Robert Parker faces criticism, 1980s edition

Robert Parker last week. Photo courtesy Alder Yarrow

Sometimes you hear an anecdote that just has to be shared with the wine world. Such it is with Robert Parker talking about the New York Times review of his first book.*

I've decided to give the winemaker anonymity, even though he didn't ask for it. The man from Monkton might remember this incident, but it also might not matter; from his recent Orson Welles-meets-Ho Chi Minh appearance at the wine writers' symposium, it seems that he's not reading a lot of writing on wine these days, so he probably won't read this.

So the winemaker is sitting in Parker's office in Maryland, and Parker has just seen the New York Times review of his book. It's not positive. And Parker says, "How can they be so mean? Don't they know I put my heart and soul into this book?"

* (If somebody wants to search the NYT archive and find the review, I'd like to see it.)

There was more, but that's all you need to know. I have a few winemaker readers and I thought you'd enjoy reading this. 

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Does the world need a new top tier for Chianti Classico?

Europeans love classification schemes. It's not enough for a winery to make superior wine; eventually there's a push for official government recognition of it.

Last week the Chianti Classico Wine Consortium unveiled the first wines from its new top tier: Gran Selezione. It's not a tiny group of rare wines: the consortium expects 10 percent of the wines in the region to be Gran Selezione, and more than 30 different wineries have already produced one.

The motivation is obvious. Chianti Classico isn't content to battle for the $20 wine drinker; vintners there want to go after the big bucks.

This is more rare than you'd think, simply taking the top wines from a region and saying, "We'll charge more for them," and getting the government to agree. It's as if the US government sanctioned the use of "Reserve" in Kendall Jackson Vintners' Reserve Chardonnay.

The way the wines make the new top tier is unique: it's not by classified vineyards, as in Burgundy, or by amount of time in oak, as in Rioja.

World's 100 Best Types of Wine: Group D

We are voting for the world's best 100 types of wine in 11 installments; this is the fourth. Please vote for the best 9 of these 15 wines. For details on this poll, please read the introductory post Vote for the World's Best 100 Types of Wine.

Some interesting candidates this week, all capable of outstanding wines, and perhaps good motivation to try some types of wine that aren't currently in your cellar.




See the results for Group A, Group B and Group C.

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Things Domaine de la Romanée-Conti owner Aubert de Villaine says: a writing exercise

Aubert de Villaine

Many of my colleagues are currently at the Symposium for Professional Wine Writers in Napa Valley. In the interest of contributing to their dialogue on narrative construction as well as ethics, I offer this exercise.

This week I heard two anecdotes about Domaine de la Romanée-Conti co-owner and co-director Aubert de Villaine's recent visit to New Zealand for the Central Otago Pinot Noir Celebration.

1. Blair Walter, winemaker, Felton Road: "We just had a big event here, and three of the 18 bottles of DRC Echezeaux were corked. Aubert said, 'It was not good.' We had a bottle of DRC the last time he was here and it was horribly corked. He wouldn't admit it. He said, 'The wine's not showing well today.' If DRC is corked, it's no skin off his nose. He's not going to replace it."

2. Stephanie Lambert, winemaker, Amisfield: "I had an argument with Aubert de Villaine when he was here. I said I was there in Burgundy in '06, I was working the vintage, and it was raining the whole time. He said, 'No it wasn't.' But I was there. We argued outside a restaurant. He wouldn't admit it was raining."

Now, writers, here are your discussion questions.

1) Should these anecdotes be reported? If so, how should they be reported?

2) Can you construct a narrative around them? If so, what is the theme?

3) Would it influence your judgment if you thought you might never again be invited to taste a DRC wine? Should it?

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World's Best 100 Types of Wine: Group C

We are voting for the world's best 100 types of wine in 11 installments; this is the second. Please vote for the best 9 of these 15 wines. For details on this poll, please read the introductory post Vote for the World's 100 Best Types of Wine.

The list is beginning to take shape. See the results for Group A and Group B.

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Jurassic Ridge wines: Better for you than brain surgery

Lance Blumhardt

Behind the tasting-room counter at his one-man winery Jurassic Ridge, Lance Blumhardt recoiled from my botched introduction. I had heard he was a neurosurgeon. I was wrong.

"I'm a neurologist," he said. "Why does everyone think a doctor is surgeon? Why do you want to go cutting bits off of yourself every time something's wrong?"

Jurassic Ridge makes some of the most iconoclastic wines in New Zealand. Blumhardt needs two separate signs on the counter to detail all the normal winery practices he doesn't do, but that skips over his main point of distinction: long aging before release. His current-release Sauvignon Blanc is from 2010; his Syrah is from 2007.

"People in New Zealand drink their wines far too young," Blumhardt says. "The big industrial wineries promote the idea that you've got to drink it the minute it's made. Unfortunately, so much of Marlborough is owned by Constellation and Pernod-Ricard, and it's true, the industrial wines are done almost the moment they're bottled."

But after reading his sign -- no this, no that, what he calls "natural vegan wines" -- it's a surprise when he says that while he likes to use wild yeast as a starter, "then I inocluate with one of the newly available yeasts that have such great flavors." It makes him harder to categorize.

World's 100 Best Types of Wine: Group B

We are voting for the world's best 100 types of wine in 11 installments; this is the second. Please vote for the best 9 of these 15 wines. For details on this poll, please read the introductory post Vote for the World's 100 Best Types of Wine.




See the Group A results here.

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We are the enlightened 5%

Earlier this week, I wrote an article for Wine Searcher about people who buy wines over $20. A big takeaway is that only 5% of American adults are willing to spend that much, occasionally, for a bottle of wine.

It's easy to read that and worry about a charge leveled on wine drinkers until recently: that we are elitist.

But there's a big difference between the enlightened 5% and "the 1%" of Americans in the highest income bracket. In the enlightened 5%, we are self-selecting, inclusive, and all about having a good time at nobody's expense but ours.

Anyone can join this group: all you have to do is buy a $20 bottle of wine once a month.

You can say there's an income below which people can't afford to do so, but I'm a freelance writer. I guarantee you I have been below whatever income level you draw, and I've never stopped enjoying a good bottle of wine now and then. You don't have to buy Bordeaux futures to join the 5%; you just have to splurge once in a while on an Oregon Pinot Noir.

The US differs from Europe in that we've always had a divide between the enlightened and everyone else. This was a whiskey-drinking country practically from its inception, with wine lovers like Thomas Jefferson in the minority.

What's changed as the US has become the world's largest wine market is the spread of enlightenment, not the popularization of wine for the masses.

Parkerd, the license plate

I was at a traffic light in Santa Rosa behind this car. Didn't get a good look at the driver, or how many points she has ...

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Vote for the World's Best 100 Types of Wine

Last week I posted the first draft of a list of the World's Best 100 Types of Wine as a lark. Now I'm going to take it seriously.

I could write my own list of the World's Best 100 Types of Wine, and maybe I will later. But first I wanted to take a poll. What do you, my readers, think?

I like this exercise because, although it requires hard choices, it's also far more diverse and inclusive than what you see from the major wine critics. Hopefully the list we come up with together will inspire people to go out and try great wines of the world that they haven't sampled before.

The poll design, though, was a challenge. Starting with the list Alder Yarrow and I put together in 5 minutes while drinking, adding your comments and suggestions on that blog post, and a few wines we had just plum forgot, I came up with a list of about 175 candidates. I whittled it down to 150 with some choices we might revisit together later. But that's a really unwieldy poll: Here's 150 wines, pick your top 100.

Here's what I did. I broke the 150 wines into 10 groups of 15. I'm going to create 10 polls. In each one, you pick the best 9 wines out of 15. These individual polls are a lot easier to deal with, and more fun too.

I used a random-number generator to assign the wines into groups. As in the World Cup, this created one Group of Death that you will know immediately; a group so strong that I'd be happy just drinking those 15 wines for the rest of my life. The No. 10 wine in that group will be better than the No. 7 wine in some other groups, but that's the way random assignment works. I couldn't figure out a better way to do it. If I could, I'd be making a fortune at Google, not writing a wine blog.

That's why I decided to take only the best 9 from each group. We'll fill 90 spots on the list through these polls. Then we'll fill the remaining 10 spots with a final poll of runners-up and worthy nominees that weren't on the list to begin with. I had to play an editing role to get these polls manageable, but I  want this to be a crowdsourced list.

One tricky issue is, what constitutes a type of wine? Where do we draw the boundaries? I tried to do it by thinking of a wine list. Stags Leap Cabernet is very different from Howell Mountain Cabernet, but most people lump them together as Napa Valley Cabernet. However, Alto Adige Pinot Grigio and Gewurztraminer are not lumped together in most people's minds.

It's wine; most distinctions are arbitrary. I separated Chablis from white Burgundy, but not Saint-Bris, even though it's the one wine in Burgundy made from Sauvignon Blanc and I just had a killer one last week (Domaine Bersan Mont Embrasé 2012). For some regions I lumped things together; in others I separated out grape varieties. I tried to go by how similar they are. One region ended up with 6 entries on the candidate list while some major wines combined the subregions of an entire country, or in one case, two countries.

I regret that the list is unfair to some of the best wines in the US, which doesn't follow appellation groupings like most of the world. Example: Trefethen makes a nice Riesling in Napa Valley, but one wine isn't enough to put Napa Valley Riesling on the list. So be it. Tough decisions have to be made to get to 100, and even though I have been enjoyed Tatomer Santa Barbara County Grüner Veltliner in restaurants all over San Francisco, more significant categories than that will not make the cut.

I want us to have fun with this, so I'm planning to roll out one poll per week for 10 weeks. And to add a little mystery, I'm not going to post a master list of the 150 candidates until the last post is up. You'll just have to wait and see whether your favorite underappreciated wine region makes the cut.

Hopefully you'll enjoy this little exercise and be inspired to try some new wines.

Vote for Group F

See the Group E results

See the Group Dresults

See the Group C results

See the Group B results

See the Group A results

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World's 100 Best Types of Wine: Group A

We are voting for the world's best 100 types of wine in 10 installments; this is the first. Please vote for the best 9 of these 15 wines. For details on this poll, please read the introductory post Vote for the World's Best 100 Types of Wine.




Check back next week to vote for Group B.

Follow me on Twitter: @wblakegray and like The Gray Report on Facebook.