A time when the headlines screamed disarray for the French, and when their sole loyal defender was the New York Times erudite wine columnist, Eric Asimov.

The date: Thursday, July 6th 2006. The post: Eric Asimov to the Rescue!

What Eric that day began, Alice has finished.

As we solemnly begin the work of grafting over to Thompson Seedless at Rebecca’s Vineyard, join us won’t you, as we all pour our California wines into the commode together, and celebrate with a synchronized flush.

The wine type this month, chosen by Tim at Winecast, is Old World Riesling, which worked out great for me. I just happened to be putting together an Alsace tasting this Friday with a new tasting group so the timing was perfect. Good times.

The Wine: 2005 Kuentz-Bas Riesling Tradition

The wine I drank last night was a dry Riesling produced by Kuentz-Bas. It’s from their low end “Tradition” line of wines, and is imported by Kermit Lynch. It cost 16 bucks.

The Region: Alsace

Alsace (sounds kinda like “All Sauce”) is cool because, unlike most other French wine regions, the producers there put the variety of the grapes used right on the label. Which is nice for us Americans. Less thinking and mental gymnastics and/or Googling.

In general The Sauce has a warm - sometimes even hot - dry growing season. The long, skinny region is shaped a lot like Napa Valley and sits in the rain shadow of the Vosges mountains to the west and enjoys the moderating influence of the Rhine river to the east. Alsace sits right near the western border of Germany in eastern France. Which basically means you can’t throw a rock without hitting a German eating schnitzengruben.

It’s a wicked little spot to grow grapes, and the main varieties planted there are Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc and Muscat. They even grow a bit of Pinot noir, which warms my cockles.

So what’s the wine like?

• It’s light yellow with a greenish tinge.
• It smells like “petrol” (or kerosene/rubber), which you’ll either love or hate. There’s also some floral stuff going on and citrus fruit aromas.
• It’s dry. This isn’t a sweet wine. At all.
• Lots of acid. Medium plus to high.
• But it’s medium bodied, which is a pretty reliable marker for Alsatian Rieslings. Nothing is worse than thin acidic wine IMO. Happily, there’re no issues with that here.
• Medium alcohol, at least to my palate. As far as Old world Rieslings go it’s a bit on the higher side at 12.5%. You’ll see some German ones with a lot less since they often can’t add sugar to their musts to bump things up.
• It doesn’t taste like a whole lot to be honest. We’re talking sour lime and citrus mixed with the petrol smells. If you wanted to get all romantic you might say it has “minerality,” but I’m not, so I won’t.

Winemaking Mystery

I like to try and rip apart wines and try to figure out how they’re made. It doesn’t always work, but it’s good practice and fun if you’re a wine geek.

Most of this one is easy. It’s obvious that the wine never saw a barrel, so it was steel fermented and aged. It’s pretty acidic and isn’t at all buttery, so it probably didn’t go through malolactic fermentation (it didn’t). It may have been chaptalized, but I can’t be certain.

The only real mystery might be the pronounced petrol aroma so early in the wine’s life. I’m told petrol usually comes with age in Rieslings. (I wouldn’t know. I’m American, I drink my wines young :-P).

I think the mystery can probably be explained by the weather. 2005 was a hot, dry year, with rains in July and August followed by a warm dry harvest window in September and October.

The chemical thought to be responsible for the petrol aroma, called TDN (TrimethylDihydroNaphthalene), is correlated to low yields, warm weather and sun exposure, increased water stress and high acid.

It all fits. In 2005 The Sauce was warm to hot, yields were limited, there was plenty of sun, dry farming was employed, there wasn’t a ton of rain, and according to the assays I ran on the wine there’s plenty of acid. Check it out:

The pH for this guy is 3.12, which is really low (high acid)

and the TA, or titratable acidity, came in at 6.4 g/L. Of that, 1.2 g/L is malic acid, which is the “greener” tasting of the acids. Tartaric acid, the remainder (5.2 g/L), is thought by some to taste more citrus-y. So maybe that’s where all the sour citrus fruit flavors are coming from.

Mystery solved? Who knows, but the process is kinda fun. Probably more thought than you’ve ever put into a 16 dollar bottle of wine before (me too), but what the heck.

The Final Score

3 Floridian Super delegates.

If you’re learning about French wines and Alsace in particular, this is a great wine to try. And the price is right. Kermit Lynch for the win!

There is a vibrant daily conversation happening among the wired wine retailers, wineries, wine bloggers and others going on each day on the twitter.

Follow me and the rest of the crew. It’s very good times.

3.4 acres of Rebecca’s vineyard were hit and hit hard by the sub 30’s temps this past Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Below you can see the temp data from our RanchSystems weather station. The sensor from which the data was collected is located right in the heart of a low lying swale.

Not good times. Worse than average for the county, but better than some. El Jefe at Twisted Oak is estimating that they lost 70% of their crop this year.

To estimate the losses I mapped out the affected areas on Google Earth and did some grade school geometry (turn all the complex shapes into simple ones, find the area…) and math, but it’s pretty accurate.

Maybe some of the shoots will live on and I’m overestimating. I don’t know. We can pray at least.

I do not wish to belabor the point, but the sooner the wholesalers realize that a major paradigm shift has occurred in the wine market, the better off they will be. The Internet is not going away any time soon, and it is already revolutionizing how wineries and consumers interact. Arguably, by permitting self distribution and direct shipments to consumers, small wineries can grow into big wineries — and big wineries will need a wholesaler to ship their goods. As the wine industry goes larger and more competitive throughout the country, that is great news for consumers, wineries and yes, even wholesalers.

UPDATE: And here’s a link to Tom Wark’s latest press release on the 75th anniversary of Prohibition.

Money quote:

At the height of Prohibition a small syndicate of powerful and wealthy individuals controlled alcohol distribution across the country through corruption, close affiliations with government officials and heavy-handed tactics. On the 75th anniversary of Repeal of Prohibition, a small group of alcohol distributors completely control alcohol distribution through heavy-handed tactics that stymie entrepreneurship and prevent consumer access to wine — all for the sake of extraordinary wholesaler profits.

I’ve held a similar attitude regarding Gary Vee since he burst on the scene a couple years ago. My first introduction to all that is Gary was through a rather ugly piece of comment spam he instigated. It was discussed at Spittoon and called out at The Wine Amatuer. Later I got the same spam myself on pinotblogger. Not a great first impression. But hey, don’t sweat the small stuff.

I didn’t always agree with his tactics, opinions, or even his style, but I felt we were basically on the same page marketing-wise and shared a similar vision for what the wine world will look like in our fast arriving, hyper-connected future.

Gary advocated a less stuffy, less rigid form of wine criticism. His take away message had basically been: “Trust your own palate.” It served him well.

Change in Message

Lately though, things have changed. Now his main message is morphing into something different. Distilled, it boils down to “The old standbys (i.e. Jordan, Yellowtail, California Pinot) are boring and lame, and so are you if you don’t try new things.”

There is a big difference in the two messages. The first empowers the individual. It’s democratic and aligns well with the ethos of the web.

“Trust your palate” is powerful because it encourages folks to feel good about what they like, and that in turn gives them confidence in their own opinions and encourages them to explore different producers and wine regions. It’s a message that unites critics, producers and consumers under one big, inclusive tent.

The second, more recent message is the opposite of empowering. It’s self-serving because it empowers the wine guide/reviewer. It says “That Silver Oak cab you’ve been drinking isn’t really good, it’s just what you’ve been led to believe is good. You’ve been tricked. Bamboozled. Hoodwinked. Follow me, I’ll show you what’s good and what isn’t.”

More than that, his new message is divisive. Recommendations that come at the expense of other regions or particular producers are at best unhelpful, and at worst damaging. I saw it in his recent talk at Google (link coming) where he chided folks who liked California Pinot Noir, insinuating that they only drank it because of Sideways, ripped Yellow Tail, and generally bagged on new world wines.

I’ve seen it in his most recent retail email newsletter:

* MUCH and I mean MUCH better then Cakebread, Caymus, Silver Oak, Jordan, Opus One, Insignia and for an unreal price. - Gary Vaynerchuk, Wine Library’s Director of Operations and star of WinelibraryTV on the 94 Point Robert Parker rated 2005 Conn Valley Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon

Wrong Approach

Personally I don’t think this type of approach is helpful or productive for wine drinkers. I don’t think that it’s helpful for wine producers. It’s only helpful for Gary.

I want to be careful here. With Gary, separating the message from the messenger, the person from the personality, is really difficult to do. I’m sure Gary is a nice guy, a friend to many, and a good husband. But his personality is so wrapped up in his brand that attacking what he says and how he says it is essentially equivalent to attacking the man. That’s not my intention. My gripe isn’t about his over-the-top video style or his voice. It’s with his message.

Gary likes taking shots at the big guys. He’s made his reputation on it. Never mind that Jordan, for instance, built their brand without ever receiving a high score from Parker (79 anyone?). Never mind that California Pinot was less than an afterthought just over a decade ago, or that most wines that are popular got that way because people actually like them.

It doesn’t matter to Gary. What matters to him is that he sees a niche he can dominate in the near future, and “Trust your Palate” isn’t the brand message that’s going to get him there.

Remember, I’m not the old guard he likes to knock down. I’m not one of the folks in Napa with the rude tasting room staff, resting on the laurels of my brand equity. I’m one of the bloggers and social media misfits that is actually taking part in the conversation.

It’s just that I don’t like what I’m seeing. And I’m not the only one.

“It has been said of Greg La Follette that he could bring a church to tears about Pinot Noir.”

In the clip below you can get a bit of a feel for how he earned that reputation.

In it Greg speaks passionately about working with Pinot, and it is infectious. At the tasting afterward I heard more people commenting on this bit of the talk than anything else.

Note: All these clips from Flickr are less than 90 seconds. I’m really enjoying the creative constraints. It’s kind of like Twitter for video.

Quick personal aside. I actually know Greg’s parents better than I know him, which is a little surprising given Greg himself is close to 20 years my senior. I met them at a Founder’s Club dinner kicking off last year’s Pinot on the River, my first. I was fortunate to spend a memorable night eating, drinking great Pinot, and chatting with them both.

The wildfires down in Southern California had just torn through the area (their house was spared), but they were undaunted and in great spirits. Both are longtime Pinot on the River vets and they made me feel right at home with their generosity of spirit and unexpected interest in my little winery project. With such great folks, it’s easy to see where Greg’s passion for life and wine comes from.

The other thing you should know about Greg and his label, Tandem, is that it is actually run like a real business. He doesn’t have an endless truckload of cash from which to draw to build his brand. He’s chipping away at it, paying down his debt piece by piece, old school style. Which to me makes his passion all the more authentic.

You can check out the new releases from Tandem here.

More clips Monday.

Today I’m featuring a quick clip of Merry Edwards talking about the Russian River Valley, and in particular the “Golden Triangle”.

In the clip below Merry talks about why she feels the Golden Triangle, a stretch of land shaped roughly like a triangle and blessed with Goldridge Sandy loam soils, is so special.

Aerial Photo

Below is an aerial view with a rough outline of the piece of land that Merry’s talking about. Some world class pinot is grown here, from Merry’s Klopp Ranch bottling, to Kistler, Dehlinger, Martin Ray and Joe Swan. And at the very tip of the triangle, near where Laguna Road hits River Road, is our 17 acre vineyard and the future site of Capozzi Winery.

The phallic, condom-looking shape wasn’t intentional. I swear.

Hope you enjoy the video and look forward to sharing more with you in the coming days.

That’s one of the questions David Williams poses in the latest issue of Wine and Spirit (UK). After taking the reader on an extensive survey of the past and present of online wine retailing, David asks whether the current buzz about wine/web 2.0 is fundamentally different from previous wine e-tailer failures.

Looking forward, David identifies direct-to-consumer as the third revolution in online wine sales. I think he’s absolutely right (I’d better, I’m betting our winery on it!). But he also thinks that direct-to-consumer sales will come at the expense of wine retailers and merchants, and Capozzi (that’s me) is held up as an example of a producer embracing the model and looking to cannibalize sales from clicks and mortar wine retailers.

Here’re some quotes for context:

…[A]ccording to Gormley, there is much more to come from the web.

“I think we’ve got an awfully long way to go,” he says. “What’s happened online so far has basically been improvements on the existing models of direct selling. But the real step change is still to come.”

Gormley reckons the seeds of revolution lie in the ability of consumers to make direct contact with their favoured producers, and to buy their wines directly from them – a kind of virtual farm gate, leaving retailers to act as “sourcing partners who basically just do the logistics”.

A virtual farm gate. I love that image. Rusty, creaky gate hinges and all. It conjures up the kind of one-to-one opportunities that direct interaction with wine lovers provides. Drop on by, have a chat. Maybe buy some wine. Lovely. Serene. Downright agrarian. Which is why the following juxtaposition is a bit jarring:

It’s a model that appeals to forward-looking producers such as Josh Hermsmeyer in California’s Russian River Valley. Hermsmeyer is well-known in cyberspace as the man behind the thoughtful pinotblogger site, which tells the story of his attempts to build his Capozzi family winery from scratch. And he is convinced that, for boutique fine wine producers if not bigger brands, the possibilities afforded by the internet could make fine wine retailers a thing of the past.

So, just for the record, I never said that I think fine wine retailers would be a thing of the past. It’s an interesting idea, but one that I completely disagree with, as you’ll see below.

I simply think that distributors and unnecessary middlemen that add no value will become a thing of the past. And even then, as David notes, I was only talking about small wineries. Big producers will always need distributors to move the volume of wine that they produce. For them, the distributors add value.

So Jill and all the rest of the awesome fine wine retailers out there, you can put down your knives.

More quotes:

“It seems to me that the change really will be at the high-end,” Hermsmeyer says. “Using social media, wine lovers who want low volume, artisanal wines will be able to go straight to the source and easily interact with the principals behind their favourite winery.

“Since the time and effort it takes to cultivate real, meaningful relationships with people doesn’t scale, I think this is where the small guys have a pretty sizable advantage over the big ones. Our customer bases are much smaller, so more personal attention can be paid to the folks who are truly passionate about our brands.”

Not everybody believes this is the future of wine retailing. As you might expect, Bennett thinks otherwise, and says: “There will always be a role for people like us who can give their authority on what we consider to be the best wines around. It’s very hard to buy direct in Burgundy, for example, unless you know your stuff.”

Bennett is absolutely correct. There will always be a role for people who have built up authority and trust with consumers to use their influence to recommend good wines. The wine world is way too cluttered and complex to navigate without some guidance. That guidance could come from a friend, a sommelier, a professional reviewer, a wine blogger, or a retailer. All of these folks add tremendous value. So, as long as the wine world stays complex and cluttered, they won’t ever go away.

More than that though wineries that rely on direct to consumer sales to make their business work would be foolish to view fine wine retailers as anything other than partners. Third party recommendations are crucial in the wine industry, and having a brand advocate that also happens to sell your wine is a powerful thing. Their passion and knowledge of wine will attract consumers and will help you grow your brand.

And as far as the internet goes, online tools are making it ever easier to create profitable relationships with such partners.

Retailers and Wine Bloggers as Partners

As just one example, imagine if every wine blogger suddenly became a tiny equity partner in your wine brand. If someone likes your wine enough to write about it, shouldn’t they be able to monetize their influence and get a cut of any sales that resulted from their recommendation? Isn’t this precisely what wine retailers do offline right now?

This isn’t a new idea, and it isn’t hard to implement. In fact I wrote about how to do it almost two years ago. People do it all the time with goods on Amazon. It’s called an affiliate program, and the web makes setting up such a system shockingly easy.

What’s holding back such a system from taking root doesn’t have anything to do with technology or the internet. It has to do with many wine bloggers viewing themselves as independent wine reviewers instead of independent wine retailers. The dominant wine blogging model is to be a small scale Robert Parker instead of becoming a small scale Kermit Lynch.

No Mini Kermit Lynches? Why?

Both Parker and Lynch have an unquestionable passion for fine wine. Both have acknowledged expertise. Both are well respected. So why aren’t there more mini Kermit Lynches out there?

No one who has spent the time to build up credibility with their audience is going to squander it by recommending a crap wine just to make a few short-term bucks. And if they do, they’ll quickly lose their influence and readership anyway. The blogoshpere is self-correcting.

So what gives? It’s a rhetorical question obviously, because I really don’t know the answer.

All I do know is that direct-to-consumer will be much more profitable for wineries if they can build their own Long Tail network of micro-retailers and blog partners.

And that means partnering with wine retailers of all shapes and sizes, both online and off, not trying to kill them.

That’s my take at least. What do you all think? All comments welcome.

Your April Fools Day Joke Sucks.

Hmm. So this is what it’s like being a critic. Much easier than trying to create or do something new and interesting. I could get used to this!