Tasting note terms to ban – have your say
Last week, NewYorker.com engaged its readers by asking which words should be eliminated from the English language. The surprising winner was “moist.” Now that they’ve jettisoned moist, it’s time for us to have our fun. Wine tasting notes are all-to-often laden with obscure, sometimes overly precious, redundant or otherwise silly words or phrases. We started...
Francesco Rinaldi, dolcetto d’Alba, Roussot, 2010
Dolcetto, which means either “sweet-ish” or “the one you drink while your Baroli are aging,” is rarely in better hands than it is with the traditional producer Francesco Rinaldi. Many dolcetti have coarse tannins but this “Roussot” 2010 has a seductive roundness to it, offsetting the notes of gentle bitterness and dark fruit. I give...
Nondrinkers are terrible presidents. Discuss.
Timothy Egan has a piece up on the Opinionator column of the NYT with a provocative thesis on the correlation between teetotalism and presidential leadership: “The nondrinkers, at least over the last century or so, were terrible presidents.” Our country has a history of both binging on alcohol and abstaining so it is in an...
La Presse: SAQ paid Suckling $24,000 for reviews
SAQ, the state-owned wine entity that has a monopoly on wine retail in Quebec, paid wine critic James Suckling $24,000 last year. Suckling and SAQ had both denied any financial relationship. La Presse reports in their online edition that they obtained documents through freedom of information law. The documents reveal that the SAQ paid Suckling...
Chateau Latour to halt futures – what do you think??
Chateau Latour to halt en primeur After the 2011 vintage Chateau Latour, owned by billionaire Francois Pinault, will not pre-sell their wine as futures. What do you think? “That’s great. It’s good to see a billionaire doing the right thing for a change by not ripping off millionaires. Also, Salma Hayek is hot.” -Mandy Street,...
Wine is about balance…and hula hoops
This is certainly a bravura performance. But, sheesh, couldn’t she use a Laguiole to open the wine?!?
Can’t wait to see this as a grande finale in the Master Sommelier exam!
Thanks, Phil!
Talking dirty: Rioja soil map
Mosel winemakers love to talk about the blue slate of their soils. A discussion of Chablis couldn’t be had without mentioning Kimmeridgian. Coonawarra has its terra rossa and Rutherford has its dust. But what about the soil in Rioja? As Telmo Rodriguez recently discussed at length, to his lament, the Rioja winemaking process favors process...
Wine LOLz from the Twitterverse
DrVino: Michel Rolland has an autobiography coming out? A magnum oakus, surely. CraigCamp: hear the Oxygen network picked up the rights and will turn it into a micro-series Wink Lorch: Bet it will appear late OlivierLandry: A very ripe comment on your part, good sir. #RollandPuns …I think we’ve extracted everything we could out of...
Telmo Rodriguez uncorks terroir in Rioja
Telmo Rodriguez was in full cry when I met him in New York City recently. Although the 50-year-old “driving winemaker” studied enology in Bordeaux, worked a vintage at J.L. Chave in the Rhone, and for 25 years has made his own wines across Spain, what was on his mind when we spoke was Rioja: “What...
Saveur finalist, Bordeaux 2011, Packers – sipped & spit
SIPPED: award According to the illustrious Hosemaster of Wine, wine bloggers are barking poodles calling out for attention. So, yay, the editors at Saveur have included this blog as a finalist in the best wine and beer blog category. Woof! Click through to vote and see the complete shortlist (which includes some good ones but...
Massachusetts wine shops worth seeking out
Massachusetts is a state coveted by wine retailers: with strong tech and finance as well as other industries, major research centers and the jet-set destinations of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, it’s fair to say there’s a large population interested in wine. However, the state is one of the hardest for retailers to ship wine into....
Do wine writers write only for the one percent?
Gawker ran a piece recently that rips into the idea that the “one percent” don’t have enough money to live on. What provoked it was a Canadian one percenter who wrote in Toronto Life about his plight, and details his living expenses and several others posed for the magazine and detailed their expenses. One line...
