The Wine Curmudgeon

The wine world has gone wacko -- but vote for me anyway

How else to explain the Wine Curmudgeon as a finalist for a 2013 Wine Blogger Award -- as one of the five nominated for best industry blog? Best industry blog? For a blog written by someone who has spent his entire wine writing career fighting the man. Opposing the power. Upping the people. Trying desperately to make wine simpler and easier for the ordinary consumer, and pushing the boulder uphill in the face of an industry that could care less.

I can only think of two things that might explain this: First, the wine industry, in an attempt to co-opt the opposition, has clasped me to its bosom. This would make sense, assuming the wine industry cared one way or the other about what I write. Second, that the nominating judges made a mistake. Which, given my dour Midwestern outlook on life, is probably what happened. No doubt, someone will shortly call me and apologize and say better luck next year.

Until then, I'm going to enjoy this, odd category or no. Because I am grateful. Happy, too. Ecstatic, even. Thank you, nominating judges. Because I sit at my desk and type five of these things a week and wring my hands and gnash my teeth and wonder if anyone reads them and if they do, does it matter? And how can I get people who aren't really wine drinkers to read the blog and what kinds of posts would they like to see? And how am I going to make any money off of this and will I ever finish the book, and dammit, I need a post for next Thursday.

And, of course,  I will be most shamelessly promoting my nomination in hopes of winning the award. So go here and vote for me. Voting ends May 24, so don't waste any time.

Wine of the week: Cusumano Insolia 2011

The Wine Curmudgeon has run out of adjectives to praise Sicilian wine. Whenever I think it can’t get any better, it does.

Remember how crazy I was about the Cusumano Nero d’Avola? The Insolia ($12, purchased, 12.5%) is even better put together. It’s a white wine made with the Sicilian insolia grape, traditionally used to make marsala. Yet, on its own, the Insolia is an absolutely beautiful wine, one that makes all that $15 and $20 grocery store stuff taste like the boring, dull grape juice that so much of it is.

Look for some lemon fruit and baking spices, but using terms like that shortchanges the wine. The whole is definitely bigger than the parts; this is a rich and full wine that not only pairs with seafood, but that makes you think of seafood as you’re drinking it. Highly recommended, and if I can find it for $10, it will be in next year’s $10 Hall of Fame.

Winebits 282: Wine prices edition

• Is cheap wine profitable? Jamie Goode, the respected and award-winning British wine writer, argues that cheap wine will never make anyone any money. He compares it to the cell phone business, noting that if one carrier offered cheaper rates instead of what he calls the almost cartel-like pricing structure in use, then “all profitability will be sucked out of the market.” That’s the opposite of the wine business, he writes, so no one must be making any money with cheap wine. His reasoning, though intriguing, misses a couple of points. Wine is not the cell phone business, which is limited by spectrum availability (as one comment to the post points out) and that lack of spectrum raises prices and margins. In addition, Goode overlooks the elasticity of cell phones vs. wine. We “need” cell phones; we don’t need wine. Hence, there is little incentive for cheap cell phone plans. Finally, I think Goode doesn’t understand the incredible marketing skill of U.S. producers like The Wine Group, which can create demand for cheap wine like Cupcake and still make money.

• Restaurant pricing: Says Chris Nuttall-Smith at Toronto’s Globe and Mail: “There is perhaps nothing more galling than flipping open a restaurant’s wine list to find a $15 bottle that you know and love listed for more than $50. That’s been happening to me a lot lately; where many Canadian restaurateurs are loath to price their chefs’ cooking at levels that would make it profitable, they show no such restraint with wine prices. It’s in-your-face enough to make some diners want to stick with Diet Coke.” The Wine Curmudgeon couldn’t have said it better. Is it any wonder that restaurant wine sales have never really recovered from the recession?

• When are wine sales illegal? When you’re in a state that forbids them. Like Wisconsin, which enforces a 1939 law that sets minimum prices for many retail goods. The story does a good job of explaining why Wisconsin wine prices can be 20 to 30 percent higher than in neighboring states, and how the World Market chain had to correct its Wisconsin advertising and sales offer to comply with state law. Note to Wisconsin residents: Drive across the border to Illinois. Wine is much cheaper there, and maybe even worth the price of the gas for the trip.

How screwed up is three-tier? Plenty, as Missouri can attest

The three-tier system is about money, and not the consumer. Right, Missouri?

Alcohol is distributed through the three-tier system in the U.S., and is constitutionally protected, thanks to several Supreme Court decisions, just like freedom of speech and religion. But that doesn’t mean it deserves that protection.

This was amply demonstrated in Missouri this spring. The state legislature debated a bill that would have restored a law that a federal judge had thrown out, suffered through a filibuster in the state Senate, and almost scuttled much needed legislation to decriminalize home brewing.

None of this effort was intended to benefit consumers, and none of it did. Instead, it was a fight between one distributor, its biggest competitor, and the world’s largest booze companies to redistribute their constitutionally-protected share of the nine-figure Missouri wine, beer and spirits market.

Or, as one eyewitness told me: “It’s chaos.” More, after the jump:

Is Fetzer's Zipz glass the answer for portable wine?

As usual, the answer depends on how much the wine costs. If you have to pay some concessionaire bandit $11 at a baseball game, absolutely not. But if you can find the wine in the plastic glass for $3 at a grocery store, and you’re not fussy about what it tastes like and you want the convenience, you could do worse.

More, after the jump:

The federal government's three-drink limit

The logic behind the proposal by the federal National Transportation Safety Board is impeccable: Cut the legal drinking limit to about three glasses of wine in 90 minutes, and fewer people will drive drunk and so fewer people will die.

But logical doesn’t always mean sensible. More, after the jump:

Wine of the week: Little James' Basket Press NV

Here’s a challenge to the California wine business, and especially those who think the Wine Curmudgeon is too hard on it. Use your incredible resources and talent to make a wine like this – a non-vintage red – instead of the buckets and buckets of boring, fruit-juice grocery stone plonk that you do make.

Because this French effort is not just a great cheap wine, but a great wine. As the guy at the store said to me when I bought it: “This may be the best bottle we have,” and his store has bottles that cost hundreds and thousands of dollars.

The point is not that California can’t make a wine as interesting and delicious as the Little James ($10, purchased, 13.5%). Regardless of anything else, California is probably the world’s pre-eminent wine region – the best weather, the best winemakers, the most money to spend. Rather, it’s that it has spent so much effort training consumers to buy wine with the name of the grape and a vintage on the label that it can’t conceive of anything else. If it doesn’t say Merlot 2012, no one knows what to do.

But they should. The Little James comes from a top-notch Rhone producer that mixes wine made with old grapes and wine made from current vintage fruit. The result is a $10 Hall of Fame wine: Classic Rhone barnyard aromas, red grenache fruit, some spiciness, and more tannin and acid than I expected -- a rough, though not unpleasant, peasant finish that speaks to a more traditional style of winemaking. A food wine for barbecue and burgers; highly recommended.

Winebits 281: Wine glasses, direct shipping, Italian wine

• Brushes for sale: There are three intriguing things about this post at Forbes about cleaning wine glasses. First, that Forbes would mess with it, given that it doesn’t seem like something their high-dollar readers would worry about. Don’t they have someone to clean their glasses for them? Second, that the best solution costs $4, using a baby bottle brush. This reinforces the Wine Curmudgeon’s theory that most wine accessories aren’t worth the money they cost and would be better spent on wine. Third, that the baby bottle brush company could have cared less about this new us, which points to the insignificance of the wine glass market in the greater scheme of things. Tip ‘o the Curmudgeon’s fedora to the great W.R. Tish, who sent this my way.

• Impressive numbers? The Wine Spectator analyzes the latest sales gains for winery to consumer shipping in the U.S. in such a breathless fashion that even I was impressed. And, given the legal restrictions, the almost $1.5 billion in sales is impressive (and that regional wine does more direct shipping than Washington and Oregon was pretty amazing). The catch, though, is that the $1.5 billion was just 4.4 percent of the total wine market. Until we see serious reform in three-tier, which hardly anyone is optimistic about happening anytime ever, direct shipping looks to remain a tiny, if lucrative, part of the wine business.

• Italian sales woes: Not in the rest of the world, where a leading Italian producer saw exports salvage its 2012 sales figures. Frescobaldi reported a 3 percent increase last year, despite a 5.1 percent decline in domestic sales. Once again, for everyone writing about wine, prices are a function of supply and demand. If demand decreases, as it has in western Europe over the past two years thanks to the euro crisis, then there must be a matching decrease in supply to raise prices.