Good Grape Wine Company

February 6 2010

Field Notes from a Wine Life – Errata Edition

Odds and ends from a life lived through the prism of the wine glass …

Super Bowl Sip

Normally, I’m the first person to mock the lifestyle articles that present mindless wine pairings around the holidays.  These articles are now popping up like mushrooms after the rain because of the Super Bowl, an unofficially official national holiday.  For some reason, perhaps because I live in Indianapolis, home of the Colts, I am benevolently ambivalent about these articles this year.  I say, go forth and work on that Champagne or Riesling pairing with potato chips …whatever… just so long as you’re cheering for the Colts. 

Should you want to support good wine with roots in Indiana, check out Buehler Vineyards or Kokomo wines – both have winemakers that are Indiana natives.

I Have to Manage Something Else?

I received my first invite to Foursquare yesterday.

Some quick background:  Early in 2007, when Tim Elliott from Winecast and I were doing regular podcasts, the topic of Twitter was discussed.  This was when Twitter was used by only the smallest slice of early adopters.  At the time, we talked about using Twitter for tasting notes – tweeting notes on a wine from a restaurant, for example.  I scoffed heartily while Tim was much more insightful in seeing Twitter’s usefulness.  Of course, the rest is history as Twitter has become a cultural phenomenon and my lack of foresight is archived on the Internet for perpetuity.

Flash forward to today, and I still act as something of a technology curmudgeon despite making my living in technology and Internet marketing.  So, when I received the invitation to Foursquare my immediate thought was to scoff again – another technology communication thingy that is hard to describe – “what the hell is it?” I thought – very similar to my first blush look at Twitter.

Foursquare IS hard to describe – a sort of mashup of mobile, sharing, and digital geocaching consumerism.  Yet, something tells me there is something fun and interesting here … enough to check out ahead of curve of others, at the least.

Whether or not Foursquare leaps to mainstream cultural consciousness like Twitter is yet to be seen, but if I were a winery I would certainly check it out for early adoption.

Spring Wine Allocations Are Coming …

On the heels of receiving an allocation of Bond last year and an ongoing spot on the Williams Selyem list, I received my first ever allocation of Kosta Browne for the Spring of 2010.  I love Kosta Browne. 

Unfortunately, that ship has sailed, the horse has already left the barn, and the toothpaste is out of the tube … whatever phraseology you want to use.  Allocations once held an allure.  Now, they seem overpriced and a status relic, out-of-fashion for the times – like building a 4000 square foot house just because a mortgage company will give you the money …

On Advertising …

I read a recent research summary that said that advertising and marketing professionals were one of the least trusted groups of professional’s right after politicians. 

Oh vey.

If nothing else, that adds a little bit of light on the mercurial importance of “authenticity” from a winery.

Gallo Wine Fraud

When I was a cub doing an internship at an advertising agency in Atlanta, GA, I worked with a former Brand Manager for Taco Bell.  We started talking about an unsavory urban legend I had heard related to food handling at Taco Bell.  Without knowing where I grew up specifically, she said that not only was she aware of the rumor, but that it originated in South Bend, IN (my hometown).  I found that interesting—she knew where the rumor started and independently corroborated the myth that was making the rounds.

Now, Gallo and their French import brand Red Bicyclette are in a little bit of a PR gaffe over allegations of fraud because the negociants that sold them Pinot Noir supposedly included significant amounts of Merlot and Syrah.

I’m sure the Gallo folks are fretting; a scandal like this can bubble up and impact sales rather quickly even if they haven’t been involved in any wrongdoing, particularly when you deal in the volume that this brand does – 220,000 cases according to the M. Shanken Trade News blog and Impact Databank.

However, this Gallo tidbit prompted me to revisit Snopes.com – a web site that does urban legend de-bunking.  There, a search for “wine” reveals a whole bunch of urban legends, including one piece of alleged truism that some wines from the Rhone are fined with dried oxblood.

I guess the moral of the story for Gallo is this: it could be a lot worse.

Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia

When I received a Kindle as a Christmas gift from my wife this year, I had high, high hopes for downloading a couple of wine encyclopedias and having a more portable reference than the nine pound tomes that currently weigh down my bookshelf.  So, it was with disappointment that I found that there were scant few wine books available for the e-reader.

However, the Kindle does allow you to email documents to the Kindle for reading.

Enter Enobytes, who are giving away an entire 664 page copy of The Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia as a PDF document if you sign up for their email list.

My problem is solved.  Still, for the 99.7% of the world that doesn’t have a Kindle, receiving the wine encyclopedia and using on your computer, or sending to print at Kinko’s is a pretty good value.

You can check out Enobytes here.

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