Archive for September, 2009
When An Award Is Not An Award
A couple years ago, The New York Times writer Amanda Hester noticed that it wasn’t real tough for restaurants to get a wine list “Award of Excellence” from Wine Spectator magazine. I want to mention it here because it illustrates a point that needs making when you’re thinking about what wine to buy, and why.Hester wrote: “…with such a large number of winners, perhaps competition is too strong a word. Of the 3,360 awards granted this year, from a pool of 3,573 entrants, 2,808 received the basic award. Only the winners of the Grand Award, the magazine’s top award, of which there are 89 this year, are ever inspected; 3,271 restaurants simply sent in copies of their wine lists and menus, a cover sheet describing their wine programs and a check for $175 – and walked away winners.” This means that 94% of the applicants got an award on some level. Fast forward to 2008. The entrance fee was $250, and more than 4000 restaurants “earned” the award. And Wine Spectator, uh, booked more than a million in fees.
Ironically, though, this really isn’t the scandal I’m referring to.
That was the work of one Robin Goldstein, a wine blogger and writer who manufactured a nonexistent restaurant in Milan, Italy, paid the fee and “won” an award. Frankly, it doesn’t really bother me, and it shouldn’t bother you too much. And to be fair to Wine Spectator, Goldstein put a lot of work into his little scam – he built a website, created a extensive menu and wine list, and even established a working Milan phone and fax number as required by the application. Who wouldn’t have been fooled unless they showed up to discover the place didn’t exist?
For its part, Wine Spectator did call the restaurant to verify the information, and left a voicemail (although the voicemail was after the “award” and it was a sales pitch for an ad). Had I been preparing to visit Milan, and run across his website, I might have made reservations at his non-existent establishment myself. And you might conclude that the fictional Osteria l’Intrepido restaurant’s award was an exception, and the result of an elaborate scam. And you might further still think that a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence still represents, oh, I don’t know, maybe good value, wide selection, and good pairing opportunities with things on the menu. After all, they’re still conferred by experts at one of the world’s leading wine consumer publications, right?
Wrong. All it really means, in most cases, is that the restaurant paid the price of admission and sent in some paperwork.
The lesson here? Don’t depend on others to tell you what to drink - not Parker, not Broadbent, not me, not Wine Spectator or Wine Enthusiast, not your neighbor. It’s ok to read reviews but remember they are someone else’s taste buds and someone else’s opinion. Instead, learn the basics and then enjoy the experience of tasting wines and thinking critically about why you like them, and how to pair them up with the foods you like. And before you head to a restaurant, do a little homework. As homework goes, it’s not as bad as digging ditches.
Wine Spectator is a good mag, with interesting, thoughtful articles and fabulous photography. I read it myself. But I make up my mind about which wines I’ll taste and buy on my own.
And frankly, too, this isn’t that big a deal, warranting great outrage, is it? We’ve got military men and women dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. An economy still in the toilet. And people still losing their houses, jobs and health insurance daily.
Wine is supposed to be about fun.
Wine Shorts, September 18, 2009
Study Shows Ratings Numbers DO Influence Tasting Experience
I’ve said more than a few times on WineFlair and elsewhere that wine ratings by “the big guys” (and gal) such as Parker, Robinson, Broadbent, Suckling etc. will obviously and hugely influence the views of people who taste those wines and know their scores in advance. In other words, someone tells you you’re about to sample a 95, and boy when you taste it, it really is!
A scientific team from a university in Zurich says they’re proved it and also that wine ratings have a consistent effect on people who are told scores after they taste. Basically, a bunch of wine-drinkers was separated into five separate groups before a blind tasting. One group was told beforehand that Parker had rated the wine 92, and a second group that he had rated the wine a meager 72. A third and fourth groups were told the scores (92 and 72 respectively) after they had tasted the wine but before recording their impressions. A fifth group wasn’t told anything.
The results weren’t what a lot of wine snobs or people who live by critics’ ratings want to hear: the group that knew the wine had a 92 Parker rating before tasting it uniformly thought it was quite a bit better than those who’d falsely been told 72. The “92 Group” also rated the wine better than those who were told after they had tasted it. The third and fourth groups showed a marked tendency to agree with the ratings when they were told afterwards, indicating that even those who were told that the wine was a 72 didn’t challenge that number though they were tasting a wine actually rated 20 points higher. What that means is simple: their taste perceptions may have actually changed by being told that low number!
In a post from a couple years ago, I cited a 2001 University of Bordeaux story that made a similar if slightly more subtle point. In the first of two tests, Professor Frederick Brochet invited a bunch of self-anointed wine experts to describe the flavors and aromas of both red and white wines he poured. One of these experts lauded the red for its “jamminess” while another talked of its “crushed red fruit.” What’s wrong with that? Well, it was really a white wine, tinted darkly with food coloring. Not one of the 60 “expert” tasters could tell!
The second test with a different group was even sneakier, in which ordinary and inexpensive red table wine was placed in a pricey Grand Cru-labeled bottle, and also separately in its original labeled bottle. In other words, a single wine was passed off as itself – and as a different, far superior wine. What happened here? Three-quarters of the experts there judged the “grand cru” as “complex, balanced and rounded,” while the vin de table in their view was “weak, light, flat and faulty”. They were the same wine.
The moral of the story is what I’ve been saying for years, and you’re probably sick of hearing it.
But I’ll say it again: don’t depend on wine ratings. Taste and decide what YOU like.
Chicago Wine Retailer Closes Two Big Stores
Sam’s Wines, a major wine seller in my former town, has closed two Chicagoland stores in just two months — the South Loop, closed in August and Highland Park just last Sunday. Maybe they were overextended; after all, the Highland Park location was an impressive 25,000 square feet with a wine lounge, party room, 50-seat demonstration kitchen and glassware room. But it was a pretty awesome place – at the wine bar, you were permitted to buy a bottle of wine, have it chilled (or not) and drink it right there with no markup! First Harry’s Velvet Room, and now Sam’s. Damn!
I started making my first large purchases (rather than a bottle of two at a time) from Sam’s big location in Lincoln Park, and was thrilled that I could order a case or two at 3 pm and have it waiting at my 40th floor apartment in Lakeview neighborhood at 6. It was probably the precursor of many of today’s giant wine warehouses, but even back then, in 1996, their service and wine knowledge was better than at most places,
even much smaller ones, today.
This ain’t good.
We Remember the People of Windows on the (Wine) World
Windows on the World was a great restaurant and one of the country’s premier wine venues – its patrons consumed 10,000 bottles a month from a 50,000 bottle cellar, choosing off a list with nearly 1500 selections. The wine service, at the hands of people we know and respect today including Kevin Zraly, Michael Skurnik and Andrea Immer, was top-notch, and its prices were reasonable in a city known for outlandishly expensive wine lists. And its “Cellar in the Sky” offered one of the city’s original wine and food pairing menus.Seventy-eight of its staff perished on that day, and we remember those who died there along with all the ther innocent victims of that senseless act of terrorism. Every day they worked hard to make their customers happy, and they are sorely missed.
The Pioneers: Jack And Jamie Davies Of Schramsberg
“For more than a year now they had been searching: on the highway, near the river, atop oaky knolls that rose abruptly from the valley floor, up wild canyons, and along the spines and scarps of two rugged coastal ranges. What they were looking for was not easily put into words, but the quality of the ideal was absolute and unassailable in their minds. They were searching for…they would know it when they found it.”- The opening paragraph of Napa by James Conaway
Jack and Jamie Davies were modern-day pioneers, and the mark they left on American winemaking is truly meaningful and, I hope, lasting.
It’s ironic that far too few Americans have heard of Schramsberg, much less tasted what is perhaps America’s finest and “truest” sparkling wine. But the name and the property have a storied history dating back to the mid-1800s, and I’m driven to tell the story myself.
Jack Davies was a successful salesman and entrepreneur when he and young bride Jamie left a comfortable, secure life in L.A. and moved to a dilapidated Victorian house atop Mt. Diamond, south of lonely, tiny Calistoga, California at the top of the Napa Valley. Neither knew anything about winemaking, nor did they know a single soul in all of Napa. And the house they’d bought, with all its promise, was mostly a haven for bats and rodents. The Davies were not just taking a chance, they were gambling their very futures – with a four year-old son and another on the way.
The Schramsberg story is itself iconic of the early years of Napa winemaking. Jacob Schram was a German immigrant who worked as a barber in New York after arriving in 1842. Ten years later and presumably filled with wanderlust, he set off for San Francisco, finding his way to the Napa Valley. No longer content with the life of a barber, in 1862 he purchased 200 acres of hillside vineyards.
Eight years later, scores of Chinese laborers were digging wine storage caves into the hillside, and a second set in 1881. Today, those caves hold hundreds of thousands of bottles of outstanding sparkling wines, many of them meticulously turned or “riddled” by hand.
Before Jacob Schram died in 1905 he was producing at least six varietal wines bearing his name. William Henry Harrison, President of the United States, was served Schramsberg Riesling when he stayed at the famous and still operating Palace Hotel in San Francisco. By the time of prohibition the Schramsberg wine estate had become a summer home for the wealthy and didn’t produce wine again until 1951, when the property was resurrected by Douglas Pringle, who produced both table and sparkling wines. but almost as quickly, Pringle died and his widow padlocked the place. The Schramsberg legacy might have ended there.
But it didn’t.
Fast forward to 1965. Jack and Jamie clear the bats from their home – with the help of a volunteer from the St. Helena Police Department – and are there to stay. They set off to produce their first vintage, but don’t have and can’t find any Chardonnay, the base wine they need. Eventually, Jack barters some Riesling grapes he’s bought for 500 gallons of Chard. And he barters for it with the General Manager of the Charles Krug Winery, a guy names Robert Mondavi, whose name at the time wasn’t known outside Napa. How things would change for both families!
It wasn’t all, er, wine and roses on that hill. Chardonnay doesn’t grow well on Diamond Mountain, nor does Pinot Noir – together the two principal grapes that go into Schramsbergs. So the Davies built relationships with many winegrowers over many years such that today, they source their grapes from dozens of vineyards as far away as Mendocino County. Although that creates huge logistical problems, they somehow get their grapes in every year, and the results are spectacular.
The business, the Schramsberg name, and the Davies would flourish. Richard Nixon toasted Chinese Premier Chou En Lai in Beijing in 1972 with a ’69 Schramsberg Blanc de Blancs.
Today the place is run by son Hugh, and it’s clear that nothing has been lost over the years in terms of quality or tradition – or dedication to excellence.
At least once a month I pull a bottle of Schramsberg outta the cellar, chill it, and toast Jack and Jamie..whom I unfortunately never met.
If you love sparkling wine, you should, too.
Wine Cooler, Anyone?
No, I don’t mean a Bartles and Jaymes Strawberry Wine Cooler from a carry-out outside the university. You should not buy those under ANY circumstances. They were good commercials, though, right?
As for a wine keeper, wine refrigerator, wine cellar, wine cabinet – whatever you want to call it – yes, you should, if you drink wine and keep more than a few bottles on hand at a time.
Until I built my own wine cellar when we remodeled our basement, I had a 200-bottle wine cabinet, about the size of an average refrigerator. It was a single temperature model that I kept at 57 degrees, perfect for storing and preserving almost any wine. Of course, I needed to let the bottle warm just a bit (but not quite down to actual room temp) before serving if it was a red, and I chilled it just a bit more (but please, not to refrigerator temperature) if it was a white. Champagnes got a bit more chilling. You can get cabinets that have several temperature zones and hold as many as 1000 or more bottles, but when you’re diving in those waters it makes sense to build a real cellar in your, er, cellar.
The point is, a wine storage unit is a good investment, and wine storage units can be had for under $100 these days, holding as few as 12 bottles, and you can get one at Target, or Wal-Mart or Costco.
These small units are ideal if you live in an apartment and have limited space, or want a counter-top unit for the kitchen or bar. You can also get waist-high units that are permanently mounted under the counter.
Some hints:
- If it’s an option, get the glass door so that you can see your little friends and enjoy the anticipation of drinking them!
- Keep a row or two at the bottom for wine you want to “lay down” (save) for a special occasion, some date in the future such as an anniversary, or just because it’s an extraordinary wine that will age well and perhaps grow in value. Tag these wines “SAVE” so neither you nor a guest accidentally opens them.
- Buy a bigger unit, say, 36 bottles, rather than, say 24, if there’s any possibility, however slight, that you’ll want or need to store more wine. You don’t want to have to buy a second unit, do you? And the marginal cost of buying bigger is probably a no-brainer.
- Don’t splurge on a multi-temp unit unless you really want to spend the money. A unit that keeps all your wine at 55-59 degrees works for everything, really.
- The main thing is, these units keep wine at a constant, cool temp, protected from harsh light, and free of vibration. The better ones (and most of the cheaper ones, too, via the a/c compressor) also keep an acceptable level of humidity.
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