Beckham Buys Napa Vineyard

While making the rounds online this morning I've come across a number of stories about world acclaimed soccer (or football, depending on your location) star, David Beckham, but a multi-million dollar vineyard in Napa Valley this week. The vineyard, which Beckham has reportedly been researching for months, was a belated birthday present to his wife and newly self-dubbed wine aficionado Victoria Beckham (aka Posh Spice). The Beckhams got into wine while the footballer was playing with Real Madrid, and now they finally have a place to make their own. Well, a place where the team of vintners they've hired can make wine that they can slap the trademarked Beckham name on the label, anyway.

In the past ten years, interest in and the sales of wines has skyrocketed in the US. It seems as though Hollywood is catching vino fever as well.The news comes shortly following news of other celebs entering the wine biz, most notably Johnny Depp and Emilio Estevez (see my earlier posts on the subject), not to mention Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Francis Ford Coppola.

Fine Dining and the Never Ending Wine Glass

We've all been there. You're out to a nice dinner with a loved one, enjoying the food, having a pleasant conversation, sharing a bottle of wine - then, just when your glass becomes half empty, a waiter approaches to over zealously fill it back to the brim. Everyone has thought it (though few will say it), why can't I drink at my own pace? This problem of the pour-happy waiter is apparently universal, and now it's being blogged about and discussed, giving annoyed diners everywhere the opportunity to complain about it.

Christopher Hitchens is a writer for Slate.com. His column, "Fighting Words: A Wartime Lexicon," focuses on a wide array of targets, debunking ideas, voicing complaints and pointing out absurdity. Typically Mr. Hitchens' anger is directed at larger problems (War, Government, Religion) but earlier this week he took aim at the never-ending wine glass issue with passion and spite. The column, titled "Wine Drinkers of the World, Unite," is a call to arms for diners everywhere, stressing the amount of money to be saved and amusing anecdotes that could remain uninterrupted if everyone were to simply stand up and proclaimed - "No, I don't need you to refill my glass right now, it's still half full." The column turns out to be an amusing anecdote in it's own right. If you're looking for a pick-me-up, I highly suggest reading it for yourself.

The Benefits of BYOB (or W, in this case)

Over at Food and Wine Magazine's website, one of their main wine writers, Lettie Teague, has written an interesting article on one of the stranger aspects of dining out - the BYOB phenomenon. You see it a lot in Chicago, not so much in New York, pretty much never in New Orleans, but nevertheless, it's been a growing option amongst smaller restaurants around the country.

Teague shares her experiences bringing a variety of different bottles to a wide array of restaurants all over the US. I think one of the most fascinating things that pops up in her article is that corking fees can range from so low to so high. She mentions that while some of the restaurants she went to popped the top for $10, others charge as much as $250! And I've been to places that don't charge a thing to open a bottle. It's a crazy thing, this BYOB. To check out the entire article, follow the link below.

Bring Your Own Wine

What's the Best Wine Stopper for the Environment?

I just finished reading an interesting (and informative) article on about.com that takes a close look at what type of wine stopper is best for the environment. The question is a huge issue, considering the millions of bottles of wine that are manufactured and stoppered each year. From Australia, to France to California, every bottle and type of wine is different, but they do have one thing in common - the bottle gets topped with either a cork, a screw cap, or a variety of plastic stopper.

So which one of the above varieties makes the most sense, environmentally speaking? According to this article, cork is absolutely the way to go. The author discusses that unlike plastic or metal screw caps, cork is a sustainable resource with economic benefits. If you're interested in reading the entire article, I've linked to it below.

To Cork, Or Not to Cork?

The Growing Popularity of Rose

An article in the San Francisco Chronicle today takes a close look at the growing trend in America of wine drinkers choosing Rose over other, more traditionally popular varieties like Chardonnay's. Historically speaking, dry rose's have never been popular here in the US. The author speculates that the lighter color of Rose may have led to people lumping it in with too-sweet cheapies like fizzy blush wines.

No matter how you look at it, and no matter what the cause, the sale of Rose in the States has increased gradually in the last year. Since it is, after all, about to be a three day, Memorial weekend, summer kick off extravaganza, I'm willing to bet that a bottle of a nice, cool Rose will be the way a lot of folks decide to begin coping with the heat and humidity of the summer. To read the entire SF Chronicle article, follow the link.

Rose on the rise.

Beer vs. Wine - A pair off

There's a great introspective on Wine Spectator's website about the virtues of pairing booze with food - more specifically, wine vs. beer. The article is inspired by a new book on the subject, titled He Said Beer, She Said Wine. Personally, I tend to mix it up, having beer with some things and wine with others (I guess I'm not snobbishly inclined to one or the other). Basically, the two participants of the "food pairing smack-down" were given a list of nine summer grilling recipes and challenged to give a superior beer/wine pairing aside an explanation. Beers chosen include Chimay Red, Guinness Stout and Brooklyn Brewery's brown ale. The wine contestant selected a 2006 Chardonnay, a Pinot Noir from the same year and a Cab, amongst others. For the full run down of the pairing battle, follow the link I've provided below.

http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/beer-vs-wine-pairings

Robert Mondavi

As many of you may have already read, famed California wine maker Robert Mondavi passed away last Friday at the age of 94. He lived a long time, but he certainly didn't waste any of it. Mondavi was one of the quintessential names in American wine, almost single handedly legitimizing Napa Valley as a force to be reckoned with and transitioning the area from relative obscurity to one of the most recognizable wine regions in the world.

In Mondavi's memoirs he stated that he wanted "to do whatever it took to make great wines and put Napa Valley on the map right alongside the great wine making centers of Europe," and that, in essence, is what he accomplished. The Mondavi brand is one of the most recognizable and common names in American (and sometimes European) wine stores. He laid the groundwork for the huge number of amazing vineyards that have bloomed in Napa since the mid fifties, and he probably rests comfortably now knowing that Napa wine is not only taken seriously but also here to stay. If you're interested in more information about the late great vintner, I suggest checking out his memoirs, "Harvests of Joy," or checking out the article the NY Times ran today. I've provided the link below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/dining/21mondavi.html?ref=style

Who Says Wine Isn't Rock and Roll?

Today I found out something that kind of blew my mind, Maynard James Keenan (of heavy metal band Tool, fame) is not only a major oenophile, but also keeps a wine blog! Not only that, but it's a pretty reputable one, seeing that it's published with Wine Spectator. Apparently, Mr. Keenan rocks a wine list as easily as he rocks a crowd of hundreds of thousands of adoring, obsessive and sometimes downright strange Tool fans. Unfortunately, the rocker's blog isn't viewable unless your a Wine Spectator subscriber, but I did manage to find a link to one of their articles that features at length Keenan's growing obsession with vino. If you're interested, check out the link I've placed below the post!

http://www.winespectator.com/Wine/Features/0,1197,2101,00.html

The Problem With Summer Wines

Today I read a great article on the Food and Wine website about the state of Summer wine preferences in America. It's a bit of a rant against all things prefaced by the summer moniker, basically pointing out that the word has become synonymous with cheap and disposable in the last thirty years. A summer read generally equals a romance or mystery novel, a summer movie features more explosions than substance, and a summer wine tends to be exemplified by two distinguishing features: it's cheap and simple.

The author mentions the obvious choices for front-runners in the summer wine category, cheap rose's and cheap White's; then proceeds to explain why these are not the only (or best) options for consumption in the warmer months. A wine merchant in California says mid-way through the article that "Our number one selling wine in the summer is a $10 Rose." He then highlights how long the cheap-light-wine-in-the-summertime phenomenon has been going on, saying - "It's been our best-selling-summer wine for more than a decade." The article is an interesting look at a big aspect of the wine market in the US. It also links to a list of the author's favorite summer wines (which doesn't prominently feature simple rose's and whites). Follow the link below for the whole story.

http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/hot-and-bothered-about-summer-wines

Stopping Up Your Champagne

I posted a few days ago about the difference between sparkling wine and champagne. Well today, I came across an interesting and informative article on another great wine blog, http://peterliem.com/, that discussess the merits of cheap champagne stoppers to keep a bottle fresh for days at a time.

You can follow the link above to read Peter's complete entry, but I'll give a brief summary here. Basically, a lot of people don't like to drink sparkling wines and/or champagne at home because they feel like they have to drink the entire bottle in a single evening. Peter mentions that many bottles of young champagne hold up remarkably well for up to three or four days, as long as you use a champagne bottle stopper.

These work a lot like a normal bottle stopper, except that they create an air-tight seal that locks in the wine and keeps the bubbles from dissapating. He even says that a lot of young sparklers tend to be even more interesting (and tasty) after they've been open for a day.

The Billionaire's Vinegar

Awhile back I mentioned a story in The New Yorker about the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold. That bottle, a 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux that was supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson, sold for $156 thousand dollars to a member of the Forbes family. The many subjects the fore mentioned article touched on ranged from the absurdity of the high-priced wine market, the rampant forgeries within that world, and a certain wine collector named Hardy Rodenstock who found the bottle (and many other maybe too rare bottles) that may be knowingly flooding the market with these forgeries.

Now, the subject and it's many twists and turns has been turned into a piece of long-form non fiction titled The Billionaire's Vinegar. The author, Benjamin Wallace, follows the story all the way back to 1787 when Jefferson was living in France and drinking excessive amounts of good wine. I haven't read it yet, but reviews are favorable thus far. If you're interested in learning more or buying the book, follow the link below to head over to the official website.

http://benjaminwallace.net/home.html

Wine Is Good for the Brain

Over at Wine Spectator's website there is an article about the health benefits of a woman choosing wine over other types of alcohol. Apparently, a recent study conducted by scientists in Sweden that tracked lifestyle habits of over 1500 women between 1968 and 2008, concluded that women wine drinkers are up to 70% less likely to suffer from dementia.

Out of the 1500 women scientists followed for 34 years, 162 of them developed dementia. Of course, many lifestyle and genetic differences play a part in health, but scientists concluded that those of the women who drank wine on a regular basis were statistically far less likely to suffer dementia. The study goes on to suggest that the women who preferred beer or spirits as an evening drink were about 15 to 20 percent more likely to suffer dementia late in life. So I guess we'll have to chalk this up to a favorable result. Wine - 1, Beer and Booze - 0. Follow the link below to read the entire article.

http://www.winespectator.com/Wine/Features/0,1197,4337,00.html

So What Is Champagne, Anyway?

All Champagne is sparkling wine but is all sparkling wine champagne? This question gets asked by a lot of people new to wine and many don't get the right answer. To put it simply, champagne is a sparkling wine that is made in the Champagne region of France. Anything that tastes like it, looks like it and/or smells like it that is made elsewhere . . . well, that's just sparkling wine.

It's sort of like how tissue paper gets referred to as Kleenex most of the time, even though Kleenex is actually a brand of tissue paper, and not a substitute for the word. Sparkling wine from Champagne is pretty much universally accepted as the best you can buy. That being said, it's also wildly popular. Thus, many, many, many people refer to all sparkling wines by the region, even when they're not using the name correctly.

Wine Classes

If you don't know a lot about wine, and you're really eager to learn . . . a wine class may be in order. I spoke with a co-worker the other day who told me he's been to a few different classes in New York, and that they can actually be a lot of fun. From what I can tell (in NYC anyway) most of the different wine schools and/or teachers offer a variety of classes, beginning with a single evening wine 101 type of thing and progressing to more detailed explorations of specific varieties or regions.

One of the nicer classes I came across during my web research is simply called The New York Wine class. The owner of the school started off as a vintner in California, and started teaching when they came to New York. Classes offered include Wine 101 (which fills up quickly), Napa Vs. Bordeaux and Exotic Wines and Cheeses to Remember - amongst many others. If you're looking for a good place to start learning here in New York, I'd recommend it.

http://www.nycwineclass.com/index.php

Backyard Vintners and the Mighty Ducks?

According to an article in the Los Angeles Times this week, backyard wine production is a growing hobby amongst residents of Malibu. And, sticking with the theme from yesterday's celebrity gossip entry about Johnny Depp, that magnificent Emilio Estevez (Quack, Quack, Quack . . .) has taken to the vintner trend.

Estevez, who's lived in Malibu for several years, has quartered off a half acre of his property for a mini-vineyard of Pinot Noir. He grows the grapes, prunes the vines and even ages the wine without ever having to leave his home. A single, half-sized oak barrel has taken up residence in his wine cellar, and the actor even has his own bottles and labels!

Thankfully, the Times article doesn't spend all of it's time doting on the finer wine achievements of our Mighty Duck hero. Instead, it takes an interesting turn - discussing the growing amount of vineyards in Malibu, despite unfriendly climate conditions for grape vines. It's a neat and interesting little article that's well worth checking out. Follow the link below:

http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-wine7-2008may07,0,7169845.story

Johnny Depp's Life in Wine

Over at Wine Spectator, they've posted a short article concerning Johnny Depp's love for wine. In fact, he's had a case of high-end French wines (he lives in the South of France) to him in Illinois, where he's filiming a new movie about John Dillinger. The article also points out that Depp owns a vineyard of his own in the Cotes de Provence where he and his partner Vanessa Paradis make their own wine. The Pirates of the Carribean star apparently has an affiity for Bordeaux (I would agree). Some of his favorites include Petrus, Cheval-Blanc and Chateau Calon-Segur. I guess it's appropriate that he's got a tattoo on his arm that reads "Wino Forever."

Apocalypse Now in a Bottle . . . Redux

I came across something today that is possibly the coolest bit of wine packaging/marketing/shameless self promotion that I've ever come across. Francis Ford Coppola (of The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and father of wunderkind Sophia Coppola fame) has a line of self-titled wines that are actually pretty good. What I didn't realize until today is that he also sells a ton of movie related merchandise on his vineyards website. Even better still, one of the gifts that he offers is a $225 3 liter bottle of Syrah with a silk screened image from Apocalypse Now on the front and a hidden shelf on the bottom that contains . . . you guessed it, a copy of the Apocalypse Now Redux Edition DVD inside! This is going on my Christmas list for sure.

Another Wine Blog

I've made a lot of fuss over the NY Times wine blog, The Pour, in recent weeks. Well, last night I came across another wine expert blog that may come in a close second. Ray Isle, the senior wine editor at Food and Wine keeps a blog on the F & W site called The Tasting Room which covers a wide variety of wine-related subjects that are interesting and informative. Follow the jump over to see for yourself. Enjoy the weekend!

http://www.foodandwine.com/blogs/tasting-room

The Very Best in Pinot Noir

Today I came across a great list of top Pinot Noir's over at the Food and Wine Magazine website. The list, compiled by F & W's senior wine editor Ray Isle, offers his take on the top 30 Pinot's on the market, based on a tasting of almost 150 different bottles. I think what I like best is that there's not a single bottle over $100, and that he starts out by offering six different "value picks" that you can find at the local wine shop for under twenty bucks. If you're into Pinot (and that article from a few days ago suggests that if you're American . . . you probably are), then this is a list well worth checking out.

http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/worlds-30-best-pinot-noirs