Is your Fleetwood Mac Cabernet all it can be

posted by philip in Wine

Mick Fleetwood, the founder of Fleetwood Mac, has just launched his own line of wines. (If you don’t know who Fleetwood Mac are, you might be too young for a wine blog).

Mick joins a growing list of celebs, both living and dead, who are putting their names to wine. Some, like Francis Ford Coppola, are lifelong oenophiles who are heavily involved in the wine-making process. Others, like Australian cricketer Shane Warne are still a little ‘wet behind the ears’.

“It took me a while to understand what chardonnay is and what red wine is,” he was quoted as saying to the Sydney Morning Herald. After that, people were probably glad he wasn’t involved in actually making the wine.

There’s even a line of Elvis wines. Again, this is an instance where you don’t expect much day to day involvement from the celebrity.

Here are a few other celeb’s in wine: Greg Norman, Ernie Els, Cliff Richard, Sam Neill, Bob Dylan, Marilyn Monroe, Norma Jean, Jerry Garcia, Gerard Depardieu.

Pleasingly, it seems the majority of the celebs (living ones at least) got into this to actually make good wines.

Looking under the hood

posted by philip in Wine

Wine is always portrayed as a romantic, mystical product: images of farmers with gnarled hands tending to their vines on weathered slopes in the early morning mist and the like. It’s seen as the ultimate expression of “terroir” (a fancy French term for “dirt” meaning that the wine represents the area which it is from). New Federal regulations may change this by requiring wine makers to detail every ingredient used to make that wine - today, though, this includes a lot more than grapes and patience!

Under the FDA every food in the US needs to disclose ingredients, calorie content and fats etc. but wine has always been given a free pass as its actually controlled by a division of the treasury department. However, a 2004 congressional mandate requiring allergen disclosure specifically references alcoholic beverages, so it seems the free ride is over.

The problem is some pretty weird stuff is used in the process of making wine - much of it is later removed, but traces may remain - chicken, egg whites, Mega Purple, oxygen, copper etc. Do people actually want to know this?

I’m all for greater disclosure and transparency, and its true that many better wines rely on some of these additives less. So it seems right that wine drinkers should be informed. But the list of chemicals used during fermentation is long and not all of these are relevant. Take oxygen for example. Do people care that oxygen was bubbled through the wine to help it age better? Wine isn’t made in a vacuum, so oxygen is always present. Whats the difference between oxygen and more oxygen?

My take is that chemicals that are added to the wine and left there (Mega Purple is a coloring for example), should be disclosed, but that items that are used to aid the wine production process and then removed later needn’t be (egg whites are used to ‘fine’ the wine which removes impurities, the egg whites are then themselves removed).

Of course, if the egg white was fully removed there would be no need to disclose. But as its too expensive to prove that there are zero molecules of the stuff left wineries will be forced to publish it on the bottle.

The LA Times has more on the subject here.

What do you, Snooth readers, think?

Its a big market

posted by philip in Wine Industry

Wine is a $100 billion market and a $22 billion industry in the US alone.

The US currently ranks second in terms of total volume consumed and its also growing faster than the other top countries. The British firm International Wine & Spirits Record, forecasted that by 2008 the US will consume the largest volume of wine.

Don’t think this makes Americans a bunch of fanatical drinkers. Once the relative populations of the countries is taken into account the per capita consumption in the US ranks outside the top 30 countries at about 8 liters per person per year (France is at a whopping 60 liters per person per year).

There’s a lot of headroom here and its exciting to see how the industry is changing at the confluence of this and other major trends (deregulation, direct to consumer shipping, imports etc.)

The power of the masses

posted by philip in Wine

I came across an interesting article yesterday that I’m glad to say i disagreed with 100%. It was on SFGate and was about how restaurants are losing business due to negative reviews from bloggers and users posting to message boards. The article features enraged restaurateurs attacking various bloggers’ abilities to review their businesses: “Everyone has become a food critic. They think they’re real big shots. They probably can’t even make scrambled eggs.”

What relevance does my cooking ability have to do with my tasting ability? If you expect me to pay (be it with time, attention, or even money) then don’t be surprised when I tell people what I thought.

I may be able to taste the subtleties between two different wines, but that doesn’t mean I know how to farm grapes.

Its sad to see such ignorance in the world today, but to me the answer is clear - the restaurants simply need to fix the problems, and then the poor reviews will clear up themselves. Provide good food, great service and charge fairly and no one will be upset.

Thankfully there are visionary’s like Seth Godin, who the same day, published a piece on the fact that there are no short cuts. Like he says “It’s not so hard. If you make great stuff, people will find you.”

Moving servers

posted by philip in Snooth

As we continue to gather data and increase the complexity of the search algorithms we’ve found ourselves butting up against the ceiling of our current hardware solution. We’re going to add a couple extra servers this week, which will allow us to give certain functions (full text search and the database for example) dedicated machines. This is exciting for us as it will give us plenty of room to grow after we launch, and will greatly improve the response times for page loads and other queries.

Cooking with wine

posted by philip in Wine

There are two camps; those that cook with whatever wine is lying around and those that feel cooking with fine wines can accentuate the dish. The NY Times put out a great article a couple of days ago about this. Catch it before they make it subscription only.

Their summary: “Over all, wines that I would have poured down the drain rather than sip from a glass were improved by the cooking process, revealing qualities that were neutral at worst and delightful at best. On the other hand, wines of complexity and finesse were flattened by cooking — or, worse, concentrated by it, taking on big, cartoonish qualities that made them less than appetizing.”

One thing to watch out for is the fact that any flavors the wine has will become stronger as it is heated. For example a tannic wine can end up dominating the dish - much safer to stick to a smoother, gentler wine.

Lindsay Lohan causes stir in Snooths neighbourhood

posted by philip in Snooth

Snooth’s offices are located on a busy street in Manhattan, New York. Mainly we’re surrounded by offices, but it’s Soho so there are some very trendy bars and clubs nearby. We’re all pretty busy here so we tend not to pay attention to much apart from work. However, last week Lindsay Lohan was in the restaurant two doors down from us (415 Lafayette, while we are at 419 Lafayette) and on her way out ended up hitting a reporter with her car! It was, however, 3am during the middle of the week and even this diligent team was safely tucked up in bed by that point.

Another shout out

posted by philip in Snooth

I know I only posted a few hours ago, but we’re excited here at SnoothHQ. Word is slowly leaking out and people are beginning to ask questions: the three hours behind blog stumbled across our site yesterday and posted briefly about us (hope they signed up for an invite). Our designer, Clint, is beaming with pride at the compliment and asks that you come back when the final site is up to see just what he can do. If you cant wait that long, take a look at his beautiful portfolio site.

Things are so very nearly complete! It’s getting increasingly hard to wait, but to answer some of the rumors - we’ll finally open to the public in the next couple of months with the largest, most complete, wine database out there. Right out of the gate the entire experience will be centered around helping you find ‘better’ wines, wines more suited to your personal taste profile.

How will we do that? By tracking and crunching lots of data: hundreds of thousands of wines, wine reviews and tastes as well as a complex set of interactions to relate everything together. On top of that our big mean algorithm that will work its magic and deliver your personalized results.

We’re going to go into closed alpha testing next week. Not that that helps anyone who didn’t get an invite, but i just wanted to let you know that we’re close…

Restaurant Wine Lists

posted by philip in Snooth, Wine Industry, Wine

At last count we were tracking over 650 types of grapes, along with with several thousand synonyms. We have also indexed 35,000+ wineries, and around 2,000 regions. In total this supports the several hundred thousand wines that are in the database. Thats why it makes me laugh when i walk into a restaurant and the wine list looks like this:

Chateau A 2002 Reserve $45
Chateau B 2002 $36
Chateau C 2003 Prestige $29
Chateau D 2000 Cuvee $86

No descriptions, no information on region, varietals or taste. How is anyone supposed to make a decision? I know that Chateau is French for ‘Manor House’, but wineries outside France sometimes use the term, so I can’t even be sure that the wine is French. Despite working in the industry, I have no idea what I’m looking at.

This really isn’t that rare. Last weekend i went out to dinner at an Argentinian restaurant. I wanted to try a good malbec from Argentina. A common choice as malbec is a lesser known French varietal that really came into its own under the sunny Argentine skies, where the grapes get much riper and the resultant wine fruitier. The wine list was useless (House A, B, C again), so I asked the waiter for help.

I specifically asked for a fruity Argentine malbec. He pointed to the entire front page and said they were all malbec’s. I asked which was the most fruit forward and he waved his hand across the entire page again. I was thirsty so just pointed to one which I then ordered.

Maybe one day that wine will be fruity, but not just yet. It was young, closed and green - it needed to age another year or two.

The world of wine is vast and intricate. It doesn’t help matters when the people selling it don’t know what they are doing.

Tonight: CSI NY investigates Wine Fraud

posted by philip in Wine Industry, Wine

Late notice, and I’ve no idea how many of Snooth’s blog readers actually get CSI, but tonight’s show will deal with Wine Fraud.

Wine Fraud is surprisingly prevalent but traditionally hasn’t been reported on by the mainstream media. Suddenly, this is a very hot topic. Earlier this month Decanter reported on an FBI investigation into Zachy’s of New York and Christie’s of London. Estimates for the amount of counterfeit wine on the secondary market vary from 5 to 10%. A shocking fact, that worryingly isn’t confined to auction wines. In 1995, for example, Hong Kong police found 12,000 bottles of fake Mouton Cadet (which retails for $10 per bottle) in a supermarket.

Sadly, sometimes the fraud actually occurs at the wineries themselves. Chateau Giscours, one of the top 20 wineries in Bordeaux, was found guilty of wine fraud in 1998 for blending cheaper wines into that of their estate. Interestingly, this wasn’t detected by anyone actually tasting the wine, and, if it wasn’t for the disgruntled whistle blowing employee, may have gone undiscovered.

More standardization and control in the industry will help to fix issues like this, but it will still take years.

My thanks to Pinotblogger for the tip on this story.