What are San Francisco Giants fans' favorite types of wine? Survey says ...

How Family Feud works

The San Francisco Giants play a Family Feud-type game with fans at home games, in which a single fan has 60 seconds to guess all the top answers to a question. It's often based on an advertiser, resulting in some stupid questions like, "What are the best things about flying Virgin America?" (No. 1 answer: "Mood lighting." From a Virgin? That's cockpit tease.)

On Friday, the question was interesting. San Francisco is probably the most wine-savvy city in the United States, and it's the capital of California wine country. So what would 100 Giants' fans say when asked,

"What is your Favorite Type of Wine?"

I'll give you a chance to play along. There are 5 answers and you have 60 seconds. The answers are after the jump.

Survey says:

Bunnahabhain Toiteach: Great Scotch with foggy origin story

I'm drinking up my liquor cabinet as fast as I can since learning the horrifying fact that liquor will not last indefinitely in an open bottle. So I came upon this bottle of Bunnahabhain Toiteach Scotch whisky, which I received as a sample last year and never got around to writing about.

Why? Here's the entire conversation I had about it with the importer:

Me: "You sent me a sample of the Toiteach and I like it. What more can you tell me about it?"
Importer: "Retails for $79.99. Here is all our information."

Not so much, right? I'll save you from clicking on the sell sheet. The distillery was founded in 1881. Although Bunnahabhain is in Islay, most of its Scotches are not peaty; in fact that's what the distillery is most famous for among aficionados. But this one is. "Toiteach" is pronounced "toe-check" -- sounds like a Scotch for hockey fans -- and means "smokey" in Gaelic. It's un-chill-filtered, 12-years old, bottled at 46% alcohol, with no added color.

It's also delicious; it was one of those bottles that I drank really quickly until deciding I would save the last swallow for a special occasion. When I learned it wouldn't last forever, I decided Sunday night was a special occasion.

For me this has the perfect blend of Islay flavors: smokiness, sure, but not to the exclusion of milk chocolate notes and some orange peel, with fine freshness that makes the glass, and the bottle, empty faster than expected.

Some of my open bottles of Scotch are going to be shaken up with sweet Vermouth to make Rob Roys -- gotta clear out that liquor cabinet -- but this one I had in a whisky glass with two lumps of ice. Don't gasp, that's how they drink it in Scotland.

Order it here, for less than list price.

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Gallup drinking preference poll is misleading: Beer still far outsells wine

Gallup released its annual poll of American drinking habits this week, and it's more good news for wine: Americans are about as likely to say they drink wine as beer.

Americans are full of shit. I'll show you.

First, here's the Gallup preference chart

It's interesting data: Gallup has been asking people some of the same questions since World War II. As you can see, 47% of Americans said beer was their favorite alcoholic beverage in 1992, and only 27% chose wine. Now it's nearly tied, 36-35.

Except it's not. The above is what Americans say when pollsters ask them what they like. Below is what they actually buy.

Climate change scientist: Washington, New Zealand are winners; Australia, Calistoga are losers

Antonio Busalacchi

Antonio Busalacchi is an unusual combination: he's a professor of atmospheric and oceanic science at University of Maryland. And he's also a wine educator who holds an advanced sommelier certificate.

Earlier this week, he released a climate study of 24 major world wine regions that, he says, "went beyond the normal simple measures of mean temperature and precipitation but also evaluated growing degree days, drought severity index, extreme temperature thresholds at which photosynthesis shuts down, latitude temperature indices, and disease pressure indices."

I called him in Orlando, Florida, where he had just finished a Bourbon tasting as part of a wine educators' conference, so he was well-lubricated and ready to talk about the study.

What led you to do this study?
It's a combination of my profession, my daytime job, and my emerging career as a sommelier and wine educator. My family is in the restaurant business, so I brought those two aspects together.

The press release said you expect Bordeaux to make low-acid wines.
We're seeing, right now, Bordeaux is in the sweet spot. The warming experience in Bordeaux is referred to as the "bon problème." But people are starting to ask what's going to happen in 20 years.
They're already starting to see changes in the blend in Bordeaux, such as more Petit Verdot coming into the blend at wineries that never used it before. Warming climate is going to mean changes in the blends.

How to make a 90-point wine

Chester Osborn

Chester Osborn told me this story earlier this week.

Osborn makes a lot of great high-end wines for his family winery, D'Arenberg in Australia's McLaren Vale. He also makes The Stump Jump ($10).

It's a Grenache-Shiraz-Mourvedre, three grapes McLaren Vale does well cheaply. But it's not his lovely $65 The Dead Arm Shiraz; it is what it is, a drinkable supermarket wine. The 2006 Stump Jump got 86 points from Wine Spectator, a score the magazine defines as "Very good, a wine with special qualities." But 86 is a long way below 90 in the eyes of wine distributors.

"The Stump Jump went absolutely mad in 2008," Osborn says. "It was the ripest, oiliest wine we ever made because of the vintage. When we made the '08, I made about 800,000 liters of wine that I thought I'd have to distill. It was so oily and weird. That was the wine I put in The Stump Jump."

And you know the punch line.

Study finds pretty restaurants with bad service pour more local wines

Restaurants rated highly for decor are more likely to carry local wines, according to a surprising working paper for the American Association of Wine Economists. Conversely, wines rated highly for service carry fewer local wines.

The study authors*, from the school of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell, looked at the wine lists of 1401 restaurants in New York State, comparing them to Zagat ratings.

(* Congrats to Joseph M. Perla, Bradley J. Rickard and Todd M. Schmit for coming up with the word "locapours.")

Here are the main observations:

* Restaurants rated more highly for decor on Zagat carried more local wines

* Having higher Zagat service ratings meant restaurants were less likely to carry local wines

* Those with cuisine categorized as "New American," natural or organic, carried more local wines

What does gunflint taste like? The shared vocabulary of wine tasting notes

Earlier this week, my former colleague Jon Bonné published a story in the San Francisco Chronicle that included this sentence:

This narrow, cool slice of Napa engenders the dramatic flavors found in Kongsgaard wines - an intense sensation of preserved lemon and gunflint, and what Alex describes as a figgy character. 

I asked on Twitter, "Does anyone know what gunflint tastes like?" Sorry Jon, but I suppose I was mocking you, though obliquely and anonymously. I was surprised to learn that not only do some wine professionals claim to know what gunflint tastes like, they expected me to also.

Here's my favorite:

He wasn't alone.