An open letter to the TTB: America needs accurate alcohol levels on wine labels

Dear Alcohol Tax and Trade Bureau:

U.S. law allows wineries to give Americans among the least accurate information in the world about the amount of alcohol we are consuming.

It is time to change that.

The wine industry is deliberately and systematically understating the amount of alcohol in wine, and U.S. law is allowing it to happen.

Americans are interested in the amount of alcohol in our wine. We want to know for aesthetic reasons. We need to know for health reasons. The wine industry should let us know for safety reasons: an accurate label may prevent drivers from becoming dangerously intoxicated.

But currently, a wine labeled with 12.5% alcohol could have anywhere from 11 to 14% alcohol. This huge spread is illegal in most of the world. A wine labeled with 15% alcohol may have anywhere between 14 and 16% alcohol. Again, this is not legal in most of the world.

Where do supermarket sale wines come from?

Where do these wines come from?

Last month on the morning news I saw an ad for a sale at a California wine supermarket. I paused it -- the miracle of DVRs -- and took a screen shot because I wondered where supermarket sale wines come from.

Here's the screen shot of the 9 wines. Who makes these sale wines? How are they so cheap?

Thanks to website of the federal government agency responsible for alcohol, the TTB, I was able to look up the Certificate of Label Approval for each wine. I answered some questions, but raised a few others.

Before I get into the details, here's a quick summary:
Wines with brand names that sound like wineries: 8
Wines where the producer is upfront about who's making it: 2
Wines whose brand name IS actually the winery that made it: 1

Here are the wines, from left to right:

Red Autumn Chardonnay
This was in the Wine of the Month Club, which helpfully rated it 94 points.
A group of very enthusiastic wine tasters bought it for $2.99 and declared it "Goooood." It's made by Fior di Sole winery in Napa, which advertises itself as "Premium bulk wine from Napa Valley and other appellations." Remember that name.

Michel-Schlumberger Chardonnay
This used to be a real winery named after the owner, but in 2011 the winery was sold to the Adams Wine Group, an investment group. The winery does list respected consulting winemaker Kerry Damskey, but he is best known as a Mr. Fixit.
So far as I can tell from a COLA search, the wines are no longer being made at the onetime winery building in Sonoma County; they're now being made at RB Wine Associates in Hopland, which has one of the emptiest websites you'll ever see.

Top 9 places to buy wine: Beginner's guide

What's the best place for good deals on wine? Where's the best selection?

If you're already a wine aficionado -- my usual readers -- this post won't be news. I discovered before Thanksgiving that many of my non-aficionado friends have real questions about the best place to pick up a good bottle of wine at a good price. So for them, and all your non-aficionado friends, here are the top 9 places to buy wine.

1) Locally owned wine shop

If there's a good wine shop in your area, it's the best possible place to buy wine. You can get advice from the staff, and good wine shops pride themselves on having great wines at every price point. Don't be shy: good wine shop staffers live to be asked, "What do you have that's good for $12?" You'll make their whole day.

2) Locally owned wine shop

Can't emphasize this enough. Go to Yelp, search "wine shop" in your area, and see what you can come up with.

3) Big wine chain store

The selection and prices aren't as good at some of these stores as you might think. They maximize profits by buying in bulk, which means they don't carry many interesting small-production wines relative to the size of the store. And while their published sale prices on corporate wines are often very good, they make up for it with big profit margins on "private label" wines that wineries quietly make for them so nobody can compare prices. Private label wines can be good, but paying $15 for $3 worth of wine isn't good value. So how do these stores rank No. 3? Some employees are knowledgeable and helpful. There are usually a lot of reasonable choices around $10, because that's what chain store customers want. And though we're talking about wine, chain stores are usually good places to buy spirits and beer.

4) Whole Foods market

Sonoma County tasting room named America's best restaurant -- again

Is this wine pairing, or lunch?

For the second time in three years, Open Table has declared St. Francis Winery & Vineyards in Sonoma County to be the No. 1 restaurant in the United States of America.

"We're still pinching ourselves," St. Francis CEO Christopher Silva told me.

Pinch hard. It's quite an honor, especially because St. Francis isn't a restaurant. It's a winery. And technically it doesn't serve meals.

Five days a week, three times a day (no dinners), St. Francis holds private sit-down wine tastings with food pairings for $68 in a room that looks out at Hood Mountain. Everybody sits together at a round table for 16.

It's a lot like lunch, although you can't order anything. But probably for legal reasons, it's not technically lunch: it's wine pairing.

"It is still all about the wine," Silva said. "The first thing Chef Bryan Jones does is not say, I've got these wonderful peppers, what should I make with it. He says, I've got this wonderful Zinfandel. What food do I prepare to go with that dish? It's a wine and food pairing and we're deliberate about the fact that wine is the first word."

We may be getting into technicalities here.

Wine retailer cancels Cyber Monday, says "today everything is full price"

For the past 10 years, Delaware wine retailer Frank Pagliaro held a Cyber Monday sale, in which he posted hourly deals on Facebook and Twitter. And he sold a lot of wine.

This year, he sent out an email saying he was done with that.

"I would be in my office the entire day fielding orders via email, tweets and posts... 13+ hours of very little human contact doing nothing but typing on my keyboard.  Don't get me wrong it is a hugely successful marketing game to play, but I was never at all into Xbox or PlayStation.  I like people.  I like hearing their voices.  I like seeing their faces.

So today I'm going back to 1986.

That's when it all started for me.  No laptop, no cellphone, no iPad, no iWatch, no Constant Contact, no Facebook, no Twitter, no WIFI... and certainly no Cyber Monday.  Yup, today everything is full price here at FranksWine." (bold is mine)

Not only that, he basically shut off Internet wine sales:

"There's nowhere to click on this email.  Kinda crazy, huh?  It's like a dead-end street."

I read this and thought, how's that going to work, a non-sale on the busiest discount week of the year?

Bouncing back from receivership, Cameron Hughes discounts Napa Valley for you

Cameron Hughes never tells me where he gets his wine from, and I don't ask him to break his non-disclosure contracts. So when I tell you I tasted a 6-pack that came from Harlan Estate or one of its offshoots, understand that I learned the provenance elsewhere*, and Hughes refused to confirm or deny it.

Looks like Harlan, right?

* Thanks to some background work from the Wine Berserkers bulletin board, confirmed by the Harlan font on the corks.

I dropped by Hughes' San Francisco office yesterday because I wanted to taste what he calls the best deal of his career -- hell of a statement, for a 6-pack of wine that costs $400 -- and to find out how he's recovering from his business being placed into receivership early this year.

There's obviously a connection. If the officer appointed by the court to oversee his business doesn't believe Cameron Hughes wine has a future, he wouldn't be able to write a check to Bill Harlan for 2000 6-packs of wines Harlan wants to unload under somebody else's name.

What do you want to hear first: How was the declassified Harlan? How's Hughes' business coming along? And what's the terrific Oakville, Napa Valley red wine for under $14! I can recommend because I asked Hughes to pour me something non-Harlany?

Let's go in that order.

It's a new era in wine: Thoughts on Pinot Noir, Robert Parker and the mainstream food media

In wine, the counterculture is the culture now.

In 1992, Bill Clinton became the first admitted marijuana smoker to be elected President. That used to be a litmus test, so much so that Clinton, the most famous equivocator in the White House, claimed, "I didn't inhale." Now, a black man can say he used a little cocaine and be elected President. The world is different now and people paying attention could see it in 1992.

Friday was such a day for me. In three different events, I noticed that changes many people have been predicting have all happened already. Individually they are not news, but the fact that we have actually entered a new era is worth noting.

Point 1: I went to PinotFest, an annual tasting in San Francisco of only west coast Pinot Noir, for the 10th time. When I went to this event for the first time the full-bodied style of Pinot Noir was the most common. You could find leaner styles, and sommeliers gathered around those tables, but they were the minority.

Not anymore.