Bottle Shocked

posted by Scott in Wine Industry, Guest Bloggers

There aren’t that many wine movies, and for this I’m grateful. Don’t get me wrong, I love wine, but I’d much rather drink it than watch it. So rejoice that it’s easy to count the number of recent wine movies on your fingers (Sideways, Mondovino, A Good Year).

The fact that there are so few wine films makes it all the more surprising that one forthcoming flick would so blatantly rip off another. I’m talking about Bottle Shock, the soon-to-be-released movie about the 1976 Judgment of Paris tasting. Its poster bears an uncanny resemblance to the poster for Jonathan Nossiter’s Mondovino, which was released in the US in 2005.

Both posters feature a bottles-as-bombs motif which was clever the first time and boring the second. Visually, I actually like the poster for Bottle Shock better, but the concept is tired. I will go as far as to say the designer was lazy; he or she didn’t do his or her research or simply thought they could get away with being a hack. Shame!

I understand that some movie posters are bound to look alike. With so many films out there it’s likely to happen. But in this case, I’m not talking about your average romantic comedies that come out every other day. I’m talking about wine movies of which there have been less than a dozen made in the past decade. All I ask of Hollywood is for a little bit of thoughtfulness and maybe some creativity if you can bear it. I know this plea has been made before, often to little avail, but now we’re dealing with wine so it’s my turn to complain. Besides, things are going to be all the more difficult when someone buys the film rights to Wine & War and someone’s going to have to come up with an original idea for a poster.

Soon there will be more wine movies on the way. Let’s hope the posters don’t feature some war-clad sommelier throwing a grenade made out of grapes. Whoops, I just gave an idea to some aspiring designer. You can blame me.

Scott Rosenbaum is director of operations for the International Wine Center and wine buyer for the retailer DrinkUpNY.

I’d like to be, under the sea..

posted by Robert in Wine Industry, Guest Bloggers

In an Octopuses’ wine cellar, you see.

My rhyming skills aside; wine producers have been conducting ongoing experiments into the undersea ageing of wine in bottle. A glimpse into the rationale of one such recent experiment:

“This week one of France’s oldest champagne houses, Louis Roederer, sent divers to place several dozen bottles of its Brut Premier on the seabed of Saint-Malo bay. In a year’s time experts will assess if it has matured with a different or better taste than in the traditional cellars of the Champagne region. In order to prevent the bottles being stolen by underwater thieves, the divers have hidden them. The cellarmaster who thought up the idea has argued that the seabed off the Normandy coast makes an ideal wine cellar, the temperature is a constant 10 degrees, the movement of the current gently rocks the bottles and there is no danger of damage from UV light.” - June 4, 2008, The Guardian, UK

What really struck me about the article was the image of Champagne thieves strapping on scuba gear to plunder the treasure buried beneath. I imagine it might be easier to drop in at the local market, but that would deprive future generations a good story.

It also highlights the lengths that producers are willing to go through to protect their considerable investment and ensure that their wines are in top condition (if not at their peak for drinking) when released to the market. Wines like Champagne may age 3, 5 or more years prior to release and you really can’t have those bottles just sitting on the kitchen counter.

While it will be interesting to see the results of this experiment – cut to image of a school of fish sabering open bubbly and riding the stream of bubbles to the surface – it really does drive home a divide in the quality of preparation in wine for sale on the producer side and how that regard for the wine’s health deteriorates at each step in the distribution chain. From non-climate controlled container ships or trucks to warm distribution warehouses and retail shops to, well, your kitchen counter.

I was reminded of this as I frantically searched the house for all of those wines I had been saving for some occasion or another and piled them in the refrigerator. If you are reading this in the Northeast you know why, record heat and humidity which drove the internal temperature in my apartment to 120 degrees and had very much the same effect on most non-subterranean dwellings.

Every step a wine takes away from its place of origin is an opportunity for disaster. The better importers and retailers go through great pains to protect their wines and make sure the bottles make it to you in as close to the intended condition as possible. But even with the climate control shippers and retail shops chilled down to cellar temperatures you will always lose a step or two.

That is why travelers who try to recreate a wine experience (say a bottle of Chianti at the Tuscan vineyard where the grapes were grown) are almost always disappointed – and not just by the fact that they are no longer at a Tuscan Villa, but by the fact that the wine – even though identically made – is just not quite the same.

What to do? Not much I am afraid, try to store your wine away from light and heat and enjoy it for what it is and not what it was. The best bottle of Barbaresco I have ever had was at the winery in Piedmont. It was twenty years old and tasted and smelled as fresh as a trellis of roses. I was partially humbled by the fact that the wine had traveled probably 20 feet in its 20 years and existed in the perfect conditions of the producer’s cellar for that entire time.

I can never have that bottle again but that is alright, that is what wine is at its best as fluid as the tides in the sea.

Robert Scibelli is a lecturer and administrator at New York’s premier wine school, International Wine Center.

Wine Words: From Argentina With Love

posted by Scott in Wine Industry, Guest Bloggers

Alright, I’m not actually in Argentina. This post isn’t about malbec or torrontes. It isn’t about steak or the Tango, either. Well, kind of. See, this post is about how I’d describe these things as being of and from the magnificent country of Argentina.

I admit an affinity for describing language as it is supposed to be used rather than how it actually is used. I’ve been down this road before. But something jabs at me brain when someone tells they had the most wonderful Argentinean (sometimes spelled Argentinian) wine. Why do I heave and haw? I do so because Argentinean is a noun and not an adjective. An Argentinean is a person from Argentina; anything else from that great nation should be described as being Argentine. Proper usage follows as such, “When on vacation, I met the most fascinating Argentinean, together we drank Argentine malbec.” Sure, it’s not the sexiest of sentences, but it is a correct one.

I am fully aware of how nitpicky I’m being, but that’s my job. So next time someone tells you how much they dig Argentinean malbec, slap them in face and then tell them how to properly describe their beloved malbec. Just don’t tell them it was all my idea.

Wine and the economy

posted by John in Wine Industry, Wine, Guest Bloggers

This past Sunday I was at Loxton Cellars working at the tasting bar as I usually do.  It was the Sunday of the Memorial Day weekend.  Typically the Sunday of a long weekend is the busiest day of the three day weekend.  So mentally, I had prepared myself for a little bit of chaos.  Philip and Mark can attest that the tasting room at Loxton is not that big.  Well, the space is big but the space is also used for 256 barrels, the winery office, the winery lab (which doubles as the kitchen) and the winery restroom.  If you get more than 10 people in this space it gets busy.

The everything room @ Loxton Cellars

What happened was not pure chaos but peaks and valleys of visitors.  While not ideal, we did manage to see a lot of people and the best part, for us, was that we sold a bunch of wine.  In those valleys of calmness it gave me an opportunity to think about and discuss with my coworkers for the day, Chris the owner and wine maker of Loxton, and Barrett, part-time Loxton guy like me and training to be a sommelier, what the impact of the current economic state has had on the wine industry.

What I am going to say is based on observation of my time at the winery and what I see when I’m in wine country.  I didn’t do any hard research.  So what effect has the slowing of the US economy had on the wine industry?  By my account, not a whole lot.  In fact, I would argue that there isn’t much of a change at all.

Again, I’m speaking based on my perspective.  We’ve seen less people at Loxton compared to this point last year.  However, the winter this year was especially long and wet in Sonoma.  People just don’t like going out in wine country when it’s wet and cold and this includes the locals.  Weather is a huge factor to us both to the number of visitors and the quality of our product.  Good weather is something we pray for.

The real determination for us, as a business, to whether the weak economy is affecting us is our sales.  It is true that first quarter sales were lower than last year.  However, if we factor in that we saw less people because of the weather then we need to look at another measure to really compare.  That figure would be average dollar amount per purchase.  When we looked at this it wasn’t very different.  In fact it was a single digit difference from last year.  So it appears that when people did visit us and made purchases they were purchasing the same amount of wine they were the year before.

What about sales to date?  The total number of purchases?  It can be easy to rationalize events.  View them in a way that makes them seem normal maybe even look good or optimistic.  However, when you look in your bank account the truth will hit you.  Is there money there or not?  For us, we can’t complain.  Sales are a little bit off from last year but that can be attributed to the slow start to the year.  This, as I stated earlier, was due to the crappy weather.  People are still buying our wine.

This brings me back to the Memorial Day weekend.  While we did have time to talk about some these topics the fact is we were pretty damn busy.  We saw a lot of people and those people were buying wine.  We had to turn away a van of twenty, twenty-something women, we just didn’t have enough staff to serve everyone.  Sales wise, we were right on target with last year.  While I can’t say for sure that the slow economy US is not affecting the wine industry it doesn’t seem to have as much an effect on us.

Crushpad’s Fusebox

posted by philip in Wine Industry, Wine

Crushpad had its annual NYC bash yesterday afternoon in the beautiful penthouse loft of Studio 450. Perched high above the Hudson River the views and space were the perfect compliment to the event itself.

Backing up for a second to tell you about Crushpad themselves. This is the company that Snooth lost out to in the Wine 2.0 VC event on Vator.TV last year, but when you see what they do and how alternative a take on Web 2.0 they have, you may very well forgive them. Crushpad is Winemaking 2.0: you go see them, buy a barrel of grape juice and tell them how to make your wine. They’ll work with you on taste, style, aging, bottling and even on branding, distribution and compliance. Its clear that if you want to retire to Napa and start your own little winery, you should ‘try before you buy’ and go use a service like Crushpad.

Wine making is damn complicated, and I wouldn’t have the first clue where to start. Lets say I want to make a Cabernet that will simply bowl you over with its intensity, I know that I need the best fruit, years of oak aging and enough alcohol to start a forest fire, but then I’d get lost. Target pH? Should we amellorate? What does amellorate even mean? How often do we stir, or rack the wine on its lees? OK, thats where the experts come in, and you get to play producer, while the directors do the gritty, detailed work.

OK, very cool, but for those of us who aren’t ready to plonk down $10,000 on a barrel of juice, let alone $14 million on that quaint Napa estate, there are still options. Crushpad make something called the Fusebox, which is basically a geeks chemistry kit for adults. Kind of like those kits you may have played with as a child - pouring pipettes of liquids into beakers and swirling gently - this kit offers exactly that, but, of course, with wine!

$120 gets you 6 little bottles of wine for you to blend, using the supplied pipettes, beakers and instructions into your very own Opus One knock off. This belongs squarely in the wine aroma kit category, its pure geek heaven.

PS. If you want to read my reviews for the commercial brands that use Crushpad to make their wines, click here. These are uber-niche small lot hand crafted wines. Some of the wineries there literally made a single barrel of each wine (25 cases), and so, as mighty as Snooth database of wines may be, I was pleased as pie to come home to see that every single wine that I tasted that day had already been lovingly entered onto Snooth’s site, buy one of our users. So, thank you very much for that, you made my day!

Your Biggest Fan

posted by mark in Wine Industry, Wine

A few weeks ago when Philip and I were in Napa we kept noticing these large fans in the fields. They weren’t turning so it was obvious they weren’t wind turbines but still I was intrigued to know what they were for. Here’s a picture of one:

When we made it to Larkmead, Snooth guest blogger Dan Petroski was able to clear up the confusion. I’ll explain from what I remember, and he can jump in with anything I miss.

In spring, Napa mornings can be chilly. In fact, sometimes the temperatures can drop below freezing. When this happens, vines are susceptible to frost damage. Frost can decimate an entire crop in one morning — I heard a few horror stories about winemakers getting to the fields to find their whole crop of grapes grey and dead.

Temperatures out in the field are closely monitored. As soon as there is a danger of frost, short metal installations filled with diesel gas are fired up, creating pockets of heat throughout the field. Here’s a picture of one we saw at Duckhorn:

Once these heat generators are fired up the fans begin to blow air through the fields, distributing the warmer air around, raising the ambient temperature and stopping frost from settling on the vines. Then I got carried away taking pictures of all the different models of field fans I could find.

European Wine Bloggers Conference

posted by philip in Snooth, Wine Industry

The first European Wine Bloggers Conference is being held in Logrono, Spain from the 29th to 31st August. In true Web 2.0 style, its going to be held as more of an un-conference.

Gabriella and Ryan Opaz and Robert McIntosh are doing most of the legwork on this important project, but what really interests me is how open and collaborative even the planning stage is. If you head on over to their site, you can participate in choosing and defining the round table discussions, for example. They also mandate that any presentation materials be distributed in advance, giving the audience time to fully digest and absorb the content and be ready to ask tough thought provoking questions during the talks themselves.

Proposed topics that I’d personally like to hear more about or get involved in are: wine communities, blogging standards and blogging technology.

Good luck guys - it sounds like the event is coming together. I’ll be reading the materials when they are published online and hope to hear about the fantastic turnout at the event itself.

Friday night thoughts

posted by philip in Wine Industry

Its Friday night and very quiet in the office as the rest of the office has left (they were up most of the night moving the site to our shiny new servers - am hoping you can all see the difference when you use the site). I’m feeling reflective so thought I’d jot down some thoughts about trade groups and efficiency.

Yes, I love efficiency and Snooth’s in part founded on that principle: its more efficient for you, the use, to have a single port of call to research your wines, its more efficient for wineries to have one standard of data feed to support and for them to have one site to monitor the public sentiment on their products.

When Jeff Lefevere of Good Grape posted a call for the two most forward thinking wine industry trade groups to merge, I immediately said I thought it was a good idea. Most people disagreed with Jeff, and maybe I was supposed to as well, as I’m on the Advisory Board for the Wine 2.0 trade group and one of the two Admins for the Open Wine Consortium group for Wine Technology Companies (the other being the fantastically quirky Randy Hall of WineBiz radio, who was wearing his “Bobs Bitch” tshirt when I met him).

Having one industry group is simply the ‘efficient response’. It may be hard to actually create, or outside of the respective founders interests, but thats not for me to judge.

This brings me to my next cry for efficiency: wine bottle shots.

Every winery takes a beautiful and artistic photo of every wine they produce. They may have the bottle next to a full glass of their wine, or perhaps carefully positioned on a rustic picnic table, with a bunch of grapes on one side and some corks on the other. Its beautiful, romantic, evocative.

Unfortunately, this is not what online retailers want. They want standard bottle shots. White background, high resolution, standard lighting and standard angles so every bottle shot looks the same and gives the store a sense of uniformity. So every online store now has to hire a professional photographer to re-shoot every bottle of every wine they sell.

With around 25,000 wines sold in the USA each year and hundreds of stores in the US alone having to photograph every bottle they display online the inefficiency is galling.

Conservatively, consider this:

200 stores, each needing 2,000 wines photographed per year at a cost of $50 per bottle shot (and these numbers are very conservative). Thats $20 million.

If there was a standard and the wineries took a second bottle shot that adhered to the standard we’d save $19.9 million dollars.

Stores would be able to offer bigger discounts to the consumer, wineries (at a minimal cost) could ensure their brand was visually represented at its best at all times across all stores, and everyone would be happy.

Self promotion

posted by philip in Snooth, Wine Industry

Tom Wark, over at Fermentation posted today over how people, usually wineries in his case, sometimes misuse the comments on his blog post to either get his attention or to sneakily collect a few back links to their own site. I’m still not sure if this is better or worse than real spam (of the cialis/viagra kind, although somehow snooth gets a lot of golf and scuba diving spam) as its done deliberately, by hand, whereas the average piece of spam is done via software code and the spammer realistically has no idea which sites they are posting comments to.

We see this on Snooth occasionally, a winery may create an account, then rush out and rate 5 or 10 of their own wines 5 snooth glasses.

In the short term these tactics probably work. Tom even, in a sardonic fashion, gave his spam commenter major exposure today by talking about them, and even posting their bottle label image (complete with naked woman), but over a longer term I think they are a bad idea:

1) the cost of being called out is greater than the benefit of gaming the system. To be totally accurate you need to factor in probabilities of each action, but even so I think its unwise.

2) in the same way that the captcha (type the words you see in this box to prove you are a human) trims out a lot of spam, we’re looking at ways to strip out bogus ratings. We already allow people to vote on reviews, and we’re getting closer to having a karma-esque rating for each user, which will help expose gamers.

I’m not saying wineries shouldnt comment on blogs, or review wines on Snooth, but making an effort to join in the online conversations that we are all having will be more rewarded than trying to hitch a free ride on everyone else’s work.

Two perfect examples:

> HondaJohn works in the tasting room of Loxton Vineyards, and reviewed one of their wines very favorably, however, he discloses that he knows the winemaker.

> Jeff Stai of Twisted Oak Winery, through his total immersion in blogging and the online wine community has generated an enviable amount of goodwill and press.

I cant wait to try wines from either of the se two wineries, when in other circumstances I’d probably have never even have heard of them.

Progress

posted by mark in Snooth, Wine Industry

When I started building Snooth I had an unclear picture of the wine industry. If I can recall properly, from the outside I always assumed it was well structured, well defined, and well planned. None of these assumptions ended up being the case, but wine’s mystique holds up for the industry as well as its product.

Now when I look at the wine industry, I see problems. Many of the problems are only resolved by fighting in our courtrooms. I have no interest in going there (although I do support the efforts of those who do). What I am interested in is the use of technology to fulfill a need for the industry. We have found very specifically that technology has yet to penetrate the industry as far as it has elsewhere. It’s a temporary condition. We’re very happy and fortunate to have interacted with many of the technological innovators in the space, some of whom we will meet in person later this week. For better or worse, the high-touch way of doing business is coughing and spluttering and being replaced by a business supported by computers. We notice the difference. Our partners who have embraced technology are better able to serve their customers.

The opportunity that Snooth provides is twofold. First, it helps the brick and mortar stores to connect up to the web — they can reach customers they couldn’t before, and serve those around them better. This is true especially as we begin to serve recommendations for stores in your area where others have enjoyed shopping and recommendations for wines you should try that are sold at those stores. That’s a real need, and it’s coming.

Secondly, it infuses the whole buying process with the social aspect that is so special about wine. We want you to connect with us, and with other folks, about wine. We’re all passionate here — and all of us can learn something. I know I love learning and sharing knowledge. What’s coming up here? We’re soon adding the ability to share wines directly with your friends via Grapevine message or even in Talk if you want to hear everyone’s thoughts. Talk will be doubly helpful when you can search it and find discussions about that which you are curious. As it grows, Talk essentially becomes a knowledge base with interesting information for the novice or the expert.

This opportunity to have a global conversation about our passion while simultaneously shopping smarter and better is what we’re about. It won’t work without the stores, and it won’t work without you. So join on in — we’re happy to have you all and your involvement encourages us to work even harder!