The UC Davis wine price challenge

UC Davis senior winemaking classes hold an interesting challenge at the end of four years of study -- and no student has gotten it right yet.

Dr. Hildegard Heymann of UC Davis' Viticulture and Enology Department told me that every year, she asks students to taste six wines blind and link them with their actual retail prices.

The prices are distinctly different, such as $5, $10, $25, $50, $100 and $200. There's a bottle of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild waiting for the student who gets them all right.

Fortunately Lafite-Rothschild improves with age, because no student has won it yet, in nearly a decade of trying. Heymann said the best anyone has ever done was to correctly choose the cheapest and most expensive wines.

These not consumers or wine bloggers; these are students who have been intensely studying wine for four years and are about to go out and become leaders of the industry. They know all the tricks and traps of sensory evaluation. Yet they blow it anyway.

"The mistake most of them make is in ranking by their personal taste," Heymann said.

How hard can this be? I want to take a shot at it. I believe I can tell the price category by the quality and intensity of the oak flavor, especially in the top-end wines. But I guess I'm just setting myself up for failure.

Do any readers remember being humbled by this or a similar blind-tasting challenge?

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Peer pressure brings wine scores toward the middle

I had the pleasure of judging wine last week at Mundus Vini, Germany's leading wine competition. My panel tasted 150 wines in three days and gave zero (0) gold medals.

As is often the case with wine competition results, one of the culprits was human behavior.

People occasionally complain that the so-called 100-point scale for wine critics is actually about a 15-point scale for publications, as the Wine Advocate and Wine Spectator rarely publish ratings below 85.

In wine competitions, the scale is a little wider, but it's still more limited than you'd expect from looking at the scoresheet. Scores below 70 are rare, but so are scores above 95, which is why Grand Gold medals rarely happen in Europe without statistical help.

I always try to follow the written rules of wine competitions: to score each wine on each attribute where it belongs. But there are unwritten rules also, and the chart below will show you that it didn't take me very long to learn and follow them -- even though I don't necessarily agree with them.

Throw out the top 25 brands, and guess what country is the US' biggest source of wine?

Data courtesy U.S. Beverage Alcohol Forum

Americans are very brand-oriented when it comes to wine. But what do we drink when we're not buying one of the big names?

I noticed recently that even without Yellow Tail, Australia still ranks in the top 6 sources of foreign wine. Today I decided to crunch the numbers a little further.

What if I took all of the top 25 brands out of the wine import numbers? Who are our largest sources of wine then?

The implication is that these countries are selling us a lot of small-production wine, perhaps artisanal. So who do you think it is? You might be surprised.

First, here are our 8 largest sources of imported wine, all brands included (numbers in gallons).

Make sashimi at home: it's easy

We eat sashimi at home all the time. I discovered in talking to some friends that this is unusual, even among sashimi fans. People pay a fortune for a few slices of fish in a restaurant or sushi shop when you can spend about $25 for more fish than two people can eat.

Sashimi with a bowl of rice is one of the easiest and most delicious meals you can make. Here's a quick pictorial explanation.

Oregon vineyard land rush is also a statement of confidence in the US economy

"Better put out more chairs, investment bankers are coming." Stoller Family Estate, Dundee Hills, Oregon

Oregon is suddenly the belle of the wine ball. A year ago the image was of enlightened hippies earnestly struggling to farm in sync with Mother Nature, with no wineries bigger than 175,000-cases King Estate. This week, it's all neckties, bankers and mortgage rates.

* Maison Louis Jadot just bought a 20-acre vineyard in the Yamhill-Carlton district, its first purchase outside Burgundy. Jacques Lardiere, who worked at Jadot for 42 years, will move to Oregon to be the winemaker, a stunning adjustment for a guy who retired earlier this year.

* Earlier this week, Jackson Family Wines (the Kendall-Jackson folks) bought a 15,000 case winery, also in Yamhill-Carlton. This will help them make wine for the La Crema brand from the 280 acres of vineyards they bought in the spring.

* Bacchus Capital Management, a California private equity fund, bought all or part of two Oregon wineries earlier this year. Bacchus' co-founder is Sam Bronfman, formerly of Seagram's and Diageo.

Why the sudden land rush for Oregon vineyards? It's really simple. Look at this chart, from January:

Napa County wineries should not be allowed to wiggle around county law

Andy Beckstoffer is right, and the Napa Valley Planning Commission is wrong. Napa Valley wineries should not be able to wiggle around the county's laws to make more wine from Central Valley fruit.

The Napa Valley Register covered this issue last week and editorialized about it on Sunday. It's right for the Register to suspect Beckstoffer of advancing his own interests by opposing a production expansion by his neighbor, Jean-Charles Boisset, who bought Raymond in 2009.

But the Register needs to step back and take a clear stand. I'm not sure what exactly its editorial advocates, but I know what I think.

Some Napa wineries are trying to skirt the law, the planning commission is misinterpreting the law rather than enforcing it, and it should stop.

Here are the details.

Napa Valley wine should be made from Napa Valley grapes. That's basic.

The question before the Napa County Planning Commission is, how much non-Napa wine should it allow to be made in Napa Valley?

In the great wine regions of Europe, the answer would be "none." But in most of the USA, the answer is "a limitless ocean."

But this is Napa County we're talking about, and the laws are different there.

Australian wine is greater than the US wine press admits

Why won't US media take me seriously?

First, let me give you a number: Australia is the second-largest exporter of wine to the US, behind only Italy. We buy more Australian wine than wine from France and Spain combined.

So why don't you read much about Australian wine?

Part of that is the domination of Yellow Tail, which accounts for 38% of Australia's exports here.

That's a lot, but we're still unduly ignoring the rest of the country. Take away Yellow Tail from Australia and it would still be our 4th largest source of foreign wine, still ahead of France and Spain.

I can't explain why the wine media is so out of sync with the US drinking public. My guess is that media is trend-driven, and Australia's not trendy. What it takes to start a trend, I don't know.

But I will share a little meta-post about my own efforts.

A few years after Yellow Tail took the US by storm, and not coincidentally Australian fine wine sales  dropped, I tried to sell several magazines and newspapers a story about the good wines from Australia.