importantly--taste of Spain.

Their gastronomic journey through Spain shows how seriously the Spanish take their food and their wine, and it's a fabulous introduction to the connections between what Spaniards eat and the land and regional traditions of this country.

Don't watch it if you're hungry or thirsty, though. I got through the episode with some olives, Spanish chorizo, and a chunk of Manchego, all washed down with the last of my Twisted Oak River of Skulls Mourvedre. But most important, don't miss any of this series. You will soon be able to get the companion book, but until then visit their website and blog, set your DVRs to record the latest episode, and check out the recipes. Get some Spanish wine into the house, and sit back and treat yourself to some armchair travel during the next few weeks.

Full disclosure: watching this program may make you homesick for Spain, even if you haven't been there yet. Viewer discretion is advised.

Catching Up On Some News

Things have been pretty hectic around GWU$20 for the past few weeks, and I want to thank everybody for their patience as I finished up with classes, jetted off to Spain, and then drove to Sonoma for the summer. Sounds pretty glamorous, I know, but it felt more like mobilizing the 5th Fleet! Anyway, I've come to roost for two and a half months on the Sonoma Coast, ready to bring you news from Pinot Days in a few weeks, Taste 3 in Napa in mid-July, some winery visits, and all the regular wine coverage that you're used to--not to mention full reports and nearly 300 pictures from Spain. I'll get them up on Flicker in the next few days and post a link. (Vintage image of the Horicon Reporter)

Meanwhile, it's time to catch you up on some news. First off, if you subscribe to or purchase Wine & Spirits magazine be sure to turn to the back page of the June 2008 issue where you will find a cartoonized me, with dogs, and a tale of my experiences searching for bargains in LA. It was fun to write a piece for an editor like Josh Greene, and to be part of their annual issue devoted to great values in the world of wine. GWU$20 readers will see a lot of familiar names in their annual "critic picks" so be sure to pick up a copy on a news stand when you're out and about if you don't have it already.

Second, I was interviewed for pieces in both the Washington Post Express and MainStreet.com about good bargain choices for wine. I think the budgetary pinch is making a lot more people interested in finding good deals. You can check out the WPExpress article on Finding Good Wine at Great Prices and MainStreet.com's piece on The Top Ten Wines Sold in Grocery Stores online.

I've got some WBW and Wine Book Club updates, too, but will save those for a subsequent post. Meanwhile, happy reading online and offline, and see you back here a bit later for some wine blogging news and then tomorrow for a review of a classic French summer white wine.

Death of a Legend

Robert Mondavi, pioneering Napa Valley vintner, died this morning at the age of 94.

It's the end of an era.

If you've got a bottle of Mondavi wine in your cellar, I think tonight would be a good time to drink it. I'll be popping open the 2003 Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon, and raising a glass to this wine legend and all he contributed to American wine culture.

Living the Not So Big Wine Life

A week or so ago, when reading a post over at Fred Koeppel's Bigger Than Your Head on the 2005 Bordeaux vintage reports, I was powerfully reminded of Goldilocks. Goldilocks visited the house of the three bears and found that life inside was too big, too soft, and too hot. Or, it was too small, too hard, too cold. She was so relieved to find something just right that she fell asleep in the "just right" bed in utter exhaustion.

Sometimes, wine makes me feel like that. There are too many wines that are too big, too hot, too expensive, too manipulated, too corporatized, too hard to find--the list goes on and on. Fred's post prompted me to yearn for a drinking plan that would only include wines that were "just right"--that managed to hold together a whole world of good times, fantastic flavors, and quality in just one glass without going too far into the big, the hot, and the expensive. Fred agreed with me, and expanded on my "just right" description" to include "wines that reflect the grapes from which they are made; wines that reflect, as much as possible, the place where they are made; and wines that embody honesty, integrity and authenticity rather than ego, ambition and manipulation." As I couldn't have said it better myself, I decided to just quote him here. This picture, taken by the talented photographer Kathy~, captures visually what a "just right" wine tastes like to me. (photo of the Town of Monterosso al Mare used with the kind permission of the photographer, Kathy~)

We live in a culture where more is always seen as better. Perhaps the most visible signs of this are the McMansions that dot the landscape, full of rooms filled with stuff nobody uses. Sarah Susanka, the author of the best-selling The Not So Big House and The Not So Big Life, fights this trend in her work. She realized that houses were getting bigger and bigger--but had little "redeeming design merit." Comfort, she pointed out, has "almost nothing to do with how big a space is." Instead, it comes from "tailoring our houses to fit the way we really live, and to the scale and proportions of our human form." When the bigger-is-better mentality seeps into our lives, we end up "so stressed that we are numb."

I started thinking through how to extend Susanka's principles to wine, and have come up with some ideas for a Not So Big Wine Life. These ideas are increasingly shaping my wine purchasing and drinking habits.

1. Drink wine you find enjoyable and inspiring, regardless of hype. This sounds simple, but it's the heart of the whole plan. I'm inspired by wine that tastes good, is not priced prohibitively, and that is true to the varietal characteristics of the grapes that go into the bottle. Points, marketing, and lemming-like mass hysteria over the latest release or the most recent "vintage of the century" I do not find inspiring. I am not a big fan of what have become known as spoofulated wines--although you should read Craig Camp's thoughtful piece about spoofulation before you decide for yourself. And the idea of GMO yeast and grapes manipulated to cater to certain genetic tasting profiles makes my hair turn white. I don't find genetic coding of taste buds, yeast, or wine to fit consumer wishes inspiring. And frankly, life's too short to drink wine that isn't inspiring. What do you find inspiring in wine? And are you drinking it, or something else?

2. Drink wines that fit your life, and remember that bigger is not always better. I confess: every now and again a fruit-bomb of a syrah makes me very, very happy. But a steady diet of big, jammy reds and overly-oaked chardonnays can numb you to anything that is not HUGE. If this is what you drink most of the time, you may be in a "bigger is better" rut. Moreover, these wines don't reflect the way that most people are trying to live these days. I don't know about you, but there is less meat and more fish on my dinner table than there was five years ago. Happily there is more organic produce, too. Ask yourself this question: do big wines fit the way you live and eat? If not, ask yourself why are you drinking them?

3. More is not always better, either. Moderation is the key to a long-term happiness with wine. Drinking until you fall down in a tasting room, or a living room, is not clever. It's sad, actually. So, too, is the pursuit of more points, more expensive bottlings, more cases in wine storage, being on more mailing lists for more highly allocated wine than ever before, etc. We live in a consumption-mad society. Every day we are told that having more is what makes you comfortable. Does it? Ever? There's always more wine in the world, so relax and remember that sometimes just enough is just right.

4. Be adventurous. If you want to experience the world in a glass of wine, you have to get off the highway now and again and do some exploring. I've been doing that a lot this year, by getting to know rare grape varieties like Negrette and the wines of Italy. I can guarantee that you won't like every wine you drink if you are out exploring. So what? How will you ever know what wines really inspire you if you drink the same, safe things night after night?

5. Support sustainability. I mean more here than just looking for organic grapes--though that's important, too. What I mean by sustainability is to create a wine life for yourself that is sustainable in all the ways there are. Support local wineries, small wineries, small wine merchants, and folks who make wine with respect for the environment and who take responsibility for the future. By honoring the grapes, places, and people who make and sell the wine we love--and supporting them with our custom--we will help to shape a wine industry that has some shot of surviving global warming and downturns in the dollar.

What do you think? Are you already living a Not So Big Wine Life? If not, is this something you imagine yourself being able to embrace? What's missing, and what could be improved upon? Add your thoughts below.

Get Out the Vote for the 2008 American Wine Blog Awards

Voting opened today for the 2008 American Wine Blog Awards. Tom Wark developed these awards last year to recognize the quality of wine writing and the depth of coverage that is available every day--for free--on blogs all over the internet.

The Awards work through a process of open nominations, the selection of finalists from those nominations by a panel of five judges, and then voting in which 70% of the decision will be determined by open voting (not Chicago style, folks! one person, one vote) and 30% by the judges. Voting will continue until March 29 at 12:01 AM.

Wonderful blogs are on the list for your consideration--and I do mean consideration. Please take the time to look at all the blogs nominated in each category before you cast your vote. Browse around through some older posts while you're there. And my sincere congratulations to all those many bloggers who were nominated by readers in the initial stages of the process, as well as to those who were named as finalists. After all, most bloggers blog because they hope to reach an audience. Nominations are the best proof that we have succeeded.

Yesterday, I thought a great deal about a colleague of mine who truly believes the following: "a rising tide lifts all boats." Tom wanted a rising tide of recognition to lift all wine bloggers and to give credibility to the work that they were doing to promote wine knowledge. Every wine blog reader and writer is contributing to this rising tide, and that's a good thing.

Overwhelmed by Wine? You're Not Alone.

If you think you are the only person in America who is overwhelmed by wine, think again. Wines and Vines' Tina Caputo revealed that 23% of 3500 wine drinkers surveyed feel as you do, according to a study commissioned by Constellation Brands and released under the name "Project Genome."

Why are people overwhelmed? There are too many options in the store, they don't know what to buy (so they pick the label they like best), they can't find information in the stores to help them that is easy to understand, they can't find anyone to help them make the decision, and if the information they get is confusing, they walk out of the store without buying anything. This may explain why the 23% of those surveyed who fit into the Overwhelmed category bought only 13% of the wine consumed.

Contrast this pattern with the group that had almost precisely the opposite profile in the survey: Enthusiasts. The Enthusiasts represented only 12% of those surveyed--but bought 25% of the wine. Enthusiasts entertain at home, think they know something about wine, are relatively affluent, browse wine in stores and in magazines, are influenced by ratings, and most of their wine costs over $6. (who the hell is buying most of their wine for under $6? If this is you, I want to meet you.)

Jose Fernandez, Constellation's CEO, concluded from the study that "We've under-communicated to these [Overwhelmed] consumers," he said. "Increasing per capita consumption in the Overwhelmed category is our biggest opportunity… If we do nothing, today's Overwhelmed will be tomorrow's Overwhelmed." Fernandez blames this trend in part on the wine industry's tendency to hire Enthusiasts, who can't empathize with the Overwhelmed. Constellation's head of consumer research, Leslie Joseph, concurred and said that "We need to do a better job as an industry of [sic] helping these people understand what a wine's going to taste like."

I hate to be a contrarian, but I totally disagree. First, there are two categories where I think there is much more potential for growth in wine sales: the 15% of Savvy Shoppers who like trying new wines and could probably be persuaded to be even more adventurous; and the good old Enthusiasts who are already buying a lot of wine and will probably only continue to buy more. Second, I don't think Enthusiasts are to blame when it comes to a failure to reach the Overwhelmed. If someone is overwhelmed by wine then there are probably a lot of factors contributing to the issue that no one--no matter how clearly they communicate--is going to be able to surmount. At least not in a 5 minute encounter in aisle 4 of BevMo.

Third and most importantly the Overwhelmed will not be made less overwhelmed if Constellation and other big brands start explaining more clearly how their wine is going to taste. Such tactics will only make the Overwhelmed even more panicky. I don't think people trust advertising when it comes to wine. Most people think the opposite: that the wine advertising is inherently not to be trusted. That's why so many people rely instead on supposedly unbiased, authoritative, points-based ratings, and why if they read 6 wine labels that all promise raspberries and crushed velvet fruit they leave the store in despair. The Overwhelmed want someone else--someone not making and selling the wine--to tell them what the wine tastes like.

So is there a way to help the Overwhelmed, send them armed and ready into Wine Warehouse to face the Sauvignon Blanc aisle, and point them in the direction of wine enthusiasm rather than wine frustration?

Yes.

It's called the Internet--and it's less scary than a wine store because you can go there in your pajamas. Type the name of a wine you've seen in a store or on tv into a search engine, and you will get information. Will you get too much information? Of course, but you have to let it wash over you and hold on for dear life to the few bits and pieces that float by that make some sense. This is how I feel when I ask someone to explain baseball. Gradually, you will find that more and more pieces "stick," and you will feel less overwhelmed when you go into the wine store to make your purchses. You may even find information in your searches that comes from Enthusiasts who run wine blogs like this one and at least try not to be too scary. When you do, you might get hooked on this wine malarkey and turn into an Enthusiast yourself.

Wine's Gender Gap?

We hear a lot about the gender gap these days. Women are from Venus, men are from Mars. Men are for Barack, women are for Hillary. Women like white wine, men like red. (photo Moët is Murder (or "Where Wine Comes From") by Bitrot)

While I have to respect the fact that in some households there is tension about wine choice, there is nothing, and I mean nothing, that gets my blood pressure on the rise faster than the notion that somehow women have to be treated "special" to get them to buy, drink, or understand wine. Wines named after clothing, beauty products, derogatory names, sexual come-ons--we've seen them all, with press releases that announce "wine especially for women." Richard the Passionate Foodie reports that the most recent advanced market studies have concluded that older women can be convinced to buy wine by putting some flowers on the label.

Flowers.

They're kidding, right?

Alas, no. This kind of bizarre thinking on behalf of wine marketers is fueled, I think, by the "I only drink chardonnay" and "White wine is wimpy" nonsense that you sometimes overhear in restaurants and bars. I always want to walk over, remove the wine list from hands of the people engaged in such conversation, and tell them to order martinis and/or daiquiris and be done with it. Turns out this wine gender gap is so treacherous, entire articles have been written to try to guide couples across it. Try beaujolais--your wife will love it, and never notice it's not chardonnay. Try a BIG chardonnay--your husband will thank you for introducing him to a high alcohol wine that's not zin.

Here's what I think: this is not about gender, it's about fear. Women are afraid to try something new and red in case they get either the hard sell ("you don't love this wine? You have to love this wine? It's HUGE!"), the dismissal ("I can't believe you don't know enough to know this is a great wine"), or the disappointment of drinking a wine that is so alcoholic that they wake up the next day feeling dreadful. Though, ladies, you need to check that nice chardonnay you're drinking--they often have more alcohol than the reds. Men are afraid to try something new and white in case they get the "real men don't drink white wine" speech from a friend, because they found they liked zinfandels in 1976 and haven't wanted to appear ignorant about wine since then so order the same thing over and over, or because they actually can't taste anything that isn't a 15.5% alcohol red (these are the same people who say "white wine is so THIN" while drinking a German Riesling Spatlese).

I'm all for people liking what they like, and then drinking it. But I put it to you: how do you know you only like chardonnay if that's all you drink? And don't reply that you tried an Australian cab in 1992 and didn't like it so you called it a day. Where's your spirit of adventure?

What I'm not for is marketing tactics based on fear. We're being told this all boils down to whether we have XX or XY chromosomes. Fiddlestix (a line of damn fine wines made by a woman that includes both reds and whites--you should try them). This is not about whether you are a man or a woman, or like reds or whites when you go to the wine store. It's about how to get a fearful wine consumer to buy a wine despite the terror they are going to do something wrong. Slap a flower, a man in a cowboy hat, or a fuzzy animal on a wine label and it turns out that their fear evaporates.

I don't buy it. Their fear hasn't gone anywhere. Thank you Marketing Geniuses. You've actually made the fear of wine worse by explaining it away as a gender issue.

The More It Costs, the Better It Tastes

My friends up the road at CalTech have proven that the amount a wine costs shapes your response to the wine. In brief, the more it costs, the better you think it tastes. This theory was tested on 21 volunteers who tasted 5 cabernets 15 times. For the study, a $95 bottle of cab was given a $10 price tag, and a $5 wine was priced at $45. They discovered that the "rewards center" of the brain showed more neural activity when the price stick was higher, even if it was the same wine.

I have long suspected that this was the case. In a culture that tells us every day to spend more on things we can't afford, that only the super-rich (and super-thin) are having real fun, and that it's better to die in debt than to deprive yourself of any of your entitlements to consumer goods during your life, this comes under the "sad but true" news department.

According to the story that appeared in the Australian newspaper, The Age:

The study found that inflating the price of a bottle of wine enhanced a person's experience of drinking it, as shown by the neural activity. Volunteers consistently gave higher ratings to more expensively labelled wines.

"What this study shows is that the brain's rewards centre takes into account subjective beliefs about the quality of the experience," Professor Rangel said.

"If you believe that the experience is better, even though it's the same wine, the rewards centre of the brain encodes it as feeling better."

So, there we have it. Your response to a wine is subjective. One of the things your brain takes into account when making its subjective judgments about a wine is the cost. So I guess there was no point in telling you to try that $12 Zweigelt. Even if it's just as good as an overpriced $45 Pinot Noir, you will still tend to think that the Pinot is better, because of that pesky price tag.

My brain must be wired funny, because I get the biggest tingle in my "rewards center" when I drink great wine and discover it only cost $8. Maybe I need a good electrician.

I Feel So...Old

It's official: I'm old. Sometimes I even feel as old as this old zinfandel vine looks. (picture of Old Vine Zinfandel from Alderbrook)

Decanter magazine reported that Australia's Yalumba Winery has decided to bring order to chaos in wine labeling by precisely setting out in an "Old Vine Charter" what counts as an "old" vine, what counts as an "antique" or "very old" vine, and what counts as an "exceptionally old" vine. 35 years of growth is all it takes to be "old." Antique, I am happy to report, is 70 years old or more. And "exceptionally old" vines are 100+ years old. What that means is that most reading this blog are old in vine-years. Or they soon will be.

When I pick up a bottle that says "Old Vine" I tend to see it as a marketing strategy, which is all the more reason to applaud Yalumba Vineyards for trying to set some standards in the industry. If "old vine" is to mean anything more than just a marketing pitch, it has to signify something. At Alderbrook in the US, for instance, "old vine" means a vine that has been in use for at least 40 years. At Seghesio, all "old vine" wines are made from fruit that comes from vines that are at least 60 years old. Dry Creek "old vine" zinfandels are made with fruit from 50-100 year old vines.

I suppose that a "middle-aged vine" designation is neither likely nor desirable. But with this range of opinion on what constitutes "old" I think the buyer should beware. Your "old vine" wine may be younger than you are!