A Grand Tasting

posted by philip in Wine

Mentioned briefly, last week, I was lucky enough to attend the New York Wine Experience Grand Tasting (like the event itself, quite a mouthful). It proved to be a fantastic opportunity for me to taste many of the world’s greatest wines. But first, lets get the negatives out the way:

Crammed full of sweaty drunken heathens, a fact which I was perfectly comfortable with. My objection lay in the dress code which forced me to wear, and then sweat into, my finest suit? Vying for top ‘classy moment’? Either the guy who grabbed a bottle of Krug Grand Cuvee and drank it from the bottle. Without, then having the decency to at least finish it off. Or the guy who grabbed a whole stack of napkins (serviettes to us Euro’s) and then tossed them in the air so they rained down on us like over-sized confetti. Like I said, classy!

Before moving on. My final objections? With a $250 ticket price for a 2.5 hour tasting, how unprofessional to run out of some of the wines after only 45 minutes. I feel that Krug can be excused from this - who can foresee what happened to their table? But to the rest of the Champagne houses that packed up show by 8.15? For shame. That and a lot of the expensive wineries seemed to be saving money by serving their most recent releases, which were clearly not yet aged to their prime.

Despite the aforementioned, this was still the most spectacular tasting I had attended. What it lacked for in ‘theme’ it made up for in its brute force of spectacular wines. With nigh 300 producers each serving a Wine Spectator 90 point plus wine.

Where else can you start with a slew of vintage Champagnes to prepare the palette, before launching into your own version of the Judgment of Paris by comparing the finest Bordeaux with Napa’s cult cabs, including the venerable Harlan Estate (very good, but not at $450 a bottle I’m afraid), before finishing with Far Niente’s excellent botrytis infused Dulce.

Ultimately, tiring of the crowds, I spent most of the evening loitering by some of the less expensive, but still spectacular wineries: Chateau Rauzan-Segla, Foradori and Duckhorn. Hardly niche, of course, but its surprising who gets sidelined when Haut-Brion and Opus One are present.

The Wine Expectorator

posted by philip in Wine

I went to a tasting event last night, a grand tasting event, and was fortunate enough to sup (and expectorate) some of the finest wines in the world. It was a heady affair, with no real business need for my attendance (sorry shareholders, but I didn’t realize that until after I’d purchased my ticket). Suffice to say I slammed back wines from such estates as Harlan, Opus One, Rothschild, Duckhorn, Haut-Brion, Etude, Phelps, Far Niente, Cos d’Estournel, Krug, Veuve Cliquot etc. etc.

Full report to follow early next week, after the long finish from these excellent wines has subsided.

Making wine in the concrete jungle

posted by philip in Wine

Despite living in the heart of the largest urban conurbation in the United States, Latif Jiji, manages to not only grow grapes, by training the vines up the walls of his Upper East Side Manhattan Townhouse, but to actually harvest, crush, ferment and then age the resulting wine, all while never leaving this concrete Island.

Laying claim to the only winery (albeit unlicensed with the product never being sold on the open market) in Manhattan, this years crop was 500 pounds of Niagara grapes, which was then made into 100 bottles of wine. The first vine was planted in 1977, but the area ‘farmed’ has now spread the an entire wall of the house, as well as the roof.

So how does the home made wine taste? According to Jiji, “it’s fruity, it is smooth. I would call it balanced. But the quality varies from year to year and even from batch to batch.”

Best of all, and a potential copyright infringement claim if I ever saw one, the wine is called “Chateau Latif”.

We’re back, and now…You’ve got Wine

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

Wishlist / Cellar / Ratings - how did online wine sites trap themselves into serving up separate pages for each? This isn’t books, we’re not Amazon. Wine isn’t simply a transactional experience. I may want a wine, then buy it and love it so much that I’m back month after month scouring for more until there’s literally none left. People who consume scores of the same book are deemed clumsy, when its the same wine, you’re a connoisseur.

We’ve felt the same pain, and so after some serious toil, your unified view of your wines is here. We think this is pretty revolutionary, but will let you judge that for yourself. With that said, here’s a run down of what you can do on the new ‘My Wines‘ page:

• Manage your cellar, by keeping track of the wines you own
• Maintain a wishlist of wines you want to buy
• Track your reviews and tasting notes
• Narrow, slice and dice your results using the full power of Snooth’s search engine
• Sort by Recent Activity, Quality/Price Ratio, Rating and more
• Narrow your results by wines available for purchase through one of our partners
• Export or share any combination of all of the above

This last point is truly powerful - Mark’s birthday is coming up. I can browse his public wishlist and narrow the results by $20 French wines that are in stock that he’s already indicated he’d like to try. Then click on the link and buy a bottle for him. Simple.

See the screen shot below, or log in and see your own!

Its an incredible powerful tool and we’re looking to make it better, so have a play and let us know what you think. There may be the odd bug, or gremlin, lurking in the code. Give us a holler if you find one and we’ll get squashing it for you.

OK, so what’s a Founding Member

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

A teensy change, that we hope, hints at the great things to come. A few days ago, our first 1,000 users received a ‘Founding Member’ badge under their profile. Just a little nod of thanks from us for your early support.

We’ll be adding other things in this vein as we mosey along - perhaps some useful stuff too. Actually, oh so much more on that tomorrow, fingers crossed.

S-E-Yo

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

Mark’s been turning his hand to search engine optimization (SEO) these last few weeks, and the early results are in, and looking good:

#1 Google position for the searches “Buy Shiraz” and “Buy Sauvignon Blanc”

#2 for “Buy Cabernet Sauvignon”.

As well as top 5 results if you substitute the varietal for several others including Merlot, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and a few others. We’re also near the top for “easy drinking red”.

It’s exciting as we’re just getting started here.

Lured by the stories of bad behavior…

posted by philip in Wine Industry, Wine

A few months ago, I wrote about the blight of students behaving badly during tastings at wineries in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Ever the diligent reporter, I decided it was only prudent to go check out the stories of drunken stripping and diving into Lake Seneca myself.

I was immediately disappointed as I didn’t see any of the afore mentioned antics. However, was mollified by some interesting wines.

New York state is the third state in wine production, after California and Washington, and the Finger Lakes, with over 10,000 acres under vine, is the main producing region in the state. The striking geology of the region, the long narrow lakes, were formed by the gouging actions of glaciers. Characterized by a short growing season and cold winters, although somewhat mitigated by the micro-climate of being near such a large body of water, the region is well known for its Riesling - a common grape from Alsace. Continuing the Alsatian theme, some of the wineries do a very light red Pinot Noir. A deliciously full bodied rose / light red that I have not seen done that often.

The region also grows an incredible range of cold-resistant native American varietals: Niagra, Diamond, Isabella, Ravat 51 amongst others. In fact, during a long day of tasting I tried almost 10 new varieties of grapes, which allowed me to finally gain access to the Wine Century club (which i’ve written about before, here).

While I was there I visited Lamoreaux Landing, Chateau Lafayette, Atwater and Bloomer Creek amongst others. Most wineries still produce several cheaper sweet wines, however, I was very excited by the drier wines (particularly those of Bloomer Creek), usually French varietals.

The Finger Lakes has some similarities with other budding wine regions, and I felt there were some similarities with the Loire Valley in terms of experimentation. Atwater Estates, for example, grows 16 different varieties on their 60 acres of land. Bloomer has 10+ on just 10 acres of land.

In all I tried about 60 wines and will be writing each up on my profile, for those interested.

Finally, I was lucky enough to go during harvest season and spent some time watching grapes being destemmed, crushed or tried those that were being fermented (the juice here ranged from wonderfully sweet when fresh, to painfully effervescent mid fermentation). Here’s a video taken at Lamoreaux Landing showing them crushing some Pinot Noir:

iS0N3AnYExY

Extended Label

posted by philip in Wine Industry

I’m fascinated by a lot of the technology in and around wine, and seem to write about that as much as I do about wine itself. I’ve written about advances in labeling technology on several occasions - here and here. Continuing the theme, Cline Cellars is introducing an ‘extended text’ label, featuring extra space to fit recipes, nutritional information or regulatory text.

“The multi-part label has three extra panels that enable us to share information about what shapes our brand - our history, vineyards, wine and farming practices,” said a Cline representative.

Costing Cline 60% more than the traditional back label, this does make it easy to fit government warnings and, if wineries are forced to add nutritional information, to plop that in there too.

I do believe that I’ve seen essentially the same thing on condiment bottles as well as tubs of Tylenol, but as ever, its always nice to see these things make their way to the wine space.

A Great Match

posted by philip in Wine Industry, Wine

A couple of weeks ago we all attended the Great Match Wine and Tapas tasting held by the Trade Commission of Spain here in New York. There were over 50 tables manned by importers and wineries, touting some 400 or so wines. I do believe there was food there too, but not one of us even remembered that once we were inside. For us, it was all business (i.e. wine).

We made it through 100 or so wines, lots of Albarino, Sherry, and of course Tempranillo. Over the coming weeks will be reviewing each and every one in our Snooth accounts.

Part of a 5 city tour, Great Match, visited Seattle, LA, NYC and Chicago and is coming to Miami on November 8th. New York was the only one that had a consumer event to follow. Pricy, at $75 or so, but possibly worth it if yore a die hard fan of Spanish wines.

This is what we do all day

posted by philip in Snooth

I’ve mentioned this before, but Snooth has entered a Wine related business plan competition. The deadline is rapidly approaching and we’re in second place in terms of overall rating (there seem to be several ways to measure ranking: # views, # votes, votes/views etc). Point is, we’re in it, doing well and if you want to hear me chime on about how we’re changing the industry this is your best bet. Take a gander:

Have a good weekend, and don’t take the number in the video too literally. They’re a month old, and significantly out of date now.