Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Sample Europe's food culture in two hours!

One of our European cuisine experts
I'm here today to announce "Lucky Bread," a great event coming to San Francisco, which will represent everything European: all that great food from the exciting, exotic continent, in just two hours.

At "Lucky Bread," 20 chefs, including 3 who are actually from Europe, will present bite-sized portions of European cuisine. We'll celebrate European ingredients and European flavors.

And of course there will be cocktails! Bartenders will create three cocktails to represent the essence of European taste.

France, Slovakia, Portugal -- it's all one big homogeneous continent, and you'll taste it all on one tiny plastic plate! Just $125 a ticket! Make your reservations now!

(Note: Change "Europe" to "Asia" and this is a real event.)

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Monday, June 17, 2013

California Chardonnay is completely different now: it's all about citrus fruit

No medal!
My column for Palate Press this month is about my misadventures judging at the California State Fair wine competition, where it will surprise my blog readers to learn I was miserly and stubborn.

The column, all 1456 words of it (that's like 2 columns for the price of one!), is philosophical hand-wringing about the meaning of medals. I didn't have space to address the most interesting trend in wines I tasted:

California Chardonnay is completely different now: it's all about citrus fruit

Remember when California Chardonnay meant oaky, buttery wines that tasted of tropical fruit? There has been a backlash against that style for a few years, but it  seemed like a stream of artisanal wines against a tidal wave of highly rated goo.

Well, the tide has turned. Mainstream California Chardonnay now is lean, with citrus fruit flavors, not butter and toast.

I know this because I tasted dozens of California Chardonnays, many of them submitted by California's largest wine companies: Constellation, Gallo, The Wine Group.


Wednesday, June 12, 2013

How common is sexism in the wine industry?

I saw a he-said, he-said argument about sexism in wine media this week and it got me to thinking about the state of sexism in the wine industry.

About 20 years ago, the wine industry was male-dominated at every level. Today, women winemakers are common, and some wineries have advertised specifically looking a woman to take the post. Women general managers are more rare, but they exist.

Women sommeliers were rare as recently as 10 years ago, but don't seem so anymore. One place I don't see a lot of women is in wholesaling, which is the most consistently profitable occupation.

But I don't really know what it's like for women in the wine industry, and I'm curious. So I thought I'd do two things: take a poll, and open this post up, for the next week only, to anonymous comments. I'd like to hear insider stories of sexism that people may have actually witnessed.

On the poll, you can select more than one choice, and you can also write in your own.


Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Chardonnay is murder: Wine in a noir story

Laura Lippman
Laura Lippman wrote the first short story in the 2006 collection "Baltimore Noir," and Chardonnay is an accessory to murder.

Lippman, who is married to The Wire creator David Simon, has published 11 novels about reporter-turned-detective Tess Monaghan. This story, "Easy as A-B-C," is a one-off not about Monaghan; it's a mere 11 pages in the paperback version.

Our unnamed narrator is a married building contractor who has an affair with a younger woman who buys his dead grandmother's house and hires him to renovate it. After they start getting it on, he begins putting some of his own money into the work. Here we set the tone:
One twilight -- we almost always met at last light, the earliest she could leave work, the latest I could stay away from home -- she brought a bottle of wine to bed after we had finished. She was taking a wine-tasting course over at this restaurant in the old foundry ...

"Nice," I said, although in truth I don't care much for white wine and this was too sweet for my taste.

"Viognier," she said. "Twenty-six dollars a bottle."

"You can buy top-shelf bourbon for that and it lasts a lot longer."

"You can't drink bourbon with dinner," she said with a laugh, as if I had told a joke. "Besides, wine can be an investment. And it's cheaper by the case. I'd like to get into that, but if you're going to do it, you have to do it right, have a special kind of refrigerator, keep it climate controlled."

"Your basement would work."

And that's how I came to build her a wine cellar, at cost.

Monday, June 10, 2013

Individual tastes differ: About 10% of drinkers prefer corked wines

Quality control at Amorim's cork factory in Portugal
The cork industry is always sending me interesting data on how bad screwcaps are for wine. Recently I got an even more interesting study: that some consumers prefer corked wines.

Granted, this study, published in Food Quality and Preference journal,
was commissioned by the cork industry. But I don't doubt it.***(see update below) Peoples' tastes differ, dramatically so. Do you like your neighbors' music? If so, you're lucky, or you live next to radio host Dennis The Menace.

Update: This study was paid for by Hanzell Vineyards, not the cork industry. More details at bottom of post.

What the study was trying to establish is the threshold of TCA, the chemical that causes "cork taint,"* that would cause consumers to notice and reject the wine. A 1995 study estimated that tainted corks cost the wine industry $10 billion, so a data point like that is worth having.

* That's "cork deliciousness" for you 10-percenters

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Grade inflation at a glance: a look at Robert Parker's 1987 Wine Buyer's Guide

Chateau Le Pin: 81 points. Ridge Vineyards Cabernet: 75 points. Heitz Chardonnay: 55 points.

The fascinating thing about flipping through Robert Parker's 1987 Wine Buyer's Guide, which I bought for a song on Ebay, is the way he rated wines all the way from 50 to 100.

The wines he reviewed in 1987 are mainly from the 1981 through '84 vintages, and include the '82 Bordeaux vintage that he loved. His palate preference is already on display, with quotes like this:
"Lanessan produces wine of a big, rich, gutsy style that often lacks finesse but more than compensates for that deficiency with plenty of power and flavor authority."
This is a period when some wineries released flawed wines, something that rarely happens today, and Parker dings those wines with scores in the 50s. That's admirable, part of the good role he played in helping force wineries to make improvements in hygiene.

Those aren't the noticeable scores, though. In today's world, where scores under 85 are rarely published, it's shocking to flip through the book and see so many wines with scores in the 70s, often with no comment at all. He calls 1981 Iron Horse Cabernet "acceptable" and lays a 72 on it. This is the exception, though: most scores under 75 get something like this comment about Gerin Côte-Rôtie: "Both the 1978 (72 points) and 1980 (75 points) exhibit annoyingly high acid levels and sinewy, compact personalities."

I cherry-picked that one to play into what we know about Parker today, though "light" is a frequent complaint about wines he scored in the 70s. It was a legitimate concern in a cooler era with less precise farming, particularly in France, wineries often struggled to get their grapes ripe enough. More common are comments like this:
"The '81 (Léoville-Barton) is good, but not special in this vintage." (78 points)
"Sauvignon Blanc is a winner here (Robert Pecota Winery), and if you should see the 1985, be sure to drink it within the first several years of its life because this is not a type of wine that ages at all." (79 points)
The point is, wines Parker scored in the high 70s back then were wines he probably wouldn't reject at his own dinner table.

Monday, June 3, 2013

Turkey fights for the right to drink alcohol

Better days ahead for Turkey? The seaside at Izmir, a cosmopolitan town near Istanbul
Turks have rioted in the streets for the past few days in an uprising that might have big repercussions for the US.

The cause -- anger at repressive government -- is similar to the Arab Spring uprising we've seen in other Muslim countries. But this is different for a lot of reasons, and one is that the right to drink alcohol was the spark.

Some US media are reporting that protests took off when the Turkish government announced plans to convert a park into a shopping mall. But that wasn't the real beginning. Ten days ago, the socially conservative Turkish government pushed through a bill banning retail alcohol sales between 10 pm and 6 am and also banned alcohol advertising of any kind, and protests began.

This was the last straw for the many social moderates who live in Istanbul. They took to the streets in a protest that we haven't seen the last of yet.

I went to Turkey last year for the European Wine Bloggers' Conference, and stayed on to visit a number of Turkish wineries. I had some interesting off-the-record discussions. Turks with a government license to make and sell wine do not want to be quoted criticizing the government. Some people told me that the reason the EWBC was in Turkey in the first place is that the government wants foreigners to get interested in Turkey's wines so there will be less of them to sell at home.