Wine-related Video Roundup

I am still crafting my next column so, in the meantime, here are some entertaining wine-related videos.

First off, a creative fan of Amy Winehouse creates a portrait of the singer out of frozen wine. Next, ever wanted to know what a wineglass breaking under extreme resonance looks and sounds like? This video has the answer. As I first saw posted by Peter over at Besotted, looking for a dazzling and unique way to blow out the candles on your next birthday cake? The Champagne cork sniper demonstrates one possibility. Even practicing with the cheapest Cava on the shelf, that would be an expensive craft to perfect.

An Austrian Wine Tasting

This past Thursday, I had the pleasure of attending an Austrian wine tasting event at the Austrian Embassy in Washington, D.C. The event was arranged by Laurent Guinand and GiraMondo Wine Adventures in conjunction with the International Club of D.C. This was my first foreign consulate experience so I was unsure what to expect but was pleasantly surprised with how casual an affair it was. I sat at a table with some very nice folks and I had a great time getting to know them while we enjoyed a nice selection of Austrian wines and food. The one thing I could fault the event planners for was that there was not quite enough food to go around so I did not get to try the Jaeger Schnitzel. However, I am partially to blame due to a tactical error in going for the wines first and getting food later. Fortunately, I was able to fill up on very nice Chicken Granciola and Spaetzle as well as a selection of tasty desserts. There ended up being more than enough wine for all to try as many as they liked so lesson learned for me.

The most planted grape in Austria is Grüner Veltliner (GREW-ner felt-LEEN-er) and it makes what is clearly the country's signature white wine. Fans of the grape, a list of wine enthusiasts that includes yours truly, often abbreviate the grape's name to GV or Gru-Ve (“groovy”). While grown in smaller amounts elsewhere in Europe, its association with Austria is well-deserved. From good vineyard sites with low yields, the grape can be turned into deliciously spicy and sometimes very intense white wines. If you have never had one, they are definitely worth seeking out. With their increased domestic popularity in recent years, you shouldn't have to look too far.

Austria's signature red grape is Zweigelt (TSVYE-gelt), a grape that holds the honor of being last alphabetically on pretty much any list of wine grapes (it is the second to last entry in the most recent Oxford Companion to Wine, losing out only to “zymase”, which is an enzyme). Zweigelt, like Grüner Veltliner, can really bring the spice along with rich cherry flavors and typically results in medium-bodied wines. Another grape represented at the tasting is St. Laurent, which is one of the parents of Zweigelt (the other being Blaüfrankisch). St. Laurent produces very deeply colored and full-bodied and velvety reds.

All of the wines poured at the event are available on retail shelves in the Washington D.C. area. I had personally had several of them before, albeit in older vintages, at other Austrian wine events I had attended in the past. I really am a big fan of Austrian wines in general and look forward to their continued growth in popularity in this country.

For what it is worth, here are my wine notes from the event:

2006 Anton Bauer Grüner Veltliner Gmork, Donauland-Wagram, not stunning but solid and very good typicity for a GV. Rich peach, and a little mango, the more tropical of the two GVs served. Nicely balanced and pleasant. ~$12 and generally pretty easy to find at retailers in this area.

2006 Tegernseerhof T26 Grüner Veltliner, from a biodynamic producer. Less fruit-forward than the Bauer. Light peach and a very smoky presentation, almost as if the wine had been lightly aerated with cigarette smoke (but in a good way). More crisp, a little earthy and perfectly balanced with a mineral-driven finish. This is a very good and very interesting wine indeed. ~$13.

2006 Steininger Zweigelt, Kamptal, grapey with red cherry and a little smokiness. Moderate tannins and a nice finish. Not as spicy as I like a Zweigelt to be but a solid red wine. ~$16.
2006 Hillinger Zweigelt, Burgenland, organic producer. I am fond of Hillinger's “Small Hill” blend (Merlot, Pinot Noir and St. Laurent) as an everyday red so I had high hopes for this one. Very similar nose as the Steininger but much more assertive initially on the tongue with black cherry and earthiness. Alas, has little additional to say as it moves to the rear of the tongue and has very little finish to speak of. ~$18.

2005 Anton Bauer Pinot Noir Reserve, easily the worst wine of the night. Cranberry juice extract to the eye. Gary Vaynerchuk's “Oak Monster” is out in full force on this wine, almost to the exclusion of everything else. A little cherry, a little ethyl (probably only discernible due to the lack of fruit). Like licking the inside of tree bark. ~$30.

2005 Steindorfer St. Laurent Reserve, Burgenland. Highly extracted, almost entirely opaque. Very grapey with a touch of cedar and some cherry, sharp with some white pepper and light tannins. This was my first varietal St. Laurent. It reminded me quite a bit of a Norton (a native American grape that I plan on writing about in the near future). As it happens, I was sitting at table with a woman who used to work at Chrysalis Vineyards, a Virginia winery that makes one of the most highly-regarded Nortons on the east coast, and she agreed. This wine was tasty but quite monotonic and probably a bit too rich to drink more than one glass of at a sitting. ~$25.

2004 Steindorfer Eiswein “Cuvee Klaus”, Burgerland, I have had this eiswein twice before and I adored it both times and I adored it at this tasting. A mixture of Welshriesling and Pinot Gris, very aromatic with musky herbal notes and honey. Perhaps slightly too low in acidity but not at all flabby. Beautiful and delicious and it paired well with the apple strudel and wonderfully with the less sweet cheese strudel. ~$35.

I went back for more red to accompany the Sachertorte, a chocolate-on-chocolate torte, and chose the Steininger Zweigelt. They paired quite nicely and solidified my choice of this wine as the best red of the evening.

And the Pendulum Continues To Swing...

A recent Corrie Brown Los Angeles Times article asks the question: Are California wines over the top? Increasingly, wine enthusiasts are saying “yes” to that question...or at least “maybe” or “kinda” or “uh...not sure.” Alcohol levels are continuing to climb and levels of extraction in many of these wines climb to keep pace and the American wine consumer may just be starting to get a little tired of it. Or, it could just the inevitable change inherent in almost every system, a reaction to a reaction, and the wine world most certainly is a system.

The primary focus of Ms. Brown's article is Ojai Vineyard's Adam Tolmach, who is very publicly turning his back on the critical darling style of big, fruit-forward, high-alcohol wines he has been making for the past several years and has a proclaimed goal of making “14%-alcohol wines with nuance.” Tolmach has the advantage of making only 6000 cases per year and already being very highly regarded so I believe he will make this work for him, continued Parker score support or not. This might be a much larger fiscal risk with a larger producer and certainly will be risky to those who emulate his moves without the benefit of also receiving the public relations boon inherent to being the centerpiece of an L.A. Times article.

15% seems to be the line in the sand that, once crossed, started to raise concerns. It seems as good a number as any. However, I do tend to disagree with the quoted assertion from Burghound's Allan Meadows that a 15% wine cannot be balanced (although I suspect his quote was taken slightly out of context). It is possible for a 15%+ table wines to be balanced and show genuine harmony on the nose and tongue. Granted, genuine examples are probably pretty uncommon, but they exist. The problem is that the level of extraction and fruitiness needed to counter that much alcohol leads to a wine that, frankly, doesn't lend itself well to what many perceive to be wine's primary goal; accompaniment with food. This is especially true of the kinds of food most people actually eat nowadays. Honestly, how many nights in a month do you eat very hearty cuisine or strong cheeses? Now how many nights in a month do you drink red wine?

I regularly come across wines that, in my humble opinion, go with few if any foods at all. I am reminded of a night not too long ago where I paid nice money for a very highly regarded Australian Shiraz in one of the more famous steakhouses in this country and found, much to my chagrin, that the wine absolutely stomped all over the think, juicy and flavorful steak I had ordered. I love the intermingled flavors of red wine with red meat. The flavor of red wine with meat texture, on the other hand, is not as endearing a culinary experience.

I support Tolmach in his efforts and can only hope that his efforts and the public efforts of others like him help accelerate the momentum of the pendular shift that has already begun. Hopefully, Mother Nature will support their efforts as well in the increasingly hot California wine regions. Careful canopy management and selective harvesting will most likely be par for the course in years to come to ensure that grapes reach physiological maturity before sugar levels go beyond the desired point and the resulting wines will not be strong enough to strip the chrome off a '72 Buick.

All Hail Torrontés

When a new (and by “new”, I obviously mean new to most domestic consumers), exciting wine region finds an audience, it is often with a narrow focus. One wine style or, more often, one grape as produced by that region captures the hearts and minds of wine consumers. From that foundation, the region now has the necessary foothold to broaden successfully its portfolio. One obvious and, in the scheme of things, very recent example of this is New Zealand and its remarkable Sauvignon Blancs. And now that the Kiwis have paved the road with white grapes, its Central Otago Pinots and Bordeaux blends from the north island are finding very receptive buyers and, in some cases, have become highly sought after.

Argentina has enjoyed a similar success story, but it is the Malbec grape, particularly from Mendoza, that has been the horse that the Argentine wine gauchos have ridden into the North American market with guns blazing. From these Malbecs, sold both at both premium and bargain prices, red wines made with other Bordeaux varieties, such as Merlot and Cabernet, as well as Bonardas are starting to make a real dent as well. But there is a white grape from Argentina that is starting to garner some well-deserved attention. That grape is called Torrontés and it is beginning to get some name recognition from folks outside the wine wonk sector.

Torrontés (pronounced tore-rahn-TEZ, note the accent on the last syllable) is almost certainly an import to South America. The name is the collective label for three different but related grape varieties grown in Argentina, the most prominent and highly-regarded of which is Torrontés riojano. Recent DNA analysis suggests that the grape is a crossing of Muscat of Alexandria and Criolla Chica (the Mission grape of California). It should not be confused with the unrelated grape of the same name grown in Galicia and other regions of Spain. Torrontés is easily Argentina's most widely planted white grape and is likely to stay that way if today's wine bears testimony to what can be crafted from it. Torrontés is today where Albariño probably was just a few years ago.

2007 Dominio del Plata Crios de Susana Balbo Torrontés (screwcap). Winemaker Susana Balbo is best known for her premium Malbec but also produces wines under her “Crios de Susana Balbo” (“crios” meaning offspring) line from Dominio del Plata in a substantial array of choices, to include a Cabernet, a lower-end Malbec, a Syrah-Bonarda blend and a Malbec Rosé.

The wine is light-medium straw in color with a tasty nose of honey, pineapple and mango. It is like the aftermath of a gunfight in the perfume department at Macy's, but in a good way. The Muscat heritage of this grape is present and accounted for but without being...well...too Muscatty. Your tongue will expect a sweet wine and won't get it. This wine is dry and elegant and moderately crisp with subtle tangy flavors settling into a long, mineral-driven finish. You will not compose sonnets about this wine but it is far from simple-minded. This would make an excellent warm weather sipper or school night dinner wine with light fare. It went very well with some deli seafood salad. It would also be an excellent choice to slip into the mix at a party with your casual wine drinking friends. They will like it and admire you for your offbeat tastes. At $12-$13, the QPR on this wine is outstanding.

Wine Blogging Wednesday #41: Friuli-Venezia Giulia white wines

The theme of this month's Wine Blogging Wednesday (hosted by the fine folks over at Fork & Bottle) is white wines from Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Seeing as I had yet to ever partake of a Tocai Friulano, I saw this as an opportunity to add another new grape to my list. The grape that constitutes the wines known as Tocai Friulano goes by the same name in Friuli but is known as Sauvignon vert or Sauvignonasse in some other places it is grown, such as Chile. It is the most popular and most widely planted white grape variety in the region. Thanks to some litigious Hungarians, these wines will soon be known as “Friulano”, lest consumers inadvertently confuse this crisp dry wine from Italy with predominantly sweet Hungarian wines using entirely different grapes.

My favorite Annapolis retailer did have several Friuli wines, but no Tocai so I ventured downtown to MacArthur Beverages where they had a couple to choose from, selecting the 2006 Villa Russiz at the salesperson's suggestion. As warned, these wines do not come cheap. Both options were right around $30.

As recommended, I did choose to decant this wine for two hours. Of course, being nosy, I first tackled this wine straight from bottle with a light chill. The color is medium straw with golden highlights. Very pretty, actually. The nose was predominantly green apples and some green grapeskin. Green apple continued to the tongue with pronounced but somewhat blunt mineral notes and moderately crisp acidity. The finish was fairly long and it is a nicely balanced wine. It reminded me of a more fruit-driven Silvaner on first impression. After a couple of hours of breathing time, the most stark change was the nose, which offered the added dimension of melon and some slight fresh peach tones. The wine was also a little more assertive in the mouth the second time around but the flavor profile remained about the same.

This is a very solid wine and a bottle I will sure to drink dry before the sun rises on Wednesday morning but I cannot consider this a very high QPR based on the sale price.

Do Wine Consumers Need to Grow a Spine?

“Wine consumers should grow a spine and buy what they like without the need of reassurance from 'experts' who will tell them whether or not what they purchased is 'good.'”

I saw this comment on a wine-related Internet forum in a thread dedicated to the timeless debate about alcohol levels, overripe flavors and extraction in California wine. Like every other thread that tackles this subject, it revealed starkly-drawn lines based on personal tastes and/or geographic loyalties. No surprise.

The thing is, I do somewhat agree with the quoted assertion, but I do so more at a wistful, emotional level rather than a logical one. Is it realistic for wine consumers to not, at least sometimes, rely on the opinions of others when purchasing wine? I don't really think so. I don't even think it is reasonable. I think that the history of wine consumption in the United States demonstrates quite starkly that most of us, as a group, do not have much confidence in our own palates.

The average consumer walks into a wine retailer and is confronted with thousands of wine bottles dressed, in many cases, with labels they do not even understand fully. The boutique-ish label featuring a wolf wearing a construction helmet or the fuzzy bunny on a unicycle or a chunk of nearly indecipherable German doesn't tell them if the product is good or not. Neither does the pricetag. Yes, an attentive and knowledgeable salesperson can at least partially remedy this inherent confusion, but the presence of staff like this on the retail floors of the establishments where most people buy wine really is the exception rather than the rule.

The very nature of the market, the countless choices in nearly countless wine types, ensures apprehension. And the higher the price point that consumer is willing to shop, the more their apprehension is likely to grow. There certainly are those who are willing to spend their money and take risks on unknowns in the search of something new and different, but we are a minority.

Of course, they don't necessarily need to rely on "experts", the super-palates in print. They simply want validation from others. Perhaps they seek to impress their friends with, “You know, this Pinot got a 94 from Tanzer.” Maybe they need a house warming gift for a wine wonk and they want to avoid embarrassment. Most likely, they just want a solid bottle of wine for their money and they don't want to get home, pop the cork, hate what they taste and either feel like they “don't get it” or that they just flushed $35 down the crapper.

In recent decades, the “experts” have been a dominant force in the wine buying habits of U.S. consumers, particularly in the greater than $20 per bottle market. Be it Parker, Tanzer, the collective palate of the Wine Spectator staff, or a handful of others, there have been a very finite number of voices speaking at sufficient volume to be heard above the din. Certainly these voices, and the volumes of tasting notes that they produce, can be useful in separating the obvious chaff from the wheat, but does any one voice genuinely speak for your palate? Can any one nose and tongue that travels the world and drinks and scores in upwards of ten thousand wines per year, often in locations and conditions that differ very much from your dining room, represent your vinous interests accurately? They may very well, but it can prove to be a very expensive proposition to even find out for sure.

The prominent wine review publications have largely transitioned from the print-centric world to the Internet very effectively, ultimately even offering more value now than before consumers knew what “www” stood for. However, they may also prove to be a bit of an anachronism. Communal knowledge is something that is held in very high regard on the Internet. It's relied upon. It's embraced. This is not communism of knowledge, rather quite the opposite. The wine world has been slow to adapt to this trend but might Google someday prove to be a more popular method for finding wine reviews than the Wine Spectator Online review search engine?

Thanks to vibrant online communities of wine drinkers, websites like Cellar Tracker (which offers, in effect, Amazon.com-esque consumer wine reviews) and the continued proliferation of review-centric wine blogs, the average consumer can get what may prove to be more reliable and varied reviews of individual wines, and at no cost to boot.  With the continued proliferation of  iPhones, PDAs, Blackberries and other Internet-connected handheld devices, they can even get those reviews in the store with the pressing of a few buttons.

Honestly, when confronted with a purchase decision on the $35 2004 Fuzzy Bunny on a Unicycle Cabernet, would you rather have Robert Parker's opinion, or the opinions of twenty average wine drinkers?

Raising Prices Enhances Wine Sales

An article in today's New York Times provided details of a Cal Tech study that showed that the perception that higher price means higher quality could influence people. If this was simply a study that showed the wine tasters will assign higher scores to a wine they think is more expensive, I would say file this one under "D" for "DUH."

However, these researchers took it a step further and actually had the tasters undergo a functional MRI while tasting the wine. The results demonstrated that the tasters actually experienced more pleasure when they had a wine that they thought was more expensive. Fascinating stuff.

Their next study will involve perceptions of pain. I think I'll not volunteer for that one.

On Wine and Climate Change

This is a topic that every wine enthusiast should be at least somewhat familiar with. Grapes have proven to be an excellent bellwether for what the media usually calls “global warming.” This is due to their vulnerability to extremely hot days as well as the fairly narrow temperature bands within which each variety can truly thrive. The wine industry has already seen some substantial changes due to climate change and, if the climatologists are to be believed, even larger changes await us in the future. Could this mean that the future will bring...

The end of Napa as a quality grape growing area?

The dominance of Puget Sound Pinots?

The burgeoning market for Danish wine?

These are all things that may just come to pass some day and very well may not. The extent of man's role in climate change is still a matter of great debate, as are the relative accuracies of the various climate models that serve as the foundation for a substantial chunk of the scientific literature on the subject. What really can no longer be debated is that climate change has happened and continues to happen.

For wine enthusiasts looking to come up to speed on the subject, I recommend the following as a very solid overview on the subject:

Corie Brown's article “Climate Change and the World Wine Map”, as originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

Grape Radio's podcast “Global Warming and Wine.”

**For reference purposes, it has been my experience that we Americans just do not speak the Celsius language well. As the climatologists in the podcast provide temperature figures in degrees Celsius, 1°C = 1.8°F. So, if someone says they expect the mean temperature of Region X to go up 3°C in the next 20 years, that would be 5.4°F.

Attack of the Winebar

As this Washington Post article from today reports, wine bars are rapidly revealing themselves to be a growth industry. They continue to spring up in the Washington D.C. area and this article highlights five that are now doing business, four in Northwest (not surprisingly). While D.C.-centric, I suspect a nearly identical article could be written or will soon be written in many other large cities throughout the United States.

In addition to wine bars, it is becoming more and more commonplace to find wine-centric restaurants with substantial by the glass wine menus. This is great news for casual wine consumers, most especially those who are looking for variety and an opportunity to try lots of different things, or even dabble in high end concoctions, while not endangering little Timmy's college fund with their Mastercard payments.

As has been reported in many places recently, U.S. per capita wine consumption has risen substantially over the past 15 years. There is no reason to believe that this trending away from spirits and beer towards wine will not continue in the coming years. Wine may be taking a big bite out of teetotalism as well since it enjoys a much healthier image. This has led to substantial growth in what I call the “middle-class” of wine consumerism.

At one end of the wine-buying spectrum is the “Joe and Jane Sixpack” consumer who very rarely dabbles in anything more expensive than Sutter Home and Yellowtail offerings. Chances are, most of these consumers will never have any real interest in delving deeper into wine and consider it an inconvenience if a wine is not available in a 1.5L bottle. At the other end is the very conspicuous 1-2% of consumers who have been parked on cult cabernet waiting lists for years and have a wine cellar full of Screaming Eagle and Gaja Barolo (or long desperately for same). Some might call this group “wine snobs”, but that would probably be an unfair generalization. In between these two extremes of regular wine consumption is a larger group of wine-interested consumers with a lot of discretionary dollars to spend. If the recent wine bar craze continues to propagate, it will be these consumers that support that growth.

Let's be honest. These people rarely, if ever, dine at restaurants awarded the Wine Spectator Grand Award.  As such, the existing fine wine and dine infrastructure has not been well-positioned to cash in. These new wine bars and the growing breed of wine-centric restaurants springing up in the suburbs are.

I am inclined to think that wines by the glass will prove to be a large facet of wine consumption's continued growth. Imagine the following wine consumer inner monologue:

“Vacqueryas? What in the hell is Vacqueryas?”

If this monologue is occurring in a wine shop, that consumer is likely to move onto more comfortable pastures and buy a bottle of Aussie Shiraz or Argentine Malbec. In a wine bar, on the other hand, the same consumer's sense of adventure (which is inevitably tempered with frugality) will probably be more than willing to pay $5 for that 3oz. tasting pour.

Of course, if there is a buck to be made, it is only a matter of time before the three or four huge corporations that seem to own practically every full service restaurant chain in this country are building “McWine and Tapas” bars in every shopping center parking lot within 20 miles of your home. Only the future will tell if this is a good thing or not.

Oh, and one more thing. All you eligible bachelor wine enthusiasts take note of this sentence from the article:

“Almost every owner and manager interviewed for this story estimated that 90 percent of their customers are female, even though they do not market specifically to women.”

Perhaps your Ms. Right is, right this very moment, sipping a glass of Riesling in the wine bar down the block. Stop what you're doing and go look.

The Cadillac of Dessert Wines

Most wine enthusiasts are familiar with, or at least have heard of, the famous dessert wines that bear the name Sauternes. These wines are created with the help of a fungus called botrytis cinerea along the left bank of the Garonne river in Bordeaux. The presence of this fungus on produce is usually considered a bad thing, ruining soft fruits such as strawberries. However, under certain conditions, it can play the role of benefactor and earns the nickname “noble rot.”

When a cluster of grapes becomes inundated with noble rot, the fungus extracts moisture from the grapes, shriveling them like raisins, but concentrating solid elements like sugars and acids. Visually, it is indeed as disgusting as it sounds, but botrytis infestation creates a very special condition in the grapes. Afflicted grapes release a super-sweet trickle of syrup when pressed rather than the normal gushing flow of grape juice. This, as one would expect, results in substantially lower fluid yields per grape. Further complicating matters is that botrytis does not tend to evenly afflict grapes on the same vine or even on the same clusters, necessitating that the pickers make many passes through the vineyard to harvest at different times, often picking individual grapes in the perfect condition and leaving the rest of the clusters to mature further. To say that the creation of a bottle of a botrytised wine is more labor-intensive than a typical bottle of Chardonnay of equal size would be a fairly massive understatement.

The area known as Sauternes has the perfect mesoclimate to facilitate, in good years, mass infection of grape clusters with the botrytis fungus. The adjacent village of Barsac enjoys similar conditions and the dessert wines produced in Sauternes and Barsac are held in very high global regard and often very pricey indeed. At the top of this heap is undoubtedly Chateau d'Yquem, the only chateau in either region to be awarded the status of “Premier Cru Supérieur Classé” in the 1855 Bordeaux classification.

With the high regard comes higher prices. A glass of Yquem is a very expensive, albeit delicious, treat. A review of prices at my local retailers show prices ranging from $125 to $350 per half-bottle (375ml), depending on vintage. Most other Sauternes and Barsacs ring up at a much lower price but you can still expect to pay $30-$45 per half-bottle for recent vintages.

The narrow definition under French wine laws of what dessert wines can and cannot bear the name “Sauternes” works very much to the advantage of the frugal wine consumer. Just across the Garonne from Sauternes and Barsac are three other villages that also make botrytised dessert wines in the same manner from the same grape varieties; Sauvignon Blanc, Semillon and a often a small amount of Muscadelle. These appellations are Loupiac, Ste-Croix-du-Mont and Cadillac (CAD-ee-yak). However, it seems that each of these appellations contain only a handful of chateau willing to subsist due to much lower sale prices of their finished products.

One of these is Chateau Fayau. Fayau has been in the same family's hands since 1826 and has 10 hectare of vineyards just outside of the city of Cadillac. Their sweet offering contains only Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc (no Muscadelle) and is aged for 18 months prior to bottling.

2004 Chateau Fayau Cadillac (purchased locally for $14.99, 375ml).  Deep earthy gold and viscous, indistinguishable from most of its more expensive cousins across the river. 2004 was not an earth shattering year for Sauternes but this is a nice effort. It possesses an expressive nose of honey and dried apricots agitated in a blender and these primary characteristics take center stage on the tongue as well. The wine is not at all cloying with solid acidity and lingers deliciously in a moderate to long finish. I tasted the wine at 55° as I find Sauternes tend to be pretty tight when served cooler like an Eiswein.  This is a solid buy for those looking for a faux Sauternes at a substantially lower price.

A Beginning

I love wine. When one chooses to embrace its allures, it provides an almost entirely unique combination of sensory stimulation, intellectual contemplation and scholarship. There is no practical end to the number of new wines one can try or wine-related knowledge one can acquire. This body of wine knowledge is part agriculture, chemistry, geography, geology, psychology, economics, business, history and even a nice splash of tabloid-level gossip and muckraking. What all this means is that the opportunities for wine exploration are, for all intents and purposes, infinite.

This is not my first wine blog. For much of 2005-2006, I maintained a blog at Vinohound.com. I'd be flattering myself if I thought that anyone reading this sentence even remembers it. As much as I have and continue to enjoy exploring the world of wine and writing about my explorations, I just wasn't self-motivated enough to keep the blog updated at that point in my life to make it something that could attract and keep a core group of regular visitors. As it started to become more of a chore and less of an outlet for my “vinthusiasms”, I stopped updating it and, eventually, purged it from the Internet.

With this new blog, begun about 18 months since my previous effort was updated for the last time, I make no promises to myself or others that it will be regularly updated. As I explore, or re-explore, some facet of the wine world and feel compelled to write a few words about it, I shall post those words here.

The intended audience of my posts here will, I suspect, be mostly those who have some interest in wine, already have some basic wine knowledge, and have a keen interest in learning more. I will not be delving into the intricacies of Burgundy vintages from the 1970s or conducting comparative weightings of $100+/bottle Napa cult cabernets or discussing the merits of investing in 2005 Bordeaux futures. Rather, I want to explore the grape less traveled, to experience the best of newly developing wine regions and winemaking styles, and to find delicious wines that don't break the bank.