When It Comes To Bubbly, Do You Know Your Letters?

Champagne production is one of the most highly-regulated in all of the wine world, with each bottle receiving a registration number for its producer issued by the region’s governing body, and each label receiving a designation code that represents how the wine was made. What Champagne label code signifies that a Champagne was produced independently by an individual estate / grape grower?

• A. CM
• B. MA
• C. NM
• D. RC
• E. RM

As requested by you, the abnormally intelligent and good-looking 1WD readers, the answer will be forthcoming in the comments later. In the meantime, fire away if you think you know the answer (and want to show off your wine smarties)!

Cheers – and good luck!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Weekly Wine Quiz: When It Comes To Bubbly, Do You Know Your Letters? from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

They invited me to take a sample test rive of the game on the iPhone, and I can say that I am fairly impressed – the interface is slick, there’s a bit of game-addiction action as you rack up bottles that measure your winnings/progress (which you can then share via twitter, Google+ and Facebook for bragging rights among your social circle as to who has the most wine smarties). And we all know that wine knowledge makes you appear sexier to your potential amorous pursuits (just sayin’).

And now YOU have a chance to win a copy of Wine Knows Trivia for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, because we’re giving away a redemption code for the app to THREE lucky commenters this week!  Here’s the deal: you comment on this post, and at 9PM ET on Friday, January 27th I will randomly select three winners from the comments who will receive a redemption code via e-mail (if you win, you need to act fast – after February 3rd, the codes evaporate into the ether, never to be seen again!). Comment discussion topic coming after the jump.

Some of the questions in the Wine Knows trivia game are pretty friggin’ difficult – I found a few that rivaled those posed within the exams of the certifications for which I sat over the years. so it should keep all but the most die-hard wine geeks entertained…

For example, do you know the most commonly-used grapes (of the 14-some-odd varieties allowed) in the making of vintage port? Probably not off the top of your noggin’.

It’s not all a bottle of rose, of course – questions that you answer incorrectly tend to repeat themselves until you get them right, which you may find annoying. And as far as I’m able to discern, the app totally ignores the mute button on the iPhone, and there’s not setting to turn off the sound effects and music, forcing you to manually reduce the volume if you want to play while you’re supposed to be paying attention in a meeting. And finally, some questions use the term “varietal” as a noun (totally unforgiveable!).

Anyway, as a wine geek you can do a lot worse than while away your time learning some interesting tidbits about your favorite beverage by challenging yourself with all the great questions that Wine Knows Trivia poses for the bargain price of $0.99.

So if you wanna win a copy to put your wine brain to the test, shout out the following in the comments:

What’s the most difficult wine quiz/test/question you’ve ever faced?

For me, it would have to be the section on the WSET Advanced written exam that dealt with Spanish brandies – I was totally unprepared for the inclusion of that (shame on me!). But then, the exam seemed to include a good proportion of questions pertaining to the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., and if had been a Londoner studying for the exam I probably would have sh*t myself on those questions!

Cheers – and good luck!

(images: www.triviaknows.com)

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Wine Knows Trivia iPhone App Giveaway! from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

Vintage-Schmintage!

Continuing our Champagne theme this month, many wine lovers know that Champagne is often a blend of different grape varieties, but fewer know that it is usually blended across vintages in order to produce a “house” style with a consistent taste profile year to year. The exception to the blended vintages is, of course, vintage-dated Champagne, which is produced in exceptional years only from grapes harvested during that vintage. What percentage of total Champagne production is vintage-dated?

• A. Less than 5 percent
• B. Less than 10 percent
• C. Less than 15 percent
• D. Less than 20 percent
• E. Less then 25 percent

Cheers – and good luck!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Weekly Wine Quiz: Vintage-Schmintage! from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

I’m not here today to dissect Jon’s responses (many of which ring true for me, and are worth a read because he’s a very, very intelligent guy), but one answer he gave to the IntoWine folks struck me as a bit odd. To the tape (emphasis is mine):

“The average consumer still feels intimidated by wine and wine-speak. Are publications like the Chronicle partly responsible for the prevalent feeling among consumers that wine is somehow beyond their comprehension?

If we’re going point fingers at the idea that wine is pretentious, let’s start with the spread of overpriced, mass-produced wine sold as an aspirational luxury. I’ll borrow a phrase from a conversation with a fellow writer a few days ago: You write up to your audience, not down. If sportswriters had to explain a two-point conversion every time they mentioned it, we’d all die of boredom. That’s not an excuse to fall into jargon. But there is no shortage of amateur wine criticism out there that doesn’t contribute to the conversation.”

The trouble for me is that I’ve got no idea what conversation Jon is talking about in that response.

It might be that there is a hidden wine conversation, one available only to a Romanée-Conti-sipping secret society of critics with wine review superpowers like UV vision that can detect the exact number of Brett, fruit, and mushroom particles floating around in a glass of Burgundy and determine at a glance if they are at an appropriate level. A secret society that meets in an underground lair at an undisclosed location (guarded by pools of sharks with lazer beams attached to their heads) and through joint nefarious consensus determines what wines will get the really high scores this year.

The bottom line is that this secret society might as well also be made up of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, because the real wine conversation is actually the one that the amateur critics are having. Or, I should say, it’s the thousands of real and virtual “water-cooler” conversations that the amateurs are having every day, all over the world…

While I’m not sure what Jon was getting at in his answer exactly, I suspect that it means there are people reviewing wine publicly who have neither the experience or background to make determinations on its quality in comparison to the greatest wines in the world. And on that point, he’d be right. I can tell you firsthand that the man knows his shiz, is sharper than a tack, and isn’t afraid to voice (and defend) a well-considered opinion – all traits that make me deeply admire his work.

But if I’m right about the reasoning behind the view he expressed to IntoWine, then I can safely conclude that the view is skewed, in that it ignores a fact that is fundamental to how wine information is being consumed today: nearly everyone who buys wine and decides to talk about it in their social circles is now an amateur wine critic to some extent.

This is not new news – in Internet terms, which are more akin to the rapid aging of dog years (and even then, those are parallax dog years, in accelerated speed-of-light terms compared with the orbiting-close-to-the-black-hole-event-horizon off-line world), it’s a bit of ancient history; studies that demonstrate the power of en masse customer reviews have been with us for years; and it’s not as if the pace of the Internet has slowed (or become less of a popular draw) since then. That wine should be somehow immune to the same forces of customers easily sharing their opinions on-line is, simply, insane-asylum-strait-jacket crazy.

This isn’t to say that the role of critics isn’t important – it is, precisely so that the barometer can be set for how wine’s compare across the entire quality spectrum, from the banal to the truly sublime; and not only across the less-experienced spectrum of each consumer’s taste-buds. But that doesn’t make those consumers’ taste buds somehow irrelevant – in fact, within immediate social circles, those consumers’ taste buds might not only be relevant, they might be the only taste buds that matter when it comes to wine recommendations, period.

So what’s a (professional) critic to do when everyone is a(n amateur) wine critic?

The answer, I think, is simple: help the amateur critics.

Professional wine critics now serve at the pleasure of the audiences who give them the honor – and humbling responsibility – of following their advice. Critics must therefore serve their audience above all else – and if separate conversations are being had when it comes to wine, then it seems to me that one of the critics duties in this now-not-so-new world is to help bridge the gap between those conversations, amateur and professional.

In other words, join the (lively, exciting, and engaging) amateur conversations, and invite the amateurs to join in theirs. Social media tools make this very, very easy to do – but that’s another topic entirely, and I’m already thirsty…

So for now, let’s just leave it at this: Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not adding to the wine conversation – because you are the conversation; and no matter what knowledge level of conversation you’re having, rest assured that your voice now matters, and matters more than it ever has!

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at You Are The Wine Conversation (What’s A Wine Critic To Do When Everyone Is A Wine Critic?) from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

The quizzes will appear a week behind those that run in The Juice – otherwise the folks at LocalWineEvents.com would be (quite justifiably!) upset with me.

So… here’s last week’s The Juice Quiz, with the answer hidden (click the “+” button below to reveal; those reading this through RSS are just gonna have to exercise enough restraint not to scroll down far enough to spoil the fun) [Editor's note: see comments, we're turning off this feature in favor of adding a bit more suspense to future quizzes - the answer will appear later in the comments section from here on out!] to help slake your thirst for wine knowledge (the theme for the first several quizzes is my personal fave bubbly action – Champagne).

Enjoy!

The Secret History Of Champagne?

Many of you were ringing in the new year with Champagne, but do you know who might have invented sparkling wine, in terms of deliberately trying to make still wines get fizzy? It almost certainly wasn’t Champagne icon Dom Perignon, who likely tried to prevent his still wines from fermenting for a second time in their bottles, thus causing the bubbly action (and exploding a not-insignificant number of those bottles!). According to award-winning wine writer Tom Stevenson, evidence suggests which country may have been the inventors of sparkling wine?

• A. France
• B. Spain
• C. England
• D. Italy
• E. Portugal…

And the answer is…

C. England

Yeah, really.

In The Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia, Tom Stevenson makes a compelling argument for England being the home of sparkling wine invention (in terms of deliberately trying to induce bubbles in still French wines via secondary fermentation in bottle). While the French were still trying to keep their Champagne from developing bubbles in the early 1700s, English dramatists were mentioning sparkling Champagne in plays dated from the 1600s; and, according to Stevenson, the English had not only the technology to induce a secondary fermentation, they also had the means for keeping those bubbles safely contained – namely, corks (something the French wouldn’t use widely until about 130 years later).

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Weekly Wine Quiz: The Secret History Of Champagne? from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!