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HiYa! If you're new here, you may want to Sign Up to get all the latest wine coolness delivered to your virtual doorstep. I've also got short, easily-digestible mini wine reviews and some educational, entertaining wine vids. If you're looking to up your wine tasting IQ, check out my book How to Taste Like a Wine Geek: A practical guide to tasting, enjoying, and learning about the world's greatest beverage. Cheers!

Welcome to the Weekly Wine Quiz!

This week, we’re continuing the theme of questions relating to research cited in iconoclastic Master of Wine Tim Hanni’s new book, Why You Like The Wines You Like (full disclosure: I received a review copy, and I am mentioned favorably in the book – though I didn’t know about that mention until after he sent the thing to me).

I’ve been having my mind rocked regularly by Tim’s new book – though I can tell you that it needs editing and already requires a layout re-do. Whatever… let’s just have some fun with this…

Ties That Bind (Food To Wine)

True or False: The higher your emotional ties to wine and food matching, the less likely you are to perceive the match as a good one?

A.  True

B.  False

Cheers – and good luck!

So… it’s Valentine’s Day… 8AM ET on that day, when this post will first hit the virtual airwaves…

Are you sick enough of all of the bubbly and pink wine recommendations to want to rip off your own skull yet? My strong suspicion is “Yes” [ Editor’s Note: please do NOT rip off your own skull ].

Around this time every year, we get bombarded with coverage of V-Day wine picks, mostly spurred on by PR types pushing sparkling and pink (and, preferably to them, sparkling-that-is-pink) wine recommendations for their clients. I love pink, and I love bubbly, and I love pink bubbly – but right now, I don’t even want to look at a bottle of pink sparkling wine. Hey, it’s okay to call me a contrarian, because I am, in fact, a contrarian.

And so it’s with a nod to my contrarian streak that I offer you a wine recommendation based not on the pink-or-bubbly-or-better-yet-pink-and-bubbly annual publicity onslaught, but rather based on evidence suggested by statistical data. My guess is that my take stands a better chance of actually getting you a happy ending to your romantic evening, given the following deemed-important-by-no-one-but-me tidbits:

a) It’s based on real world evidence and not a press release liberally sprinkled with the words “romantic,” “special,” and “pink,”

b) I write for Playboy.com, which superficially links me to sexiness and so maybe makes me slightly more qualified to pronounce upon a wine’s sexiness (okay, that’s a stretch…), and

c) Mrs. Dudette is waaaay hotter than I deserve (empirical evidence!), so I might know something about the wooing of beautiful ladies with vino (more likely, I simply got lucky when she said Yes… look, stop raining on my parade and just go with this, it will be fun…).

So if you at least agree that statistical data is potentially better than press releases, you can safely ignore the tongue in cheek b) and c) justifications above, and read on about increasing the chances of getting your tongue in someone else’s cheek tonight…

Read the rest of this stuff »

Anyone remember back in 2011, when we talked about the fact that Boomers – who by and large account for the vast majority of current wine sales – wouldn’t be around forever, and so the wine biz really needed to get off of its duff and start thinking about how it would court Gen X and Millenial buyers?

Well, I’ve got some bad news for those who’ve been ignoring that advice.

In the 2013 incarnation of Silicon Valley Bank’s annual State Of The Wine Industry Report presentation, a round-table style discussion between author Rob McMillan (from SVB’s wine division), Paul Mabray of VinTank, Tony Correia of The Correia Company and MJ Dale of KLH Consulting, who discussed the results of the report live in mid-January 2013. During the discussion (uber-interesting for wine geeks and insiders, probably not so much for normal people), McMillan (who is a nice and interesting guy, by the way, something I found out when I had dinner with him at Nickel & Nickel) discussed the sobering fact that the exit of Boomers from the wine market will be a potentially enormous blow to wine sales, and that the Millennial generation requires focus to help fill the expected gap.

To ease in the understanding of this, I’ve taken a graph from the SVB report and “enhanced” it so that the implications are more, well… transparent (click to “embiggen”):

In other words, Boomers don’t just exit the wine market “feet first” (though many, hopefully, will continue to love wine and keep on buying it until they shuffle off this mortal coil); they exit it in droves when they retire. The message is this: if you’re a wine producer who hasn’t been courting younger generations as well as Boomers (And as we’ll see in a minute or two, chances are good that you haven’t), you ought to be crapping a brick right about now…

Read the rest of this stuff »

So, like, what is this stuff, anyway?
I taste a bunch-o-wine (technical term for more than most people). So each week, I share some of my wine reviews (mostly from samples) and tasting notes with you via twitter (limited to 140 characters). They are meant to be quirky, fun, and easily-digestible reviews of currently available wines. Below is a wrap-up of those twitter wine reviews from the past week (click here for the skinny on how to read them), along with links to help you find these wines, so that you can try them for yourself. Cheers!

• 09 Stony Hill Cabernet Sauvignon (Napa Valley): Nervy Bordeaux-raised beauty, trying on stylized American perfume and dress. $60 B+ >>find this wine<<
• NV Quevedo Tawny Port (Portugal): Dried figs and spice with attitude, bite and definite self-knowledge of its crowd-pleasing poise. $22 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 10 Bogle Vineyards Old Vine Zinfandel (California): In which you reap the vibrant, spicy and bold benefits of depressed grape prices. $11 B >>find this wine<<
• NV Freixenet Cordon Negro Brut (Cava): Apples, apples, apples, apples galore, crisp apples and… hey, did I mention apples? I did? $12 B- >>find this wine<<
• 10 Breggo Savoy Spiritus Pinot Noir (Anderson Valley): A brontosaurus that can do ballet? Yep, and it can tango if you give it time. $95 A- >>find this wine<<
• 11 Poet's Leap Riesling (Columbia Valley): Imagine running a marathon, coming to a station where friendly limes serve mineral water. $20 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 07 Abacela Reserve Tempranillo (Umpqua Valley): Big, bold, dense, but ultimately in need of a puff or 2 of tobacco to calm its nerves $45 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 08 Story Winery Picnic Hill Vineyard Zinfandel (California Shenandoah Valley): Bright as the Sun, but just about as big and heavy, too $28 B >>find this wine<<
• NV Gustave Lorentz Cremant d'Alsace Rose (Alsace): A meaty, cherry-laden instant mouth celebration, served up in a bakery shop. $24 B >>find this wine<<
• 06 La Fiorita Riserva Brunello di Montalcino (Brunello di Montalcino): Surly but well-read and quick-witted; will tar U w/ chocolate. $95 A- >>find this wine<<