Forget about having Champagne tastes on a beer-lover’s budget. Costs for almost every step or ingredient used in alcohol production are on the rise, from the price of malting barley for beer to the fuel costs associated with importing foreign wines, says Ilhan Geckil, a senior consultant with Anderson Economic Group, a Chicago-based research firm. And, thanks to consolidation, those rising costs are getting passed onto consumers more quickly. “If two companies represent 80% of the U.S. beer market, that makes it easier for them to put pressure on market prices,” he explains. In addition to high fuel costs, here […]
Wine Articles
Wine Blogs
Q. William S Burroughs said that, in a revolution, those who control the media control events. Today, wine blogs seem to be revolutionising wine. Do you agree? A. Yes and no. Blogs expand the discussion beyond traditional media, allowing more drinkers and self- appointed critics to comment, but do more opinions mean more democracy or more noise? Most blog postings aren’t edited the way newspapers or magazines are, and while that can be liberating, it can also be a recipe for inaccuracy and unfairness. Overall, I think blogs are a good thing, but there will be a major shake-out in […]
Wine Critics
Sommelier and wine scribe Natalie MacLean has written for dozens of magazines and newspapers, penned Red, White, and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass, and authors the monthly wine newsletter Nat Decants. I asked MacLean, who hails from Canada, about how the palates of professionals and amateurs match up, how cultural background affects wine critics, the pros and cons of the Internet for wine consumers, and more. In Red, White, and Drunk All Over, you state that you taste 3,000 wines per year, while a critic such as Robert Parker tastes as many as 10,000. Given […]
Budget Wines
There’s nothing that says luxury and the good life more than sitting down on the patio and sipping a glass of good wine on a hot summer’s evening. I used to think that being a Budget Smart Girl meant that I’d either have to forgo this one little pleasure, or be forced to buy a wine that wasn’t that great. However, as the philosophy of the Budget Smart Girl’s lifestyle is to have luxury but at your own price, I did some research and happy to say you can enjoy a great glass of wine at a Budget Smart price, […]
Golf & Wine
Normally you’d figure that any PGA Tour player accepting high-fives for scoring in the 90s must have had a sip of something strong. A group of current and former pros, though, have taken winemakers for playing partners and adopted the wine critics’ 100-point scale as a new measure of being on par. The idea is simple enough: Golfers bring the fame, winemakers bring the expertise and together they alchemize the mix into a golden brand. Greg Norman has been at it for nearly two decades. More recently, Arnold Palmer, Mike Weir, Nick Faldo, John Daly, Ernie Els, Retief Goosen and […]
Gewürztraminer
Natalie MacLean, editor of the award-winning wine newsletter at NatalieMacLean.com and author of Red, White and Drunk All Over helped AskMen.com learn about the extraordinary white wine Gewürztraminer. Gewürztraminer has historically been unfairly treated and ignored. This dry white wine calls Alsace home and despite its distinctive character, its more popular big brother Riesling largely overshadows it — “partly because Gewürztraminer is hard to say in a restaurant or liquor store,” says MacLean. Once you taste Gewürztraminer, however, you’ll either love it or hate it. Either way, there’s no way you can ignore this versatile wine or its lychee and […]
Women & Wine 2
For too long, oenology (een-ology, the study of wine) was considered off-limits to the average American consumer. Wine knowledge was a carefully guarded male stronghold of stuffy sommeliers, grumpy English professors with big, red noses and the wealthy. But in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the wine industry began selling its products in the United States with a more inclusive approach. A methodical marketing scheme began with easily understood White Zinfandel. Wineries started selling people on Chardonnay and then Merlot, varietals that were easy to drink, whose names had a ring of sophistication. People took notice. It was a […]
Scoring Wine
I just finished a chapter in Red, White and Drunk all Over in which the author Natalie MacLean examines the “purely American phenomenon” of wine scores. Hugely interesting stuff, and very relevant to us Winos; the vast majority of us, I would hazard a guess, are influenced by those 100-point-scale ratings that we see taped up next to displays of wine in stores. Charged with a mandate to buy something relatively obscure (a bottle of Pinot Noir from Chile, lets say), and discovering two similarly-priced bottles at your local wine shop — both with positive reviews but one featuring a […]
Internet & Wine
Lucky for me, Red, White and Drunk All Over by Natalie MacLean was one of the first books I picked up when I started thinking about doing a wine blog. For MacLean, writing about wine is not an academic exercise, a parsing of the chemical responses upon the tongue, a conjugation of fruit groups or a diagram of geographical factors. Important though they are to figuring out how and why certain flavors and aromas play out on the senses, those elements alone are a flat description of a particular wine’s character. As MacLean explains in the chapter “The Making of […]
Cognition & Wine
Roots and brains Lalou Bize Leroy, a Burgundian winemaker, has a rallying call of ‘Respectez le terre!’ ‘I hate technology,’ she says, ‘it produces fake wines’ (in MacLean, 2007, p.30). She views vine roots, somewhat anthropomorphically, as brains. She recounts stories of her vines ‘withdrawing’ from chemical dependency when switched to a biodynamic approach, created by the Austrian ‘anthroposophist’ Rudolph Steiner in 1924. Steiner believed that agriculture should be in harmony with natural systems such as lunar cycles, for example by filling a cow’s horn with manure and then burying it amongst vines until the spring solstice. Many psychologists might […]
