The Wine Curmudgeon

Wine comedy, and why I wish more of it was funny

This year, I wanted to do more silly stuff on the blog – after all, wine is supposed to be fun. The Winestream Media is almost always deadly serious, and even I fall into that rut more than I should. So the do-it-yourself wine review and the April Fool’s Day post were my attempts to lighten things up.

Unfortunately, though I can write funny, it’s not easy. Rob Petrie I’m not. So I have been searching the Internet for wine humor to use once a month or so, but with very uneven results. This Mel Brooks’ bit isn’t especially funny (the wine stuff starts at the 6:40 mark), and I didn’t think it was possible for Mel Brooks not to be funny.

The problem, as wine humorist William Tish told me, is that most wine comedy “is just the same old, same old. How many times or ways can you make fun of snobbery?” And Tish is right – that’s the theme in most of what I found, whether a skit in the Tamil language, a couple of Australian comics, or a marginally tasteful “gay men know best about wine” video.

What does it say about wine that people around the world, regardless of any other cultural differences, make fun of the same things about wine? We are entirely too serious, aren’t we?

So I’m stuck – either beat my head on the keyboard in the hope I can write something funny, which defeats the purpose of what I’m trying to do with humor, or keep scouring the Internet in the hopes something Cleese-like will show up.

Any thoughts, as well as wine humor from blog visitors, are welcome. Send me an email or leave a comment. We need to have more fun around here.

For more on wine and comedy:
• What's wrong with the wine business: Cartoon edition
• "Am I boring you?"
• "Wine writers -- donkeys that most of them are"
• "You won't show this, will you? I'm a wine merchant."

Mini-reviews 52: Beach House, Trump, Hedges, Drouhin

• Beach House Sauvignon Blanc 2013 ($10, sample, 13%): South African white was much different than I thought it would be -- young and fresh and citrusy, with a bit of a pithy finish. It’s a one-note wine, but delivers value for price.

• Trump SP Brut 2008 ($30, sample, 12%): Virginia sparkling wine from the former Kluge Estate continues the Kluge tradition of excellent bubbly. Lots of tight bubbles, crisp cherry fruit, an even finish, and a noticeable and welcome lack of oak.

• Hedges Family Estate Red Mountain 2011 ($25, sample, 13.5%): One of the best wines I've tasted this year -- classic Washington state red blend with rich, black fruit and where the Washington state syrah stands out. Highly recommended.

• Joseph Drouhin Bourgogne Laforet 2011 ($17, sample, 12.5%): Pinot noir from France has some Burgundian character, which means it has a little earthiness and not that much fruit. But it's a little thin, and the price is problematic.

The Treasury debacle, masstige wines, and what the consumer is trying to teach the wine business

When will the wine business figure out I buy on price?

The Wine Curmudgeon, despite his brilliance as a writer, is a lousy businessman. How else to explain that former Treasury Wine Estate CEO David Dearie earned A$2.4 million (about US$2.25 million) for running his company into the ground, while I have been giving away, for free, the wisdom that could have helped Treasury avoid this year's 53 percent drop in profit?

One more time, for those who still aren't paying attention: The U.S. consumer buys wine on price. The challenge for wine companies, whether multi-nationals like Treasury, Napa cult wineries, or the thousands of other producers around the word, is to add value so that the consumer gets more than their $10 worth. Some do it with cute labels and marketing; some do it with points and high scores; and the best do it by giving us $12 or $15 worth of wine for our $10. (Go here for almost seven years worth of examples of how the best do it.)

Treasury did none of those. Instead, it looks like it did the absolute worst possible thing -- it charged us $12 or $15 or $18 for $10 wines, a technique called masstige that was part of its business plan. I spend some time on this in the Cheap Wine Book, though I didn't realize what masstige was when I wrote it. Rather, I noted that wines that cost between $12 and $18 seem to offer the least value, "probably because producers don’t improve the quality of the wine as much as they increase the price and gussy up the label."

Think of masstige as a cross between mass market products like Two-buck Chuck and Barefoot and luxury labels like high-end Champagne. Masstige is apparently very common in cosmetics, where the added value comes from the prestige a product provides because it costs more money. This approach may still work in cosmetics, where the value difference between Revlon and Clinique remains well established even though the products are quite similar based on what's in the jar. But in wine, the idea that expensive is always better (as noted here and elsewhere many times since 2008) is something that the consumer has rejected.

Interestingly, I'm not the only one who has realized this. An analyst, discussing Treasury's problems, said "the underlying problem in the U.S. is not inventory, it's the health of the brands, because of underinvestment in marketing." Which, as mentioned above, is one of the three ways for producers to add value.

Want to make money in the wine business? Treat the consumer fairly, and the consumer will reward you. That's the lesson the recession taught, and it's really not any more complicated than that. Which is probably why I never thought I needed to charge for the advice.

Wine of the week: Domaine de la Janasse Terre de Bussiere 2009

Just when the Wine Curmudgeon thinks that he can’t be surprised by wine any more, I taste something like this. Is it any wonder that this is the best job in the world?

My reaction to the first sip was “Wow!” – for just that reason (and because, in my notes, wow stands for a possible wine of the week). The Janasse ($15, purchased, 15%) is a red blend from the Rhone in France, but with some very un-Rhone-like merlot added to syrah and grenache. I don’t pretend to understand what’s going on here, but I didn’t need to understand to enjoy it.

This is an earthy and fruity wine (black cherries?), if not especially complicated, and another example of the fine values that are available from the Rhone. It’s an end of the summer barbecue wine, perfect for the porch.

And don’t worry about that 15 percent alcohol level; frankly, I don't believe it (though 2009 was a very warm vintage in the Rhone). The wine wasn’t hot or overdone in the way that so many California 15 percenters are, and I only realized it was so high in alcohol when I did my notes.

Winebits 300: Wine prices, Texas wine, Google

• Pricing pressure – in the other direction: Just in time for the Cheap Wine Book (and the shameless plugs will eventually stop) comes this blog post from banker Rob McMillan. “Attempting to increase bottle pricing --even in an allocated environment -- has been like pushing a wet string up the hill.” Wine prices have been mostly flat since June 2012, well behind the rate of inflation. Throw in the 2012 California grape harvest, which was a record, and what looks to be an equally as large 2013 harvest, and we'll be drinking cheap wine for the foreseeable future. “Consumers haven't been willing to pay more for wine and based on the recovery sluggishness, I can't see them willing to pay more going into the holidays or even 2014 at this point,” says McMillan.

• Impressive hire: One of the obstacles facing regional wine has been the inability to hire the best qualified people, who have traditionally preferred to work elsewhere. That has been changing, and one example came this month Texas Tech hired a a Cal State-Fresno graduate. Maureen Qualia, whose family owns Texas’ Val Verde Winery, spent the past five years working in California before taking a job in the Hill Country to work with winemakers, do extension work, and teach classes. Fresno has one of the top three or four winemaking programs in the world.

• Google’s affect on the wine business: The Wine Curmudgeon, watching his visitor stats this year, saw a marked drop this spring when Google changed its search algorithm. But I’m not the only one who has suffered. Changes to Gmail, used by as many as three-quarters of a billion people, are sending wine retailer emails into spam, even though they may be legitimate. One of the untold stories of the post-modern world is Google’s influence on the non-technology part of our lives because of its tremendous power in shaping the Internet. Who would think the search giant could change how wine drinkers buy product or find wine reviews?

Cupcake wine review 2013

The Wine Curmudgeon has discovered the flaw in the Cupcake Vineyards marketing juggernaut. It’s almost impossible to find the wines in a store, whether grocery or wine, that has any kind of inventory. It took me 10 minutes to locate the two bottles for this review, scuttling between aisles at my local Kroger; would a less determined consumer have done as much?

Maybe they would. Cupcake is the post-modern wine business success story, eclipsing even Barefoot and its millions and millions of cases. Three years after it started, Cupcake was named wine brand of the year, and its sales increased 67 percent in 2012, according to one market research firm.

Cupcake, as Blake Gray wrote last year, approaches wine from a different perspective. It markets its brand before it markets its products, so its customers don’t buy on varietal, like pinot noir, or region, like France, the way most of us do. Rather, its customers buy Cupcake first and worry about varietal and region later.

In this, the wine is marketed almost like women’s clothing, where Cupcake is the designer that shoppers look for before they look for a specific item like a dress or a skirt. That’s why Target has long offered designer collections, whether from Isaac Mizrahi, Jason Wu, or Phillip Lim.

None of this, of course, takes into account whether the wine offers value. That’s why I’m here – this year’s take is after the jump:

Expensive wine 54: Charles Heidsieck Champagne Brut NV

The occasion required a sparkling wine for celebration, and it required more than cava. So the Wine Curmudgeon, spotting the Heidsieck ($56, purchased, 12%) on the shelf at a local wine bar, opted for Champagne. And why not? How often does the Cheap Wine Book go on sale?

Champagne has long been one of the great contradictions in my wine drinking life. I love Champagne, but I have little use for the Champagne business. It embodies everything that makes me crazy about the way wine works – little regard for consumers, pricing that bears almost no relationship to reality, and the idea it can operate like it’s 1953 and not 2013.

But they do make nice wine, and the Heidsieck is no exception. Look for lots and lots of caramel at the front, giving way to layers and layers of flavor, including white fruit and a mineral finish that has been described as almost iodine by some of my colleagues. This is not a subtle or especially elegant Champagne, and bears more than a passing resemblance to the mass Champagnes, like Veuve Clicquot, that I don’t much care for. But it is incredibly well made and a perfect example of this style. And we had a fine time celebrating the book.