New York Wine Expo this weekend!

A quick reminder for everyone:

The NYWE will be happening on February 27th, 6:00 pm – 10:00 pm and February
28th, 2:00 pm – 6:00 pm. So if you are more of an afternoon “taster,” head there on Saturday, but if you are looking for a kick-start to your evening, try the Friday night special. There will be hundreds of wines to taste, knowledgeable people to talk to and dancing (well, not technically. But lets be honest, its New York and the only criteria to get in is if you buy a ticket… there will be dancing).

Tickets are $85. To order go to http://www.wine-expos.com/Wine/NY/.

I will be heading there tomorrow night. Will you be there?

Well, if you put it in front of me…

There is really only one thing that stops most people from becoming more knowledgeable about wine. It is not the amount of time they read articles about the regions or a particular winemaker or a particularly good vintage. When it comes down to it, the roadblock is accessibility.

In order to know about wine you need to taste a lot of wine. And I mean A LOT of wine. The last comprehensive wine tasting I helped coordinate had over 800 wines submitted (two bottles of each, that’s 1600 bottles of wine!!). If you have never been in an office with 1600 bottles of wine, I would suggest trying it. The feeling that you have enough alcohol to host the craziest frat party is quite a trip. That is as long as you do not break any of the bottles (another story for another time).

And then when these bottles are open it would seem a shame not to taste them to see what they are like. That’s my point, where do you have the opportunity to taste 800 wines? Do you think you’ve had 800 wines in your life? Any of the wine bloggers that I read regularly (for list, see sidebar) would say, “Yes, I did that Thursday” but for the vast majority of wine drinkers (and I mean SERIOUS wine drinkers) it would take over two years of drinking a different bottle of wine each night (don’t skip a night, otherwise you’ll have to drink two different bottles the next night).

And the crazy part is that 800 wines is just a drop in the bucket! As I posted in The good of wine ratings, there are over 7,000 different wine brands available, and more appearing DAILY!

So, I feel very lucky to be in a position to taste as many wines as I can get my hands on. It lets me explore the tastes I enjoy and the combinations that are possible. Hopefully my personal insights are also useful to my friends (who read this blog?).

However, as I said up front, the main problem is accessibility. My company only works with two (maybe three) wine country groups, so besides those I am limited in my knowledge. But slowly I taste more wines (and I encourage you to do the same) and continue my wine education.

If you are a wine marketer reading this, I accept wine samples (I’d be a fool not to). E-mail me here.

The Art of a Virtual Tasting

Last Friday night at 8 pm I joined a group of other wine geeks to taste wines and compare our notes. We all went through the proper motions: swirl, sniff, sip, swish and swallow (I don’t think anyone spits in this crowd). We were all meticulous in noting the different flavors and aromas that our senses perceived. I might be the only one to admit it, but some of us got a little tipsy. And we did it while we were all hundreds of miles from each other.

We were all participants of a tasting on Twitter Taste Live. On November 19th Lenn Thompson of LENNDEVOURS announced that he was hosting the tasting and that his choice was four wines from Humanitas Winery, a winery owned by Judd Wallenbrock who is also the winemaker. I read Lenn’s blog all the time so I decided to check it out. Judd blogs at Drink Charitably and the concept of his winery is a beautiful one, to make good wine and to give back to charities in local communities where the wines are sold. The profits from the winery go to three primary causes: hunger, affordable housing and illiteracy. They have chosen Feeding America (formerly America’s Second Harvest), Habitat for Humanity, and Reading is Fundamental as their targeting charities, but do not limit the donations to only those. Judd and company are just as likely to donate to local charities that best address these issues in individual communities. One of the best winery missions I have heard to date.

If you’ve never seen or heard of Twitter before, you are not the only one. It might be the latest online craze, but then again it might not. The format of using Twitter Taste Live (TTL) was an interesting one. The notion is that everyone buys the wines and meets at the same time and tweet about them. Yes, that’s the new verb, and no I did not coin it (thank goodness). TTL was created by Craig Drollett, John Hafferty, and Chris Gillis and was originally connected to their retail store Bin Ends. Today TTL has distanced itself from the store and is completely open to the world of the wine industry, especially the consumers. The userbase is currently nearing 500 with participation in 8 countries. Not bad for a site based on tweets.

“The real vision is that this platform is a direct line of communication between consumers and wine makers,” explains Craig. “So far it’s working out very well.”

The tasting itself was very interesting, but turned into a case of the hiccups that won’t go away. I loved being in an online space where there are so many people who love to talk about wine all expressing their opinions of the same wines. The way it works is that as long as your tweet has #ttl included then it will pop up on the live feed. The only problem was that every ten to fifteen minutes or so the live twitter feed (I almost said tweet feed, but that seemed wrong somehow) would cut out. The only thing that really kept everything together was Matt doing a live video feed from his house.

All said and done, it was a good experience. The wines we tasted were:

• Humanitas Sauvignon Blanc 2006, 13.8% ALC, Monterey County, California, USA


• Humanitas Oak Free Chardonnay 2007, 13.8% ALC, Monterey County, California, USA


• Humanitas Gap’s Crown Pinot Noir 2006, 14.6% ALC, Sonoma Coast, California, USA


• Humanitas Cabernet Sauvignon 2006, 14.2% ALC, Paso Robles, California, USA

My clear favorite and that of the two others I tasted with (ok, so it is also nice to taste wine with live people too) was the Chardonnay. It was that classic pear and apple that Chardonnay should produce and had a great balance on the taste. The Cabernet started coming through for me after it sat out a while; I had not expected to need to decant it. When I first tasted the Cab it had huge tannins and was extremely rough. It started to smooth out and find some fruit after about an hour or so. I’ll know better for next time.

You can buy the wines here, and be sure to check out Twitter if you have not done so yet and Twitter Taste Live.

The good of wine ratings

There are a lot of people that complain about wine ratings. Most of the people I know from college have only the slightest grasp of what a rating is and what it means for the wine. For me, it is important if a wine is rated, but a rating is not everything.




How many products have over 7,000 brands to choose from? I think I can name five brands of cereal, six brands of mustard, and perhaps (if I stretch really far) eight or nine brands of salad dressing. However, when you walk into a wine store and look around there are easily hundreds of different wine brands sitting on the shelf, waiting for you to make a decision on which one to purchase.


How are you supposed to make a decision as to which one to buy?? There are large bottles, small bottles, green bottles, brown bottles. There are bottles with cute cartoons on the label (be wary) and bottles with funny names (be even more wary). There are bottles that look like you need a jackhammer to open and bottles that look like you could sneeze and they might break. Bottles, bottles, more bottles, and then even more bottles...

It's daunting! You almost prostrate yourself in relief when a helpful employee comes over and asks you what you are looking for and then points you in a direction. However, the only way to have a suggestion coming into the wine store is by checking out the ratings.

Some writers talk about how ratings are like training wheels. I think this is pretty accurate (although those that know me might find this funny since I do not know how to ride a bike). Wine ratings are, when all is said and done, a report of what one person thought about the wine. The higher or lower the rating the more or less they would recommend the wine over another. I think the only way to know if you agree with the individual rating the wines is if you taste the ones they rated and see if your tastes match theirs. If not, perhaps it is time to find a new writer to follow (there are plenty out there).

As a final note, a writer who I read often on his blog is Steve Heimoff, the West Coast Editor of Wine Enthusiast. He posted about reviews and the people who malign them on his blog. It is an interesting read, mostly because you get to see the cat fighting in the comments.