Gail Collins is an ignorant wine snob

Gail Collins used to be one of my 10 favorite New York Times columnists mainly because her politics generally are close to my own. That means I expect her to be brilliant -- aren't her positions brilliant?

Thus her column this morning was like a mouthful of vinegar. I was shocked and disappointed and I might never again read her with the same enjoyment.

But rather than plagiarize like her colleague Maureen Dowd, let me quote the offensive paragraph here (with italics added):

"Back before the turn of the millennium, my husband and I wrote a book that contained a lot of lists of the best and worst of the last thousand years. Our friend Alfred Gingold contributed “Ten Worst Ideas of the Millennium,” which included flagellants, foot binding, wine in a box, trench warfare and French mime."

I'll be honest, I don't know who Alfred Gingold is. (He does have a home page.)

But Collins and her husband were editors of this book. Thus they must take responsibility for putting wine in a box on the same level of horror as foot binding -- not to mention Marcel Marceau.

And she's not trying to hide from this bad judgment of 10 years ago; in fact, she wants to point it out to us again. She didn't list all Ten Worst Ideas, so she could have corrected her previous error.

Wine in a box, Gail Collins, is a fantastic idea, maybe one of the 20 best wine ideas of the last millennium. Here's why:

* It's much better for the environment than shipping heavy glass bottles everywhere.
* Current bag-in-box technology keeps oxygen out, so the wine can stay fresh up to 3 weeks (compared to a couple of days for bottles).

* You can bring wine in a box camping, kayaking, wherever, without having to carry around glass bottles. I've had decent Merlot while kayaking in Glacier Bay and I've smuggled Tetra Paks of wine into ballparks that refuse to stock drinkable wine.
* The container is NOT the contents, stupid. If you don't like a brand of boxed wine, try a better one. You wouldn't insult all 1.5-liter bottles just because you had a corked one -- or would you?
* There are some interesting boxed wines available -- 3-liter sizes, generally -- for those who aren't too snobbish to try them.

I feel an arm-waving rant coming on here -- there are few types of people I hate more than wine snobs -- so I'm going to cut myself short. Stick to politics, Gail. Though I'm kinda with you on the mimes. But we'll just keep that ... er, quiet.

The true cost of corked wine

Last night I brought a bottle of 1996 Bert Simon Serrig Herrenberg Spatlese Riesling that I had been sitting on for the better part of this decade to Mission Street Food, where it sat waiting for its star turn.

We didn't quaff badly in the interim, as my friends brought a bottle of 2001 Trimbach Cuvee Frederic Emile Alsace Riesling, which was rippling with acidity, making the tongue cry, "Feed me!"

Riesling is always a good choice with Asian street foods, which MSF was featuring. We felt a little sorry for people at the nearby table who had brought a moderately pricey Napa Cab that wasn't emptying very fast. I wish I had a chance to tell them beforehand, "Those spices are going to make that wine taste hot and unpleasant." People have to live and learn.

But speaking of hot and unpleasant -- my own long-anticipated bottle smelled of cork taint even before we got the cork completely out. I think James Laube could have smelled the TCA from the kitchen. Wow, what a bitter disappointment.

The funny thing, though, is that the wine didn't taste foul. In fact, I deemed it drinkable (though we didn't; I didn't want to have that memory of the wine.) And I don't think the TCA actually smelled foul -- if you didn't recognize it, you might think it was another form of "minerality," though with a plasticky edge.

That's the true problem with corked wine. I suspect that very few corked bottles are poured down the drain. Most people would have just drunk the bottle and thought, hmm, Bert Simon Riesling isn't very good. Or maybe that aged Riesling isn't very good, or even all German Riesling isn't very good. I have a friend in Florida -- a place where you really need to drink Riesling -- who believes this, and I can't help wondering if she was influenced by a disappointing bottle just like I had last night.

Fortunately, my friend ran to his car for a half bottle of Champagne that he just happened to have on hand to save the day (and our Charred Five Spice Chicken with mint, cilantro, baguette and young coconut juice.) But how likely are most people to have an emergency Champagne split? (I like the idea of packaging it on a utility belt with a Velcro fastener -- Never fear, Champagne Man is here!)

Moral of the story: A corked wine costs the consumer, but the greater longterm cost is for the winery.

The view from Bordeaux: Your wine sucks

There's a great quote in an AP story about French wine sales dropping.

But Arnaud Crete, of Chateau Listran in Bordeaux, said he has been pessimistic about the prospects for French wine for some time, as new, low-cost vintages from across the globe gain ground in the international market.

"I always take the example of tomatoes," he said. "They're inedible, the tomatoes you find in supermarkets. But people buy them just the same."

Yeah, that's right, you upstart vintners of Argentina and South Africa and New Zealand. Your wine tastes just like unripe hothouse tomatoes. It's undrinkable. At least in Bordeaux.

Read the full story here.

Why isn't wine sold like Miller High Life?

Miller High Life beer has been running a series of ads for more than a year that categorize its drinkers as savvy people who appreciate good things -- while "the swells" do not.

Here's a typical ad: A straight-talking, overweight delivery guy barges into a suite at a baseball game. He asks if anyone knows the score. Nobody does, so he declares that he's taking the High Life. He and associates pack up the beer and leave, sometimes redistributing it to blue-collar types in cheaper seats.

I love these ads on a lot of levels. Mainly, I admire a good campaign.

People like a product that makes them feel superior to others. It's often true that "the swells" in the luxury boxes don't understand the game they're attending. So it's easy to extrapolate that the swells don't appreciate a great beer either.

Then the mind closes a gap that only a pointy-headed intellectual would say is a logical fallacy:
1) Rich people don't appreciate baseball (or racing, or whatever)
2) Rich people thus won't appreciate great beer
3) We take the High Life away
4) High Life is great beer
5) I, a superior person who really grasps the nuances of sports, am sophisticated enough to appreciate the greatness of the High Life.

That's a great campaign. My question is: Why is there nothing like this for wine?

The closest thing might be the unpretentious Yellow Tail ads -- but Yellow Tail was huge before it started advertising.

Why hasn't some company taken one of its private-label wines -- there are hundreds out there these days, fighting for shelf space -- and positioned it exactly like Miller High Life: The workingman's wine. The wine for folks who know better than those rich fools. Do it with a private-label so there's no blowback on the higher-priced wines from the same winery.

This message could resonate. Look at the comments on wine stories in any major newspaper. There are plenty of High Life wine drinkers out there, saying things like "Expensive wines aren't any better than the stuff I drink every day."

Why doesn't the Wine Group or Constellation or Bronco really go after this marketing group?

Wine is a commodity

I'm not feeling romantic about wine today. I'm thinking about Constellation closing RH Phillips.

The brand will continue, but there won't be a winery. A few hundred people will lose their jobs as Constellation centers production at its facility in Lodi.

Will buyers of Toasted Head and RH Phillips even notice a difference? Probably not. If there was a difference in wine quality, it would have happened years ago when the company was still independent and needed to ramp up production. Constellation is not in the business of making bad wine; sometimes its products taste generic, but to quote a beer ad I can't escape from, they always offer "drinkability."

This closing was set up 9 years ago, when the Canadian company Vincor bought RH Phillips. Once you're a commodity, you're a commodity from then on -- whether you're a luxury Bordeaux brand purchased by LVMH or a Dunnigan Hills brand that a Canadian distributor wants to make its flagship.

Constellation bought Vincor in 2006 because it wanted better access to the Canadian market. RH Phillips came along with the deal. The brand had some value -- it's on the wine list at some chain restaurants, for example. So Constellation kept it going.

I never tried RH Phillips wines before the Vincor era, so I have no romanticism about them -- they always seemed generic to me. Closing the winery makes good economic sense.

It's just a little reminder that we can write all we want about some Austrian Dornfelder we tried in a wine bar, but the reality of the wine industry is that millions of people will drink Toasted Head this year. This is what wine is to most people -- a commodity.

How to open Movia Puro sparkling wine

Last week I watched Movia owner/winemaker Ales Kristancic open a bottle of his sparkling wine, which is bottled with the lees still in it.


This is not a user-friendly wine (it's catty, but I'm going to say this is true of most of his lineup, but for different reasons -- these are wines for wine geeks, not average consumers.)




It must be stored upside down so that the lees collects in the neck, and it must be opened underwater. There's no way to open it without losing a little of the sparkling wine.






Yes folks, this is why Champagnes are so pricey: the winery disgorges them and recorks them for you, preventing you from having to do this.

In contrast, with the Movia bubbly you need a special tool.

Here's a series of photos showing the effervescent Kristancic opening this wine.



After all this, I have to say that honestly I liked the show more than the wine, which had a savory, peppery quality and no fruit to speak of.

I much preferred his Movia Veliko Rosso Brda 2002, an unusual (of course) field blend of Merlot, Pinot Nero and Cabernet Sauvignon that had nice bright fruit, missing in most of his whites (maybe I'm just not geeky enough), with a gentle mouthfeel that showed the influence of the Merlot. No show, though, just good wine. And I admit, I did enjoy the show.

Bon Appetit says bacon is a health food

Want to eat healthier? Eat more bacon! So says Bon Appetit magazine, in the June 2009 issue.

The story is called "The Terrific 10," and it's written by San Francisco freelance writer Daniel Duane. The headline on the website reads, "10 Suprising Health Foods."

No. 1 on the list of these newly anointed health foods is bacon. Duane writes:

"Ever see that old Woody Allen movie Sleeper? The one where he goes to sleep in 1973 and wakes up 200 years later, only to discover that decadent foods (fudge, cream pies) turned out to be healthful? Well, here comes Jennifer McLagan, author of a book simply called Fat, telling us that 45 percent of the fat in bacon is monounsaturated, the good-for-you fat that can help lower bad cholesterol levels. Better still, bacon's monounsaturated fat turns out to be oleic acid, the same fat found in olive oil. So that means that some could argue that bacon is about half as good for you as olive oil and about 100 times more delicious."

No wonder Americans are fat! Let's replay those numbers: less than half of bacon's fat is good for you. So let's just ignore that 55 percent bad fat and concentrate on the good.

That means that the BLT at Tony's in Birch Run, Michigan -- which contains a full pound of bacon -- is giving you a half-pound of dietary goodness! Heck, Daniel Duane, why don't you order two!

Having worked around food writing professionals for some years, I can tell you how this kind of article happens. Most food writers resent health restrictions on their recipes; they concentrate on deliciousness, a defensible position. Moreover, most good food writers I know are not overweight because they eat small portions.

Food publications constantly get emails and letters from readers, most of them strident, complaining about unhealthy recipes. The readers may have a point, but most don't win friends with their approach. This is how I grew to hate vegans, even though I once spent a couple of years as a vegan myself. For many people, diet is a religion, and most evangelists of any religion are annoying to nonbelievers.

So when a writer manages to pitch an article like this one, an editor who may have just finished a testy email exchange, or had an obnoxious phone call, is likely to say, "Finally! I eat bacon and I'm not fat. Let's print this."

The problem is, the average reader isn't going to add one chopped-up strip of bacon to their grilled escarole; the average reader is going to take this as nutritional permission to order the 1-pound Tony's BLT. This article isn't about the "Terrific 10" flavor additions (which bacon surely qualifies for.) It's about the Terrific 10 foods for a healthful diet. And it's just plain wrong. But it's what you get when you take your nutritional advice from 35-year-old movies about the future. What's next: 10 great foods from Star Trek? (Hmmm, let me pitch that ...)

Read the whole shameful Bon Appetit article here.