The Wine Curmudgeon

Coming next week: The new Wine Curmudgeon website

That's the schedule, anyway. The new site will be easier to use and will look better, but will contain the same quality content that has made it one of the best-read English language wine sites on the Internet since 2007. The redesign will also give me the ability to add features, including an on-line store where you;ll be able to buy the Cheap Wine book.

I don't anticipate any problems, but one knows how these things often turn out. The web address will remain the same -- winecurmudgeon.com -- and everyone who subscribes to the blog via email and RSS feed should still receive the blog. If there are problems, like broken links or lost subscriptions, send me an email.

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."

Retailers and wine prices

Wine-Searcher.com has great news for wine drinkers: “Increased transparency of wine prices worldwide means retailers are no longer able to charge excessive prices.”

So how does that jibe with what I saw yesterday – a national retailer charging $17 for a South African red blend that included pinotage? Wine prices don’t get much more excessive than that.

The Wine Curmudgeon will sort this all out after the jump:

Cheap wine for dinner

Toward the end of last month's $3 wine epic, I got very tired of cheap wine. Or at least it seemed that way. And the Wine Curmudgeon was embarrassed. How could one of the world's foremost advocates of cheap wine be tired of it?

Which led to some serious reflection. Had I finally reached the cheap wine equivalent of the marathon runner's wall, when he or she has gone as far as they can and can run no more? And, if true, what did that mean for the future -- especially with the Cheap Wine Book on the way? Or was something else going on, something that I didn't understand, caught up as I was in trying to evaluate wine most of my colleagues don't think needs evaluating?

Fortunately, the latter turned out to be the case. The problem wasn't that the wine was cheap; rather, it's that it wasn't very interesting -- especially after five consecutive nights of the same thing. It might have taken longer to get bored if the wines had been $100 white Burgundy, but boredom would have come eventually.

Which made me wonder: Is that yet another reason why Americans drink so little wine (per capta consumpton has remained more or less the same for 30 years)? Do we stick to the same wine, even when we're bored with it, because it's too difficult to find something else?

Do those millions of women of a certain age buy the same undistinguished pinot grigio year after year because it's easier than buying something else, even if they want something else? Do those millions of Millenniuals buy syruped-up malbec because the alternative is spending money on wine they don't understand, even if they're tired of malbec? Can it be that the devil that we know is easier than negotiating the wine purchasing process and its indecipherable labels, intimidating retailers, and unintelligible winespeak?

Which led me back to the only wine rule I have left after 20-some years of doing this: Drink what you want, but be willing to try something else. Yes, that can be terrifying -- who wants to spend good money on something you may not like, even if it's only $10? But the alternative is getting bored, and there is too much wonderful wine in the world to let that happen. So take a chance. Don't let the wine business do to you what it has done to everyone else. You have nothing to lose but boring wine.

When Blue Nun ruled the wine world

In the 1980s, the German company that produced Blue Nun exported 2 million cases of the cheap, sweetish white wine, making it the YellowTail of its day. In this, it was supposed to be the fabled gateway wine -- something that would introduce non-wine drinkers to wine. Then, they would progress from Blue Nun to dry wine wine and eventually emergeturn into smart, sophisticated, and savvy wine drinkers.

That never happened (and, as I discuss in the cheap wine book, probably never will). Blue Nun, like all potential gateway wines, whether white zinfandel or YellowTail, reached its peak and hit a plateau, and consumers moved on to something else. Blue Nun is still around and still sells millions of cases, but it’s not what it was.

How big was Blue Nun then? I had dinner at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans in 1982 in the swanky upstairs dining room, and six or eight people at the table next to us were drinking Blue Nun. That they ordered it at one of the world’s great restaurants and which had an equally great wine list speaks to how comfortable it made those diners feel. Because, of course, Blue Nun was the white wine that’s correct with any dish – a brilliant marketing slogan for U.S. wine drinkers hung up on wine and food pairings, and just as true now as then.

Not all of the wine's marketing was that good, as this TV commercial from 1985 – when it was on its downhill slide -- demonstrates (courtesy of xntryk1 at YouTube):

The myth of wine and food pairings

The ancient Greeks, who didn’t understand gravity or the Bell curve, attributed the mysteries of the universe to the gods, and it served them well. Need a victory in battle? Pray to Zeus. Not sure about the future? Visit Apollo’s oracle at Delphi.

Wine and food pairings are wine’s version of Greek mythology. It’s the solution to all of the wine industry’s problems, even though – like Apollo’s oracle – pairings don’t mean all that much to the vast majority of wine drinkers.

This is not to say that wine and food pairings are legitimate, because certain food tastes better with certain wine, and there is scientific evidence to support that. What it does mean is that, for most consumers, they aren’t important. You can see more about this here. And here.

This has made such an impression on me that I’ve pretty much given up on wine and food pairings (though I’ll still suggest them). The cheap wine book goes into detail, but what it comes down to is this: If I tell people it’s OK to drink what they want, then why I am telling them what to drink it with? All I ask is that wine drinkers be open to the concept of pairings and give them a try. If they don’t like them, that’s fine, too. As my brother says, “I like big red wine. Why can’t I drink it when I want?”

Nevertheless, many in the wine business see wine and food pairings as the key to increasing wine consumption in the U.S. (this being one of the most important exceptions). This approach shows up regularly in studies and white papers, and most recently in what was an otherwise outstanding effort to help the industry figure out how to get Hispanics to drink more wine.

But the report, issued by Rabobank, has this line: “What support will be given for pairing wine with Hispanic food?" Forget the practicalities – what exactly is Hispanic food, given that Hispanics come from dozens of countries and they even eat non-Hispanic food? More importantly, it also ignores the point that most consumers don’t care about pairings and that pairings are especially intimidating to new wine drinkers. So how will that help lure Hispanics into wine?

Sometimes I wonder if anyone is really paying attention when they write these things.

The e-book versions of the Cheap Wine Book

It's here. And, if you do buy the book and like it, fill out one of those review things and let the rest of the world know just how wonderful it is. And, apparently, it is. It peaked at No. 12 among wine books in the first week, and was at No. 96 on Sept. 18 and No. 26 on Sept. 27. It's also in the Barnes & Noble Nook store. Still waiting on the Apple version, which is taking forever to show up in the Apple store.

The print on demand paperback, which will be sold through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and traditional retailers, is out and is available at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

I'll start selling the paperback version on the website -- the new and improved website -- around Oct. 15. For those of you who don't know about the book -- and how is that possible? -- go here.