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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!

“Joe, Enjoy!

- Cool-climate Syrah – touch of Viognier

- neutral oak – low alc

Best – Jonathan Pey”

It’s always nice to get something – anything – that isn’t formulaic when you open something up from the wine sample pool. So much juice comes into 1WD central sometimes, accompanied with letters that begin impersonally (not an auspicious start when you’re trying to stand out among a deluge) with “Dear wine writer,” “Editor,” or – directly from-letter-mail-merge-misfire-embarrassment hell – “Dear [blank].”

So… Jonathan Pey’s personalized note stood out when I yanked it out of the shipping box, along with a bottle of Pey’s 2011 Spicerack “Punchdown” Syrah. When I read the hand-written addition (reproduced – and pictured – above), I got a chuckle out of it. I mean, I try not to pigeon-hole myself in terms of stylistic preferences, but it’s true that I am often giving high ratings to extremely well-crafted, complex, age-worthy wines that I personally wouldn’t want to drink (my personal drinking preferences, in my view, should have little to do with the “grade” a wine might get, given that your preferences might be different). I quite happily drink a crap-ton of “B+” wines, ecstatic that I’ve received them for free (and probably more ecstatic than the producers receiving less than an “A”), and happy there’s enough juice left over in that bottle to share with Mrs. Dudette during dinner after I’m done reviewing it.

But it got me thinking… am I that easily transparent, even after all of my careful work (careful by my lazy standards, anyway)? I mean, I smiled at Pey’s note, but I also wanted to crumple it up and toss it in the fireplace, because it seemed so… smug… as if he was thinking “I’ll bet this guy is like those hipster East Coast Somms, all up into under-ripe 13% abv wines that smell like bush stems and taste of battery acid!”

Turns out I am that transparent, after all, but Pey’s not that smug, and his small production wine (15 barrels) tastes nothing like tea made from green vine stems…

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[ Editor's note: the following screed is nearly 1500 words long. The Cliff Notes version, for those who are in a hurry: be very careful about where you take your advice regarding wine and social media, lest you miss out on worthwhile authoritative voices/resources (as a consumer) or miss opportunities to build brand awareness and acquire customers (as a producer). ]

There’s no delicate way to breach this topic, and so I’m going to risk pissing off a lot of people by jumping right in and starting it this way:

From whom should you take your social media advice? Choose one of the options below:

1) Someone who ran Internet web hosting for some of the most successful brands in the history of social media (including Skittles, Snickers and M&Ms), who makes $0.00 from social media consulting, and who bootstrapped his way from total unknown to authoritative in the wine space completely via online channels,

or…

2) A traditional media outlet source that has little or no experience operating in social media channels, has a vested fiscal interest (advertising) in pushing wine brands away from inexpensive social media channels and into (more expensive) print advertising spending, and who publicly decries social media / blogs while at the same time advertises on those online channels and repeatedly asks those same blogs it decries to cover its events and press releases?

Hello… Paging Ralph Nader…!

The answer seems ludicrously straightforward, and yet I regularly watch wine brands go with #2, potentially to the detriment of their long term bottom lines. And yes, for the record, I’m the guy in the first example above, but that’s not central to the point – you could substitute anyone in the #1 slot with both social media and wine experience, like Paul Mabray of Vintank, for example. The point is that wine brands accord far, far, far too much weight to the social media prognostications and pontifications of OpEd pieces, newsletter introductions, and blog posts from staff members of traditional wine media. These media folks are often fantastic tasters, great writers, and immensely intelligent people who routinely, somehow, manage to make themselves sound like complete idiots by holding a bully pulpit sermon on topics about which they know almost nothing. It’s like eighty year old men talking about teenage girls’ high school fashions, or ten year old boys talking about prostate health or political voting strategies.

Seriously, people, this is getting embarrassing…

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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 Morlanda Crianca Red (Priorat): Flexes 6-pack abs, kicks other big red wines into a bottomless pit, screams "THIS IS PRIORAT!!!!" $48 A- >>find this wine<<
• 10 Viticultors del Priorat Mas de Subira (Priorat): Muscular, dark red fruits holding back chained, feral, gnarling wild animals. $30 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 11 Garbo Negre (Montsant): Rustic Syrah beats up on little cousin Merlot, but aunt Tempranillo scolds them all back into good behavior $19 B >>find this wine<<
• 11 Valdubon Cosecha (Ribera del Duero): Tart, friendly & simple Tempranillo, transmogrified into takeout sweet and sour pork form. $15 B- >>find this wine<<
• 09 Stolo Family Vineyards Anno di Lucas Syrah (San Luis Obispo County): In Robert Plant voice, "does anybody remember… Pepper?!?" $25 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 09 Stolo Family Vineyards Anno di Lucas Pinot Noir (San Luis Obispo County): These boots are made for… collecting funky earth. $35 B >>find this wine<<
• 09 Stolo Family Vineyards Anno di Lucas Chardonnay (San Luis Obispo County): Life's a preach, & then… hey is it getting hot in here? $21 B >>find this wine<<
• 10 Chateau Hanteillan Haut-Medoc (Haut-Medoc): Saddling up and delivering a Jack Palance-style glare-and-ass-kicking combination. $23 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 10 Marc Mondavi's The Divining Rod Cabernet Sauvignon (Alexander Valley): What it's flashing under that oak cloak is kinda impressive. $19 B >>find this wine<<
• 10 Marc Mondavi's The Divining Rod Chardonnay (Santa Lucia Highlands): Talks peaches, melons & bread, but secretly wants to be a lemon $19 B >>find this wine<<
• 10 Domaine Bott-Geyl Gewurztraminer Les Elements (Alsace): Less sweet-nothings-in-ear whisperer & more sweet-tongue-in-ear sticker. $25 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 10 Pertinace Nebbiolo (Langue): It's plenty of Funky, but it could use a lot more of the Cold Medina; or just a lot less of the Funky. $18 B >>find this wine<<

By now, many of you reading this will have come across a handful of articles on the Global Interwebs proffering the idea that the current style of high-scoring, high-end fine wines (prominently oaky, complex, high on the alcohol and low on the acidity) will always reign supreme in fine wine sales, and that it’s only a matter of time before Millennial consumers “grow up” and stop buying higher acid, inexpensive imports and trade up to the “real” stuff.

Many of these arguments are well-written and intelligently presented. But to me, they don’t read like the Queen’s English; they look more like this: “Blah blah, blah-blah-blah, BLAH-BLAH!!!”

Some of the crystal ball gazing has been done by those with a vested interest in prolonging the reign of the current style of high-scoring, high-end fine wines, but I don’t really have any issue with that potential conflict of interest. Also, I’m willing to ignore the fact that one of the key pillars of their arguments – that an entire generation will “grow up” to fundamentally change how they interact with brands – has no previous viable example in the entire history of luxury goods consumption on planet Earth.

The real nail in the coffin of these arguments is that no data are ever offered in support of them.

Meanwhile, we have examples of exactly the opposite happening; younger consumers buying fresher, higher acid wines, because that’s what they can afford and therefore it’s the style on which they’re cutting their wine loving teeth, informing their future purchases and tastes from this point onward.

What examples, you ask? How about roughly eight million bottles, is that a good enough example for you?

8 million is the annual bottle production of Mednoza’s Luigi Bosca, a producer I visited during my stint earlier this year judging the 2013 Argentina Wine Awards. The results of that visit – aside from yielding a handful of tasty recommendations for you (more on those in a few minutes) – underscored nearly every aspect of the speeches I and my fellow judges gave to the Argentine winemaking community during the AWAs, and yielded one of the most telling illustrations of the changing tastes of younger wine consumers I’ve yet encountered…

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