I’m crazy excited to tell you that I will soon be authoring a freelance wine column on Playboy.com.

So now you have some legitimacy behind the “I’m just going there for the articles, honey!” excuse (you’re welcome!).

The folks behind Playboy.com reached out to me many moons ago, and the whole thing has been even many more moons in the making, so I’m thrilled to be able to get started – and humbled and honored by the opportunity to work with such an amazing brand. I don’t know how long this gig will last, and the column doesn’t have an official name yet (please shout out your ideas in the comments – I’ve got a feeling those will be very entertaining!), but we have some great ideas for content, which naturally will be exploring the more sensual sides of wine.

Now, I’ve never featured beautiful nude women on 1WineDude.com (though I’ve come close!), but I suppose you could say that there’s a bit of “spiritual alignment” in my writing style and the serious-but-accessible-and-slightly-irreverent take on the subject of wine that Playboy.com was looking for. To me, it’s a bit like Forbes.com bringing on Jeff Lefevre’s smart, analytical writing style, or how the populist, grounded voice of Vinography’s Alder Yarrow fits in so well with JancisRobinson.com. So you can add one more name to the list of home-grown wine bloggers being tapped by long-standing on-line brands.

There are a few things you probably should know about this Playboy.com gig…

1) This is a freelance gig, with freelance gig pay, and I’m not an employee of Playboy. But that’s okay by me, because Playboy.com reaches several million eyeballs per month; of course, most of those eyeballs aren’t visiting to get wine recommendations, but that kind of audience volume is substantial, even if most of them are going there more for boobs than booze (I don’t know where puts me on the list of U.S. wine peeps in terms of potential reach… presumably pretty high, but I’ll let the PR people run those numbers and tell us, since they’re supposed to be doing that kind of stuff anyway :-).

2) I don’t yet know when the content will start running (and in fact, I’ve yet to create all of the content; so trust me, you will know when I know).

3) I have not met Hef (yet!). And I have not partied at The Mansion with Robert Downey, Jr. (…yet! Hey, a guy can hope, right?).

4) We’re talking Playboy.com here, and NOT Playboy the printed mag. And NO, I cannot get you free subscriptions to Playboy in either form (so you can stop typing that e-mail to me right now); though some of you in the biz may now be able to claim the subscription as a business expense (again, you’re welcome)…

5) Finally, and most importantly, I want to say… THANK YOU to YOU.

Yes, you.

I’m humbled, honored, and thrilled to have you along this crazy journey with me, and the ride is more rewarding and more fun for having you involved! I fully appreciate that many of you have been getting sick of hearing me say “big things are coming” and then delaying the announcements – all the more reason why I should be thanking you.

I don’t know if this adventure is going to end in sustainable income pooling, luxury yachts and diamond cufflinks for me, but I can promise you it is going to be quite an adventure. So please share the news as you deem fit!

And I’m looking forward to seeing many of you over at Playboy.com in the near future (for the articles of course!).

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Meet Playboy.com’s New Dot Com Wine Dude from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

Ok, so it’s not really proof, but it’s hard to deny the traction when someone like me makes the top 20 in a list like this. And #14?? Seriously?!? WTF?!??…

There’s probably something cruelly insane about me being more influential than Terry Theise (#60?) and the CEO of Total Wine, but one thing I’ve learned is that wine is, in fact, one crazy business (and according to the article, it was people in the biz who helped named the names). I feel thee are a ton of omissions, all of whom I’d personally rank higher than me on this list, but I’m honored to be in the company of such inspiring people (about a third of whom I have had the pleasure of meeting personally).

Having said all of that, I’d caution about reading too much into lists like this – good for a pulse check, probably bad for anything more substantial than that. My placement/ranking is probably a controversial play (and that’s not even considering the glaring omissions, such as Bonny Doon‘s Randall Grahm), and judging by the Facebook and twitter chatter this week, it’s a successful play.

You can check out the full list of IntoWine.com’s Top 100 U.S. wine industry influencers here. Thanks to Michael Cervin and the IntoWine.com folks for the nod – I’m trying to live up to it!

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at “Proof That Social Media Has Forever Changed The Landscape Of Wine?” from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

You pour yourself a glass from a premium bottle, the aromatic liquid spilling forth with the tell-tale floral and stone fruit aromatics of high-quality Riesling. You take a long whiff, then a sip, swooshing the liquid around in your closed mouth to get all the volatile compounds going, noting the secondary aromas and overall presentation that identify the growing conditions of the vintage from which the grapes were harvested.

Then you pass the glass to your eight-year old daughter, who downs the rest of it unceremoniously.

This scenario can happen, with no ill effects to your pre-teen offspring, and all quite legally, if the juice happens to be from one of the $10 bottles made by the likes of Virginia’s Oakencroft Farm or Oregon’s Draper Valley Vineyard that are offering high-end, vitis vinifera grape juice – as reported earlier this month on USAToday.com.

As in unfermented grape juice. Like Welch’s, only made from vintage-dated Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Gewurztraminer, and the like. Navarro Vineyards has been doing it for decades, in fact.

Why am I mentioning this? Because I’m fascinated by it, for a number of reasons.

First off, if you have too many grapes on your hands this is a brilliant way to put them to potentially profitable good use. And while alcohol is an important element of body and even flavor, this is also potentially an amazing tool for introducing people (and kids!) to different fine wine grape varieties, without the buzz (apparently, keeping the grapes from fermenting is one of the primary challenges in the fine grape juice biz, by the way). And the juices could spice up recipes that otherwise call for wine (Navarro sort of suggests this via their Verjus cookbook).

I’m not sure I’ll ever look at Welch’s quite the same way again (even if it will be to pause momentarily at the refrigerated section of the grocery store to give silent thanks that those Concord grapes never reached fermentation)…

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Vintage-Dated, Premium… Grape Juice? from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

It seems that venerable news-aggregator has stumbled upon the apparently news-worthy advice that shopping in the “Bin End” section (so named, as I understand it, because these were often literally bins of wine stacked up at the end of the aisles in wine shops) of the wine store is a good place to find vinous bargains.

To the tape:

“…you can also score some discounts by looking for your wine or liquor store’s “bin ends” section, or bottles with scratched labels, wines or vintages that are bout to be rotated out of stock, or just not a great seller at that store.”

But not all is a bowl full of rosés in those end bins. The trouble with the bin-end-bargain advice quoted by Lifehacker (which is a re-blog of wine buying tips from TheKitchen.com – the rest of which are much more sound, by the way) is that quite often the wines offered in bin ends aren’t much of a bargain at all.

If you’re not careful, shopping those bin end bargains might actually leave you more disappointed than a Steelers fan after an improbable NFL post-season Tebow-ing (full disclosure: I’m a long-time Steelers fan, so, yes, this is cathartic for me, okay?)…

If you do decide to take TheKitchen.com/Lifehacker.com up on their advice to storm the bin ends section of your regional wine shops, study this game-plan to avoid getting Tebow-ed for your $10:

1. Know this: there’s a reason those bin-ended wines are poor sellers.
   It could just be some of the labels got screwed up in shipping, but in my experience it’s much more likely that the bin ends are full of wines that did not sell and so the retailer is trying to get rid of the inventory by slashing prices. Now, that can be a very good thing if the slow sales are due to a down economy, or an “off-vintage” that got lower critical scores but are still probably really good wines. But it could be because the wines weren’t actually very good to begin with.
2. The bigger the retailer, the less likely the bargain.
   Again, this is from personal experience, but the larger the retailer the more inventory they have to buy and then dump off if it doesn’t sell. Which means the big boys are almost certainly discounting something there that didn’t sell (see #1 above).
3. Don’t expect crazy-good bargains. There will not – I repeat NOT – be first-growth Bordeaux stacked up in the bin ends on sale for 50% off the SRP because the labels got ripped a little bit during shipping. Don’t go looking for the deals of the century in those bins, because you will not – I repeat NOT – find them.

Look, shopping in those end bins and/or asking for a look at discounted inventory is a good idea for bargain-hunters – but save yourself some trouble and try it with shops that you trust. You won’t be saving a ton of dough on the wine in those bin ends, but you might save a few percentage points off of SRP, and in these tough times that might be reason enough to go to the extra trouble of asking the shopkeeps (with the added benefit of possibly striking up a relationship with those sellers that could blossom into full-fledged bargains on really good juice for you in the future.

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Are “Bin End” Wines Really A Good Deal? How To Avoid Getting Tebow-ed At The Bin from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

Before you flame me, Yes, I am already aware of the irony of today’s title.

I realize that some of you might have been trapped for the last several days under your collapsed wine racks and several hundred bottles of your collected vino. Or maybe you are just coming off a severe wine bender, Rip Van Winkle style, one where the hangover lasted for a few weeks. If you’re in any of those camps, I offer the following recap of some recent wine news:

• Blogger breaks story about Wine Advocate critic Jay Miller being in a potential scandal with MW Pancho Campo, regarding allegations of pay-to-play wine tasting/reviews in Spain (yes, that Jay Miller, the one who seems to always be in a story about a potential scandal).
• Chaos ensues on the global interwebs, WA’s Robert Parker sort-of threatens to sue bloggers, and then Jay Miller announces he is leaving the WA, but – ah-ha! – it had been planned all-along and is not actually the result of the blogosphere churning up possible evidence of a pay-to-play scandal.

[Editor's note: at least skim the above links, or the rest of this is not gonna make much sense.]

I can’t tell you if the pay-to-play allegations are true, but I can tell you that the Spanish wine biz seems to be quite relieved by the news of Miller’s departure, based on private correspondences I’ve had with people in the biz there (most of which amounts to them thinking that Jay was “terrible” – names withheld for obvious reasons!).

I’ve been conspicuously absent in saying anything about any of this stuff here on 1WD. Why? Because I don’t really give a rat’s ass, and feel compelled to talk about it now only because I’m getting asked why I’m not talking about. So before the irony gets infinitely recursive, here are the top three reasons why I haven’t been talking about it…

The Top Three Reasons Why I’m Not Talking About The Latest Wine Advocate Scandal

1) The average wine dude/dudette doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Jay Miller or The Wine Advocate. If the general wine-drinking public is interested in any of this, it’s in the train-wreck-so-awful-I-can’t-look-away, life-of-the-Kardashians kind of way (I have some Facebook thread discussion proof of this). Yes, some of them care about the scores given to wines, but studies have shown that many don’t care about the names associated with those scores, only that the wine has a high score. To those Dudes/Dudettes, Jay Miller only matters to the extent that this scandal tarnishes the Wine Advocate brand – scratch that, it’s not right: actually, it’s probably only retailers (many of whom consistently abuse wine scores, by the way) that actually care about this, because it could mean that those tarnished scores get pulled from the shelves (in which case people would buy based on the scores supplied from any of a dozen other sources that will take the place of those from TWA).

It’s not that the scandal hasn’t been covered well already – by any reasonable measure it has, with Blake Gray’s articles on the topic standing out as particularly excellent and thought-provoking. And it’s not that it isn’t newsworthy – it is. But it’s only newsworthy to a tiny percentage of the wine-drinking populace, and that populace is already well-served by the existing coverage. Unfortunately, this hasn’t stopped many of those people from proving the adage that…

2) The Mob Rules. Never question the wisdom of Black Sabbath, people. Everyone seems to have assumed that Jay Miller, Pancho campo and the WA are already guilty of some impropriety in this scandal. But nothing has been proved in a court of law, and probably never will. I’m not saying any of them aren’t guilty – if it looks, waddles, and quacks like a duck, after all, it’s probably a duck – I just don’t like getting involved in the pile-on mob mentality. Unfortunately, the pile-on mobs are probably stirring up the hornets’ nest of short-sighted media moguls who are under the impression that…

3) The wine world already looks like a bunch of douchebags. If Miller and Campo should be ashamed of anything, high on the list ought to be the fact that their conduct is dragging the wine biz back into the douchebag spotlight. The media outside of wine waits like a panther to pounce on shiz like this, which they wasted little time in doing, taking the tired, worn-out, jumpeth-the-shark-already tract of – surprise! – saying we’re all a bunch of douchebags in the wine biz!  Gee, that you sooooo very, very much Pancho and Jay – now my buddies have extra fodder for giving me crap about my career move over the holidays! Again, it’s not that the scandal isn’t news, or shouldn’t be covered, but at this point adding further kindle to the douchebag-perception flame seems gratuitous and unnecessary to me.

I understand that TWA subscribers probably have lots of questions about this scandal – and they should. I understand that those people deserve ongoing and in-depth coverage of this mess. But I don’t understand why everybody and their sister has to jump on that bandwagon.  For many of us covering the wine world, we might better server the community by focusing instead on offering transparent, viable alternatives to the wine coverage douchebaggery, and let those who broke the story continue to pursue it.  My friends at Catavino.net recently voiced a similar piece of advice in an open letter to the Spanish wine biz in the wake of the scandal:

“…I say to you, invest in relationships, not with critics and communicators. Invest in real wine drinkers.”

Amen to that! If you consider yourself part of that real wine drinker crowd, I’d love to hear what *you* think about all of this!

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at The Top Three Reasons Why I’m Not Talking About The Latest Wine Advocate Scandal from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!