My Wine Education

TasteCamp: Thoughts on Long Island Wines / Wine Industry

I don't have as many wine notes as I would like from this weekend. Some folks were diligently finding every possible surface to write on, but after the first couple vineyards, well, I just gave up. However, I did have a writing surface for both Shinn and Paumanok, which were also my two favorite vineyards that we visited. I'll post tasting notes for Shinn, Paumonok, and Roanoke over the next few days and into next week.

Looking at the trip as a whole, I had two issues with Long Island wine:

1) Merlot merlot merlot. It's pushed on you, and I think it overshadows other grapes they offer that are just as good or, in many cases, better. Most of the time (with a few exceptions) I wasn't overly blown away by the Long Island Merlot you hear so much about. I had a great cab franc, some not bad sparkling wines, a few lovely cabernet sauvignons, and some great whites and rosés, which were a wonderful change after an overload of reds.

2) Prices. Egads!  I fully expected to ship home a case of wine, but I think we only brought home about five bottles - two of which were dessert wines. Why? Price vs quality. There are a couple of ways to look at this. Most of the wineries are content, it seems, to cater to a New York-area market. If that's the goal, and the locals are willing to pay the prices, then I suppose there is no issue. But if there is any desire to expand into a larger retail market, some of those prices have got to fall. At Roanoke Winery, for example, I was perfectly thrilled with their wines and made the assumption they were all around $20 or so dollars. When I found out they were in the $30-$40 range, well, I was shocked. As I said, some of the prices put a damper on my purchasing. Good for the pocketbook, but not so good for the wineries.

I was impressed with the commitment to sustainable farming we learned about at a lunch provided by Jamestown, Macari, and Shinn Estates. The lunch was all locally grown / farmed / fished and all three wineries, while not certified organic, are working towards it. In some cases, they are happily adding in biodynamic practices. I've said before that while I don't actually buy into biodynamics, I do believe that anyone who is going to pay that much attention to each individual vine and the soil is just going to grow great grapes. Their efforts at sustainability are admirable, especially since, as they pointed out, Long Island is basically a giant sandbar. Biodynamic-leaning Shinn Estates, with their wild dandelions lining the vineyard, was by far one of the prettiest I've seen, even just at bud break.

Our weather for the trip was lacking, until mid-afternoon on Saturday when the sun chose to peek out of the rain clouds long enough to allow us all to traipse through Shinn Estate's vineyards. But for those of you who thought I had a relaxing, beach-filled trip to the Hamptons, rest assured there was much use of the umbrella. It didn't really dampen the fun though.

I'd love to go back to Long Island - I know that much. When Kevin and I travel, we love to learn about the local wine. But we itch to explore everything else as well. Time to learn a little more about the area wasn't really scheduled in, so we found time where we could. Friday, before the festivities started, we ate at an historic diner in Cutchogue and visited a couple of wineries on our own (as well as the Big Duck roadside attraction in Flanders).

Before dinner that night, as well as early Saturday morning, we spent some time walking the adorable town of Greenport where we were staying. I'd love to visit again in the summer when all the little stores are open. Finally, we made a decision to be late to the Sunday tasting so that we could at least drive through the Hamptons and visit the gorgeous old lighthouse in Montauk, at the very tail end of the South Fork. As Roman Roth (winemaker for Wolffer Estate) said when we walked in late, "It's a very Long Island."

If you're up for a weekend getaway, it was an easy flight from Cincinnati to LaGuardia, and an easy 90 minute drive down the Long Island Expressway to get to the North and South Forks of Long Island.

Wine Away for Stain Away

I want to address this because I'm always asked this question in interviews. How do you get out a red wine stain?

You see, I have a love of white furniture, white rugs, white accessories - a lot in my house is white. Of course, I also love red wine. About once every two or three weeks, I accidentally spill a bit of wine on my light beige and white carpet or my white couch. Without fail.

But you can never tell I had a spill at all.

I have a process I swear by, and it starts with Wine Away. You can buy it at Amazon or at most of your local wine shops (certainly Party Town and Party Source have it). You can even buy it in travel size (purse size!). It smells horrible - like someone dumped a lot of fake oranges into the bottle - but it's worth it. According to the Wine Away web site, the stain remover is made from fruit and vegetable extracts and does not contain bleach or phosphates. 

Whenever I dump the wine, I immediately get a towel and the Wine Away. This isn't a paper cloth type of experience by the way. I actually keep a white cloth in the cabinet with the Wine Away bottle. I spritz on a lot of Wine Away and then dab it with the cloth. For larger spills, I just press. Don't rub!

You'll immediately see a difference. After the stain is close to gone, I add some more Wine Away, dab it again, and drop the item in the washing machine. I let it soak for 15-30 minutes, and then let the washing machine do the rest. It's worth mentioning here that I'm also a fan of washable slip covers for just this reason. ;-)

Last year, Kevin accidentally dropped a Kinkead Ridge cabernet franc on his home office carpet. The bottle shattered and red wine went everywhere. A bottle of Wine Away and a lot of white towels later, the stain is almost non-existent. If I could actually put the carpet in the washing machine, it would probably be completely gone. Oh, and I ran out to Chateau Pomije and replaced the bottle the very next day of course!

I also dropped a bottle in Party Town one day last year. I was wearing white capri pants. I bought some Wine Away on the spot, drenched my pants in it, washed them when I got home, and they're still sparkling white.

So, I know I sound a bit like an infomercial but I promise that Wine Away neither pays me nor sends me samples. I wish they would! I certainly use enough of it.

Game On!

Over the last decade, wine has become more approachable. From easier to read labels to consumer-focused and consumer-written wine blogs (waving hello!), it's just getting easier to learn about wine.

In the learning field, we often add games to our courses, whether online or in person. Experts will tell you that adults learn better when they can apply their knowledge. Of course, adults also learn better when they're playing a game, and the learning isn't as obvious. They're having too much fun.

No where is this more evident than in the world of wine. Two new wine games have hit the market recently. In Europe, there is the Dutch game, 4xProeven (Tastingx4), which combines a board game with four bottles of wine. Here in the US we have Karafe. I've yet to play either of these games, but here's what I know so far:

4xProeven

This game is a brilliant move for marketers all over. Wine publicists should pounce on this. The carton folds out to become a game board. Inside the carton are six half-bottles of wine that are somehow related (ie, all Australia), six numbered bottle sleeves, playing chips, instruc­tions, additional information and tasting notes.  Players first select a game leader, who sleeves the wines. After that, there are three different games that can be played:

• ‘Name and Blame’: taste all six wines and guess which numbered bottle belongs to which wine label
• ‘Dare to Compare’: compare two wines at a time
• ‘Grip the Grapes’: determine the two dominant flavours of each wine

This is a fantastic way to introduce people to new wines and let them get to know the wine in a fun and relaxed environment. As far as I know, this game is curently available only in Europe.

Karafe

I own this game. The nice publicist for Karafe sent me a free copy and I've yet to play it. My weekends have been filled and this game doesn't appear to be quick. From glancing at it and reading the instructions, it seems like an adult version of Life, Monopoly, and Trivial Pursuit, all rolled into one.

Truthfully, I'm rather eager to play it, although slightly fearful that my wine knowledge is lacking. The object of the game is to make the most money through the process of producing and selling wine. Yep, in this game, you get to be a winemaker. It starts with acquiring cash, then land, then growing and harvesting, bottling, and finally selling the wine.

To move forward, you the dice. Each space has a monetary amount or instruction. You can acquire cash or buy more acres. Eventually, you can start bottling, harvesting, or selling per the instructions on the space. You must answer a question correctly before you can recieve the asset (acres, bottles, cash, etc). 

There are two levels of questions: Sippers and Connoisseurs. Sippers have slightly easier questions. (This is helpful if you're playing with a sommelier. They have less of an advantage this way.)

• Example Sippers question: When decanting a younger red wine, it is best to pour quickly in order to allow the wine to splash against the side of the glass. True or false? (True)
• Example Connoisseurs question: What is the term for the flaky deposit sometimes found in the older, bottle-aged wines, particularly port, which requires the wine to be decanted to remove it?
• A) beeswing B) dust C) fermentos D) foliage  (A beeswing)

Occasionally, a player will receive a Wine Taste Test question. Ah yes, there is drinking in this game too. The player must turn their heads while someone else pours the wine. The drinker must then identify the wine. It's recommended for everyone to taste each wine and make a note of them before the game begins. For more difficult tastings, you could have four similar wines; for easier tastings, you can use four starkly different wines.
When we do get around to playing this game, we'll definitely let you know.

So there you go. Two completely different approaches to wine  games, but both educational and fun.

My thanks to Kevin Dugan for the tip about 4xProeven and for the title of this post!

A Champagne a Day Keeps the Dr Away

According to an article I read on Britain's Decanter.com yesterday, Champagne might be the secret to a long life.

UK crime writer John Mortimer says a glass of Champagne every morning is the secret to a long life.

The 85-year-old novelist, whose most celebrated creation, Horace Rumpole, used to drink 'Chateau Thames Embankment' red wine at his local wine bar, revealed his drinking habits to UK broadsheet The Guardian at the weekend.

...

The writer added that he was meant to take high-protein drinks throughout the day but that he distrusted doctors, saying each one told him something different.

'So I stick to Champagne – not very grand Champagne,' he said. 'I drink it every morning, and that is the secret of a long life.'

As Decanter is quick to point out, one small glass of bubbly at 12% AbV is half of the UK's daily recommended amount for "sensible drinking."

Hmm ... Champagne every morning. I think I could do that.

Green My Vino on Facebook

(cross-posted from bub.blicio.us)

Truthfully, I usually ignore Facebook Apps. I don't want to hunt vampires or play Scrabble. Honest. I have a lot of fan pages and Causes, but that's about it. But Green My Vino, by Village Green, combines my bleeding heart causes with an application.

In this case, it's allowing you to give free virtual "gifts" on Facebook. Each one of these gifts is a token for 1-10 minutes of Green Power. Village Green totals the amount of tokens exchanged by folks on Facebook and purchases tht amount of solar energy from specific wind farms and solar arrays. When a certain number is reached, a selected wineries have agreed to power their operations on 100% clean energy. For example, the first winery is Iron Horse Vineyards. Iron Horse will convert when 10,000 tokens have been exchanged.

Iron Horse is the first of four wineries to commit to the program. Also involved are Girard Winery, Windsor Vineyards, and Windsor Sonoma. Once the first four are converted, Village Green will recruit more wineries to participate. I think this is a great idea, especially considering how many of my friends are using the similar L'il Green Patch application on Facebook. This appeals to folks who like wine, who like playing with various apps and sending gifts on Facebook, and those who are trying to go green.

The application just launched today and at my last count it was at 1700+ tokens exchanged. Not bad for a few hours. I think we'll have some greener wineries in the near future.

UPDATE: This post was cross-posted from my bub.blicio.us entry. On that post, Village Green CEO Mike Jackson commented with some clarification and some numbers:

On its face, Green My Vino is just a neat way to engage Facebook users in the efforts of a company to go green. But somewhat behind the scenes, the Green My Vino model directs far more money to the purchase of renewable energy per page view than would be possible with other Facebook application models.

Here are the numbers: If Facebook users pass 10,000 minutes to each other, then the first winery will convert their operations to renewable energy. Traditional Facebook applications make money through advertising revenue – so 10,000 minutes passed might result in, let's say, 20,000 page views. This would generate $20-$100 through ordinary banner adds, and this money could be used to purchase renewable energy.

Instead, the wineries involved have made a commitment to do much more. At the 20,000 page view mark, Green My Vino will purchase $3,500 of renewable energy. While an app with traditional banner ads might purchase only 90 kWh of electricity - about what the typical American uses every week, Green My Vino will be purchasing 290,000 kWh – what the typical American uses every 64 years.

Are the wineries getting duped? No, the wineries are excited to be a part of the effort and see it as a cost effective way to spread their name and advance a cause they believe in, and Village Green has already received interest from a number of other companies. What's going on?

A couple things. Green My Vino enables people to interact with a brand, rather than be subliminally exposed to it through banner ads. Village Green is focusing on brand interactions instead of page views. Furthermore, this interaction is mutually beneficial – the users help force businesses to use renewable energy and learn about current events in clean energy, while the organizations get noticed for taking a legitimately large step to green their business. And these aren't monstrous organizations buying a token amount of green power, these are small businesses committing their entire operations.

What the businesses involved get as well is a toehold in Facebook. Social media networks are clearly the next step in online interactions and many companies have no idea how or lack the funds to get involved.

These smaller businesses get exposure on Facebook for a fraction of the cost of what they would pay otherwise, and because we at Village Green are a bunch of young environmentalists, we make them go green in order to get that exposure.

Providing these services to businesses provides a value far beyond banner ads, which directs much more money towards addressing environmental concerns.

Earth Day: Design Your Own Bag

This isn't wine related, per se, but I think we can loosely tie it to food, and definitely tie it to Earth Day on Saturday.

Have you noticed (or purchased) an eco-friendly shopping bag from your local grocery store?  I know we've purchased some from both Kroger & Remke's. We even bought holiday themed ones at Christmas and wrapped our gifts in them. Of course, although Kevin & I love the idea of these bags, it doesn't mean we're not constantly forgetting them either at home or in the car.

Kroger is launching a "green" initiative online. You can design your own reusable shopping bag in a new contest. If your bag design wins based on online votes, you could win a $500 gift certificate to Kroger. In addition, if you submit your Kroger plus card number when you submit your design, you'll receive a free reusable bag the next time you visit a store.

Find some free time today and design a bag! The more bag designs the better - and happy Earth Day this weekend!

Tryvertising and Wine

One of the awesome things about Twitter is that it's a great link-sharing tool. Kevin, from Strategic Public Relations, found this awesome tidbit and immediately shared it on Twitter. Now I'm bringing it to you.

In Paris, you can now sample wine as you might sample perfume. In fact, the packaging is eerily similar. The trend of letting a consumer try-before-they-buy is called Tryvertising (the Apple Store is a giant example of this), and why shouldn't it be applied to wine?

In spirit, it's no different than attending a free tasting in a wine shop. I've also read of other wine shops where you can purchase samples from fancy machines, which is a great way to try that wine you could never afford to purchase. These tube-shaped bottles, because they factor in the look and feel of packaging, take the concept to a whole new level.

WineSide offers both sweet and classic wines in patented, flat-base glass tubes with screw tops carefully engineered to protect the wines' flavour. The sweet wines—which include Sauternes and Muscat, for example—are available in 6cl tubes, while the Pomerol, Chateau Neuf du Pape and other classic wines can be purchased in 6cl or 10cl sizes. WineSide's collection represents a range of appellations and producers; tubes are available individually or by the box, which can be chosen to provide an introduction to a variety, year or region. Kicking off retail sales, the products are available exclusively at Colette in Paris this month.

I rather like this as something I could take home with me, try it when I want, and return later to purchase a bottle. If I were a large conglomerate, such as Constellation Group, I'd jump on this to market many of my wines, across wineries, at one time.

Wine Inventory

I should have taken a photo. The two of us, sitting on our basement floor, each with a glass of cabernet and surrounded by bottles on all sides, and a computer.

Truthfully, we only have a little over 225 bottles. It's not that much in the scheme of things I suppose, but it seems that, at times, we have wine in every available wall space. We have 3 small wine refrigerators (we thought surely one would be enough at the time, and so on).

Last night, as we arrived home from Cork and Bottle with a half-case, I realized I had no idea where any of our wine was located. I had pulled up CellarTracker to enter the new wines and noticed how poorly I had kept track of what we drank, what we purchased, and our tasting notes.

I know CellarTracker isn't as "fun" as a lot of the other wine-based social networking tools. But at its heart, CellarTracker is a useful and powerful database tool. Interacting with others is just a bonus. We tracked all our wine last night. In the end, we have several different (now named) locations, as well as 5 missing bottles. I'm hoping we drank those at some point.  We used several of CellarTracker's reporting functions to pull it all together. I've been inputting wine into CellarTracker for several years now, but this is the first time we've really used so much of the functionality. (See my post on virtual cellars from May 2006.)

It took hours getting everything organized into locations last night, but it was only the first step in inventory. Next, we need to take some time and try to organize via grape, I think. In the meantime, I can use CellarTracker's excellent Wine List function to always have a list of our available bottles and their locations.

Until Kentucky recently passed some convoluted laws, we were members of several different winery clubs, including Cline, Gundlach-Bundschu, and Ledson, all out of Sonoma. These three clubs are the reason we have so many wines, I think. There's something to be said for a regular shipment of wine arriving on your doorstep.

Show Us Your Rack

Tomorrow (Friday, Nov 9) is Show Us Your Rack day in the wine blogging world.

Take that as you will, but what it really means is show us your wine rack. This is the brainchild of my friend Lenn over at LennDevours. It's also one of the first things to make me smile in weeks. What a great title! So along with our weekly listing of events, I'll also be showing you my rack, er, racks tomorrow.

I'll be posting multiple photos:

• Our family room bar area with 3 wine refrigerators of the small and smaller variety. There are also several cases sitting around this area. This may require 2 photos.
• Our "green" ecofriendly dining room rack, where the wines that don't fit in the wine fridges live.
• Our two overflow racks in the living room where wines that don't fit in the dining room live.
• Our dining room hutch, where dessert wines live.

Yeah, we have too much wine.

You can read more about Show Us Your Rack Day here. Photos will be posted to this Flickr group. So join us, and show us your rack!

Organized Wine

I fully admit that things aren't going to be back to normal around here for another week. But for the next couple days, I'm going to try to get one little post in per day, plus the Friday event listing. After that, the relatives will go home, the services will be over, and we can find our new normal. So, on with the first of these little posts:

I'm leading a book club session at an upcoming conference on the book "Everything is Miscellaneous." It got me thinking about how I organize - or more appropriately, would like to organize - my wine. We don't have a wine cellar, instead, wine is in three small temperature controlled coolers and then shoved into every available spot in our house. I do, however, tag our wine. Each bottle has a hanging tag that lists the type of wine on the front. On the back it lists the drink by date, where it was purchased, and how much we paid. In addition to the haphazard physical organization of my wine, I have most of my bottles logged into CellarTracker. Like most of these online wine organization tools, it lets me view my bottles by vintage, purchase location, varietal, and so on. CellarTracker does not yet use tagging, although I read somewhere that tagging is a coming upgrade. (Don't quote me on that though.)

I started wondering how everyone else organizes their wine and it led me to Donna M's blog. Donna is an information architect and compulsive organizer. However, if I had the space, I would organize my wines exactly as Donna has - by varietal, then vintage, and then with all the other information on my hanging tags.  I don't see this as a complicated organization scheme. Where it runs into difficulty is the same place that most physical organization schemes run into difficulty - when you add a new bottle. There may not be room for that bottle between 1996 and 1998 Cabernets. Then what? Years and years ago I worked at a video store. When new releases came in, we had to move every single movie just to fit in the new one. It is the bane of the alphabetical and physical world. The advantage CellarTracker has over physicality is that it also allows me to note where I stored the wine and sort by storage location as well.

Just some thoughts as my professional world and wine world overlap yet again.

Cross-posted to the Write Tech blog.