a wine importer thinking out loud

2001-05-13T16:17:00.000-04:00

Even Simpler

I have changed servers and our attorneys have successfuly filed to have our own Internet URL.

From now on you can reach my current blog by typing:

www.joedressner.com

I am no longer updating this site and new posts are already at the new web address. There will also be pictures and exciting contests.

Incredibly, an internet profiteer had already reserved the www.joedressner.com url! We had to give him a rather generous pay-off to use my name!

2001-05-10T07:32:00.000-04:00

Even Simpler

I have changed servers and our attorneys have successfuly filed to have our own Internet URL.

From now on you can reach my current blog by typing:

www.joedressner.com.

.

I will no longer be updating this site and new posts will all be at the new web address. There will also be pictures and exciting contests.

Incredibly, an internet profiteer had already reserved the www.joedressner.com url! We had to give him a rather generous pay-off to sell us his rights.

2001-05-08T14:27:00.000-04:00

Blog Moving?

Please take a look at Joe Dressner's Possible New A Wine Importer Thinking Out Loud Site.. The graphics department likes the ability to put in pictures over there.

Let me know what you think.

2001-05-07T22:48:00.000-04:00

The 17th Reason I Like Being a Wine Importer -- You Meet Lot's of Famous People!

Just this past Saturday, for instance, I was conducting a tasting at The Wine Connection, a fine store in Pound Ridge, NY. Who should walk in but Nino Magliocco! That's right, Nino Magliocco, the owner of Peerless Wines & Liquors, one of the largest wine and liquor wholesalers in New York!

Who is Peerless, you ask? And why should I be impressed by Joe Dressner meeting Nino Magliocco, Peerless' owner?

Peerless Importers has some of the most beloved liquid assets around. The company, founded in 1943, distributes wine and spirits in New York and Connecticut. Its spirits catalog includes blends, brandy and cognac, cordials and liqueurs (including Baileys Irish Cream), gin, rum, scotch (including J&B), and vodka. Wines are imported from Australia, Chile, and Western Europe. Unfortunately, Peerless Importers does have peers and has, in the past, lost business from liquor giants Diageo and Bacardi Limited to New York rivals like Charmer Industries. The Magliocco family (through its Quaker Equities holding company) owns and operates Peerless Importers and its Johnny Barton subsidiary. The firm ranked Number 417 in the Forbes Private 500, has 1,200 employees and billed over $600 million dollars in 2000 (according to the ever-reliable Hoover's News).

Although I knew Peerless was a big company, I had no idea what they actually sold. Nino was quick to inform me of all the above, and also pointed out that they sell Louis Jadot wines, wines from Paterno and various other imports. I told him that I always get confused between the big companies and can never keep straight which one is actually Hublein and which one is actually Somerset & Schieflin.

This is a little know fact about the wine/liquor trade: two giant behemoths, the aforementioned Hublein and Somerset & Schieflin control every company with the exception of Louis/Dressner Selections, Mark Whitmore's Vineyard Expressions, and the Shiverik portion of Langdon/Shiverik (although the late Louis Langdon long sold out to Hublein). Nationally prominent importer Andrew Scott, for instance, is a Hublein creation and paid agent, who maintains the elaborate pose of being an independent agent. This allows Hublein to get favorable reviews from Robert Parker. More recently, these two mega-firms conspired to destroy Seagrams, which is now being dismantled by the notorious Vivendi company, a well-known French Freemason Front with long-standing ties to Somerset & Shieflin. Rumors have it that Hublein will get Captain Morgan but Somerset & Schieflin gets all the rest (including that well known Angerville brand).

Anyhow, Mr. Magliocco told me I should give him a call as even Neal Rosenthal had recently called Peerless about helping him distribute some of Mr. Rosenthal's excellent wines. I was rather taken aback that Mr. Magliocco would make such a strident offer, as I was tasting with one of the principals in Douglas Polaner Selections, a seemingly independent New York/New Jersey distributors who carries many of our wines. Much to my relief, Nino Magliocco had never heard of Polaner.

Anyhow, 10 minutes later, who should walk in but Tom Brokaw the NBC newscaster! Brokaw was looking for enzyme-treated New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs (although I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he did not realize that they are enzyme-treated and actually enjoys all that gooseberry taste. Despite Brokaw's proclivities, I did manage to get him to taste a Clos Roche Blanche Sauvignon Blanc 2000 which he claimed to like and actually purchased.

Yes, the wine business is a glamorous business.

2001-05-03T15:42:00.000-04:00

Even More of the 17 Reasons The Wine Importer Likes Being a Wine Importer

15. Our office just learned that President Bush's Uncle must have a case of Château Pierre-Bise's Coteaux-du-Layon Anclaie 1998! He drank this wine at Restaurant Daniel in New York City and went wild for the stuff.. We don't know if this is Barbara's Brother or George Sr.'s brother. Then again, maybe this is one of the 17 reasons I don't like being a Wine Importer.

16. The Knowledge that an Uncle of President George W. Bush Finds the 1998 Vintage of Château Pierre Bise's Coteaux-du-Layon Anclaie a Superb Wine When Everyone Knows that it Rained During the Harvest and the Vintage was a Keen Disappointment after 1995, 1996 and 1997 -- Ex-President Clinton stocked up on 1997 Anclaie and has so far refused to buy any 1998 or 1999. Actually, it tastes well now, although it was somewhat bitter on release. Of course, if you never had the 1995, 1996 or 1997 you might find it suberb.

2001-04-23T23:01:00.000-04:00

Some More of the 17 Reasons The Wine Importer Likes Being a Wine Importer

8. Introducing Unknown Wines to an Unsuspecting Public -- When we first started, Minervois and Corbières were oddities. Alain Jungenet had a couple of estates and perhaps a few others were around. Now, they seem almost commonplace. What has been extremely gratifying for myself, Denyse and Kevin is to see wines from obscure appellations being drunk by wine lovers around the country. Bourgueil, Cheverny and Cour-Cheverny, wines from the Bugey, great Muscadets, high-priced Mâcons, Beaume-de-Venise Reds, Gaillac, Touraine whites reds....I think our firm has played a large role in the popularization of fine wines from these regions.

9. Popularizing Wines Without the Wine Press -- I don't have the popular wine palate that gets the big scores in the wine press. Sometimes it depresses me that we are not Bobby Kacher. But more often than not I am delighted to be buying and selling wines that have a purity and authenticity. Rather than finding wines for Parker, or wines for the Wine Spectator, or wines for the "American palate," we have found wines we love and found the people in the wine trade who can get them to a public that will appreciate them. With or without a shelf talker that has a 93 point score from a Parker review.

10. Meeting Like-Minded Geeks in the Wine Trade-- most importantly, there is Kevin McKenna, my partner along with Denyse Louis. Kevin was one of our first buyers, when he was the buyer at Astor Place in New York City. For six years now he has been an integral part of our firm, bringing a wide range of wine and business knowledge that Denyse and I have always lacked. There is David Lillie at Garnet Wines, the King of the Loire Valley, who helped us so much to get going and to keep moving in the Loire. JR Battipaglia at Garnet, whose commitments to our Burgundies was so essential to our stability and expansion. Steve Mosher at the Wine and Cheese Cask in Boston who has flooded the Boston market with too many obscurities from our book. Tom and Carol Piscatelli in San Francisco and all the work they has done for our wines. Eugene Kaplan in Dallas, Robert Yellin in DC, Frank Lichtenberg in Atlanta, Paul Roberts in Chicago.... Then there are all the sommeliers and retailers out there who have invested in maybe one or two of our wines, but without whom we would never have had wide distribution. There are also the great distributors like Roanoke Wines, Domaine Selections, Triage, Silenus, Slocum, Douglas Polaner and so many more who can sell wine as wine and not simply as commodity.

11. Meeting Like-Minded Geeks Not in the Trade -- there's a whole group I've met around Robert Callahan that coalesced around various internet wine forums and who can now be found at Robert Callahan's Wine therapy. Callahan is kind of in but not of the Wine Trade, so I best put him in this category. It has been not only gratifying to meet all these people but I've learned about Gruner Veltiner and so many other wines by spending time with many of these maniacal characters. I will never forget all the support I received from these friends during my heart surgery a year ago and I will never forget their generousity and kindness.

12. Brad Kane.

13. Discovering Chenin Blanc -- I do have a home in the Mâconnais and I suppose could have been happy just drinking Goyard and Jean Thevenet. But there is such a beautiful range of Chenin -- from dry Savenniéres to Vouvray and Montlouis Demi-Secs through Moëlleux onto the special bottlings of great vintages -- wines that uniquely express their terroir and that age superbly. Wines that are delicious young or at 80-years-old. Wines that go so well with so many different foods and have yet to be corrupted by gobs of new oak and over-extraction.

14. Discovering Cabernet Franc -- I do have a home in Southern Burgundy and I suppose I could have been happy just drinking Pinot Noir....

More to come....

2001-04-20T13:49:00.000-04:00

Prestigous Chicago Wine Placements

I'm pleased to announce that Chicago's well-know establishment, The Matchbox, has added the Quinta do Mouro Estremoz 1997 and the Domaine du Traginer 1995 Banyuls to their Wine-Spectator Award Winning wine list. "These two wines are valuable additions to our cellar and we believe that the Chicago wine-loving community will be every bit as happy as we are with these marvellous wines," said MW Paul Roberts, Matchbox Beverage Director. For information, please consult Fine Wines and Great Dining in the Chicago Area.

Having spent Tuesday evening at the Matchbox, I would also strongly recommend their award-winning Martini program.

2001-04-19T08:52:00.000-04:00

17 Reasons The Wine Importer Likes Being a Wine Importer

I've been altogether too negative lately about being a wine importer.

Here I am, on a ATA flight to Chicago, packed into the plane like a sardine, adjacent to a passenger reading a book on successful, inspired salesmanship. To the casual onlooker there is nothing that really seperates me from my neighbor. Both of us are peddling product.

Happily, we sell different products. It is nearly a year since I had four heart bypasses and I am feeling sentimental. Here are 17 reasons I am sometimes delighted to be The Wine Importer. They are in random order, except for number 1:

1. Working with my wife - It is not always easy to separate the business from the private but I love my wife and am delighted that by working together I get to see her more often. Twenty years ago I learned that the student next to me in Graduate Journalism school had vineyards in some town called St -Gengoux-de-Scissé in the Maconnais. I was off on both a personal adventure that would lead to two children and a new profession where I would get to meet some of the most impassioned artisans in the world. I have to thank Denyse, the love of my life, for all that. I forgive her the schnooks (see blog entry last week).

2. Tasting in the Clos Rougeard Cellar - Dominique Derain, our grower in St. Aubin, recently visited the Foucault. Derain is certain the cellar itself, where wine has been made for centuries, adds an unquantifiable something to the wine. In a sense, there is a biological environment here that is every bit as much of the 'terroir' of the Foucault's Saumur-Champigny as the limestone that the cellar is carved into. A beautiful cellar that is laced with bacteria throughout.

3. Tasting Henri Goyard's Macons in February -- Goyard's wines often have noble rot and are usually at a fairly elevated level of sugar when I first taste the wines in mid-February. Jean Thevenet has done considerable research on the history of Vire and Clesse and the wines here were often sold raw, in plain fermentation, to Lyon bistros (known as Bouchons). The wines would still have sugar and gas and you can get the approximation of this delicacy if you taste at Thevenet or Goyard before the wines are finished. Thevenet and the late restaurant owner Alain Chapelle tried to revive this tradition before Chapelle died. Goyard has officially retired after the 2000 harvest and I will now have this pleasure at Florent Thevenet's cellar. Florent is Jean Thevenet's son and is the new proprietor of Domaine de Roally.

4. The Annual Domaine de la Pepiere Muscadet Jeebus -- Marc Ollivier throws this affair every year in February. Tons of oysters, pates, cheeses and vintages and vintages of Marc's Muscadets. Truly one of the great pleasures of being in the wine trade for me. Some of Marc's older treasures will soon be for sale at Virot Restaurant in New York. Don't miss them!

5. Any Visit to Clos Roche Blanche -- There is something magical about this vineyard. Catherine Roussel lives in a totally bizarre home, a cross between a haunted house and something out of Lewis Carroll, that overlooks one of the greatest parcel in the Touraine. Roussel and Didier Barouillet work this land with rare intelligence and charm - running an organic exploitation that always looks vigorous and healthy and almost joyful. Even the 104-year-old Cot vines. Being in the wine trade was worth it just to get to know these two vignerons and the Clos.

5. Tasting with Fernand and Alain Coudert - this is often a marathon affair that rivals a tasting at the Foucault. In February, before the bottling, there are numerous cuves and foudres to taste in an effort to approimate the final blend of the Clos de la Roilette Fleurie. It is always incredible to taste truly great wine coming from the much-maligned Gamay grape. We then get down to the serious business of tasting endless vintages to see how they have aged and for the pure pleasure of enjoyng the Coudert's work. Fernand, the father, is retired but has all the intensity of a wily vigneron bon-vivant who likes drinking his metier as much as he enjoyed the actual work. His son Alain is far more reflective and less gregarious, but if anything the quality of the wine has improved since Alain took over.

6. Learning About Wild Yeasts from Jean-Paul Brun at Domaine des Terres Dorées -- The first vintage we tasted here was the 1989 and it was all a revelation to us. We had already been in the wine business for a few years, but Jean-Paul was the first vigneron we met who talked with passion about how innoculated yeasts were being used all over France to create industrial monsters rather than wine. Tasting the 1991 in tank here during the winter of 1992, was one of the most thrilling experiences of my wine career. The wines were so fragant, so concentrated and yet so light there was something truly ethereal about that great vintage. Every year I hope to replicate that experience, but I have yet to drink a wine of such grandeur, such a perfect match of grape, terroir, vintage and winemaker.

7. I'm selling wine in Chicago and writing this on a tlny Casio PocketPC. No time. More to come.

2001-04-13T14:13:00.000-04:00

The Three-Tier Schnook Stystem

I'm writing this on the Metroliner returning from Baltimore to New York City. I have been in DC/Maryland/Virginia since Monday morning in an effort to promote Louis/Dressner Selections wines in this region. In the process, I have not only met a lot of Schnooks in the wine trade but have turned into a Schnook myself.

My Thursday’s salesmanship highlight, was trying to convince two dead men who buy wine for an important retailer in Maryland to buy the Clos Roche Blanche Sauvignon Blanc. Despite the numerous amusing anecdotes I told the dead men about the vignerons, they rejected the wine on the grounds it was too acidic. But they greatly enjoyed the Corbieres Chateau la Baronne Rouge 1999 and immediately ordered a large quantity that will be case stacked at their important store. The dead is a market segment I want to learn more about in the future, as I see my firm has enormous growth possibilities with this important group. On the other hand, we are not doing well amongst the far more numerous Schnooks.

The two dead men did not qualify as being Schnooks as Schnooks are genuinely among the living. Addtionally, the two dead men tasted with glassware, whereas Schnooks always taste using plastic cups that they either have stolen from their Dentists or that they have bought in massive quantities from dental supply companies.

That's right. You, the average wine geek out there, are bombarded with endless literature about Riedel stemware and fret over which stemware is more appropriate for Burgundy and which stemware is more appropriate for your Flowers Chardonnay. Curiously, the DC/Maryland/Virginia market is flooded with Flowers Chardonnay, a winery that I always assumed is an internet invention. Kind of like Kay Bixler.

Anyhow, in reality the Schnooks who are deciding which wines you will be able to buy at your local retailer are making buying decisions by tasting wines in plastic cups. Here is how it works:

(1) The Schnook Salespeople from Schnook Distributors arrive at stores all across America with samples of wines from Schnook Importers (such as myself) or Schnook Domestic Wineries.

(2) The Schnook Retailer then humiliates the Schnook Distributor Salesperson over some late delivery or billing error for the first 15 minutes of the encounter. Since the Schnook Retailer is secure in the knowledge that the Schnook Distributor Salesperson needs his business (as the salespeople are working on commission) they take particular sadistic delight in making the salesperson feel sullied, stupid and humiliated. The veteran Schnook Distributor Salesperson learns to ignore this tirade and not take it personally. If the salesperson is a man and the retailer is a man, the skilled Schnook Salesperson allows the tirade to come to a halt and then tells a particularly salty dirty joke, usually involving oral sex, to make the Schnook Retailer laugh and feel a sense of camraderie with the Schnook Distributor Salesperson. They then proceed directly to important business deals.

(3) There are two variants to this stage. In the simpler variant the Schnook Retailer takes out his plastic cup and tastes all the wine samples the Schnook Salesperson has brought with him. The Schnook Salesperson tries desperately to bombard the Schnook Retailer with all the scores the wine in the plastic cup has received in The Wine Advocate, The Wine Spectator, The Wine Enthusiast, The Paul Roberts Wine Monthly, or any other periodical that has mentioned the wine and that can be turned into a shop talker. This is a very important point: the wine needs a good score somewhere, anywhere, because the Schnool Retailer does not have the time to do "hand-sells." The Schnook Retailer has a difficult job during this phase of the ritual, having to smell, taste and spit (already made more difficult by the wine being in a Dentist’s plastic cup) while listening to the Schnook Salesperson's passioned narrative of 89 points, 90 points and 87 points for each wine.

A subvariant of this process in the Schnook Retailer having a Designated Taster, a kind of sub-Schnook, who tastes all the wines in a designated plastic cup and decides which wines merit being tasted by The Main Schnook. This is something I have never seen outside of the Washington, DC area.

Regardless of whether it is the Designated Schnook or the Main Schnook there are now two fascinating rituals to observe. Some Retailers use one plastic cup for whites and another plastic cup for reds. Some use different plastic cups for each wine. I suppose this is often a function of the tasting budget alloted by each store. Because often the Retail Schnook Buyer is but an employee working within the budgetary limitations of a Boss who doesn’t even bother coming into the store. I did observe during this trip that our wines were much better received by the Schnooks who change cups with each wine. They tend to be much serious wine tasters.

After evaluating the wines through any of the above methods, the Retail Schnook then tells you which wines they will order. This is prefaced by an interrogation where the Retail Schnook demands to know the name of every retail store in the immediate area who carries the wine and what they are charging per bottle. The Retail Schnooks especially like wines that are not carried by their competitors: normally they mark-up the wine 50%, but if no competing Schnooks carry the wine they can add another $1.00 to the bottle price. In general, the Distributor Salesperson Schnook blatantly lies at this point and assures the retailer that non one else in the continental United States will carry the wine if they take 5 cases and make a floor stacking.

I am always shocked by the sheer squeals of delight by Retail Schnooks when they find out their 5 case purchase will be an American exclusivity. Since I work for a fringe company, the Retail Schnooks assume that no one carries my wine anyhow and sometimes mark it up $2.00 for a an additional $120.00 profit on their 5 case purchase! If I am present, working with the Schnook Salesperson, the Schnook Retailer then tells me how he loves working with insignificant companies like Louis/Dressner Selections because our wines are so badly distributed and obscure that he can make enormous and objectionable profits from carrying our “product.”

What do we call this system? We in the wine and liquor trade call it “The Three-Tier System.”

Of course, the entire market is not like this. There are fabulous retailers out there and great distributors with great salespeople. They truly do exist and eventually wine geeks figure out who they are and patronize them.

Despite being a schnook myself I have met many of these people. But even these people are obligated to carry Schnook wines along with the often excellent selections they sell. It’s a schnook world out there and everyone needs a schnook cash flow to stay in business.

And don’t forget that without the Three-Tier Schnook System there would be nobody to warehouse, truck and get out wine to retailers and restaurants outside of a handful of major wine markets.

Yes, the Schnooks perform many useful functions.

[b]Thanks[/b]
I want to thank everyone at the Washington Winos for the great reception I had on Monday night. It was truly an enjoyable evening.

2001-04-05T20:32:00.000-04:00

Grape Varieties, Lawyers and Medications

Yesterday was another glamorous day in the life of The Wine Importer.

6:00 AM -- Wake up, make oatmeal for breakfast. Oatmeal is very good for heart disease. I had four bypasses last May and have to take endless medications and eat lots of oatmeal to remain alive and to evangelize Pierre Overnoy's wines. Who else will do this if I falter?

8:00 AM -- Spoke with a French Lawyer who guaranteed, for a modest fee, that he would bring the Citibank and Crédit Agricole to their knees. Both banks will soon be rewarding my firm vast sums of money.

8:30 AM -- Called Long Island Carpet Cleaning to arrange to have the ugly wall-to-wall carpeting in my apartment cleaned. I would like to strip the carpets off the floor and just have wood floors, but legally I'm obligated to cover 80% of the apartment's surface. Given we have a dog who scurries around the apartment and my son Jules has taken to riding his skateboard and doing elaborate tricks in our flat....I suspect we need to maintain some level of sound insulation. But the carpets get so dirty and so ugly. Every few months we have those miracle workers at Long Island Carpet Cleaning come to our apartment and totally clean the carpets, leaving them almost as clean and shiny as the first day they were installed. The carpet cleaners are coming on Friday, but cannot guarantee what time. It will be somewhere between 9 am and 5 pm, they assure me.

8:45 AM -- Get on my fabulous Swiftfolder bike and ride to work. I'm in an energetic mood and purposely take a 55-minute trip over the Queensboro Bridge (immortalized in the 60's by Simon and Garfunkel) through industrial Queens and industrial Brooklyn and then return to Manhattan over the Williamsburg Bridge to our office somewhere in Soho. Of course, I cannot play my usual mental game of counting the number of Duane Reade Drug Stores I pass and using my chronometer to time how long it takes to go from one Duane Reade to another Duane Reade. Industrial Queens and industrial Brooklyn are official Duane Reade Free Zones (New York Mayor Rudolph Guliani calls them DRF Zones). Instead, I count how many trucks from 1800-MATTRESS pass by me. Only three of them this morning. Unfortunately, I cannot get the jingle from the 1800-MATTRESS commercial out of my head and hum it to myself for the entire duration of my bike ride.

9:45 AM -- Arrive at my office and check my e-mail, foreign currency rates, faxes from angry French vignerons, and faxes demanding we pay for services we performed for free or at our expense for our customers. This last ‘charge’ is part of the wine racket -- if we travel to another town, we pay for the air fare, the hotels, take out the customers and salespeople from the distributor, organize a luncheon and pay for it, and get nary a thanks. It is a norm of the wine racket. A few weeks later we receive a bill for every last bottle of Muscadet or Gris du Toul that was open during our stay. We throw out this bill immediately. One month later we get a threatening letter from the distributor. Then their collection department calls. Then they start deducting money from payments. Distributors call these sort of trips "work-withs." They call me personally a "rep." What do I "rep?" A "supplier" named Louis/Dressner Selections. What are my wines called? "Brands," "Product," or “Products."

9:55 AM -- Make reservations on Amtrak to take a Metroliner to Baltimore on Monday morning at 7 AM. This is altogether too early for me to be traveling, especially considering my heart problems, but my mother is having a Passover Seder on Sunday evening and I want and have to be in attendance. I am of the Jewish persuasion. One of the joys of this Seder will be having my sister-in-law say that she actually prefers the Manischevitz Heavy Malaga to the other wines available at the dinner. Since no one is religious I don’t bother to bring horrible Kosher wine, but my folks always have one bottle of the Heavy Malaga.

10:00 AM -- Organize documents for the meeting later today at our lawyer. Why am I going to Washington? A shipload of Louis/Dressner product just arrived there and I have four days of work-withs scheduled with our distributor there to move boxes and promote the brands.

10:15 AM -- Retailer in New York calls and orders some Corbières. He wants to know exactly what grape varieties are in the wine and in what percentage. I make up something that satisfies the guy. Why he, or his customers would like to know this sort of information is a mystery to me. The wine is a blend dominated by Carignan and there are many more interesting things to say about this wine then to describe what grape varieties are in the bottle. So, it is just easier to make something up. Later in the day another retailer calls and gets my wife on the line -- I'm already at my Cardiologist. The retailer wants to know what grape varieties go into Franck Peillot's Modeuse from Bugey, which the retailer has on his shelves and likes very much. My wife says Mondeuse, which is the actual answer and all is well. We are considering reducing the Louis/Dressner catalog to mono-cépage wines to avoid all this bothersome talk with customers and consumers about varietal composition.

10:30 AM -- A guy named Peter from San Juan calls and wants to know how he can get three cases of Cerdon du Bugey for a marriage in two weekends in Puerto Rico. As importers, we cannot sell to consumers, but apparently retailers in New York City can ship to Puerto Rico. I tell him that I do not condone or condemn the shipment of wine to Puerto Rico (in case he is actually an agent of the New York State Liquor Authority) and suggest he call a store I know that carries the Cerdon. Five minutes later a retailer from the Hudson Valley calls to get prices on the Cerdon du Bugey. Turns out a friend of the guy in San Juan has already called this retailer who is desperate to bag the three-case sale of Cerdon. I inform him that the wine is distributed by Douglas Polaner Selections and that I had unfortunately sent his potential customer to another store. The best and most satisfying part of this whole exchange was that no one asked me what grape varieties go into the Cerdon du Bugey. Later in the day a woman calls and asks if we sell to the public. I ask her if she is a member of the public and when she informs me that she is I tell her that we Federal and State laws prohibit us from selling wine to her. Assuming yet another call for a wine from the Bugey I ask her what wine she wants. She is looking for Sutter Home.

10:42 AM -- A phone company calls offering us a national rate of 1.2 cents a minute and 3.4 cents a minute to France. I say "no thank you" and hang up the phone.

11:00 AM – I feverishly print out, annotate and collate the information for our law firm, Klein, Foster and Steinfesse. Someone from a distributor calls to complain that Garnet Wines is lowballing the price on the Clos Roche Blanche Cabernet in Garnet's New York Times ad on Wednesday. We sort of agree, but what can you do? The caller then wants to know what grape varieties go into the Clos Roche Blanche Cabernet -- is it Cabernet Franc or Cabernet Sauvignon or a mix of the two. It is actually only Cabernet Franc. I hang up the phone and am relieved that I had an entire 45 minute interlude without talking about the dreaded "What Grape Varietal" question. I am assuming that my lawyer and cardiologist will not be discussing grape 'varietals' when I see them later today. But who knows? Spring is here and Grape Varietals are in the air!

11:43 AM -- Take cab to 14th Street to the corporate offices of Klein, Foster and Steinfesse. The entire Board of Directors of our firm converges on their offices where we discuss the latest legal challenge to our wine work. Peter Steinfesse, our attorney, assures me that we will not only collect $30,000.00 in debt, but will also make $50,000.00 in damages! Wow! I wasn't certain if this was a new episode or a repeat. Steinfesse looks remarkably like many of the character actors who appear on NBC's long-running Law and Order television series. Apparently, if we pre-emptively sue on one issue, it short-circuits our opponent's attempt to sue us over inflicted business damages. Or something like that. We were fearful that our antagonist would resort to physical reprisals. Happily, they have only used theft, slander, racism and sexism. We can deal with that. There is talk of dragging long-time Louis/Dressner confidant Eddie Wrinkerman into the legal arrangements as some kind of designated hitter. Wrinkerman has the same relationship to Louis/Dressner Selections that Bebe Rebozo had to President Nixon. But frankly, I lost Steinfesse Esq.'s logic on this matter.

1:13 PM -- After this exhausting meeting, the entire board adjourns to a restaurant called Republic in the Union Square neighborhood. Since the Board has 14 members, we purposely pick this restaurant as they have large tables that can accommodate such a large group at short notice. Noodles are healthy, nutritious, and inexpensive. For $6.00 to $8.00 you can enjoy a bowl of noodles which includes a healthy broth, starch, fresh vegetables, and a variety of meats and fish, depending upon the dish you select. The decor is minimalist, with a "sit-where-you-will" seating arrangement in a strikingly smart and modern space. Service is provided by a chic, hip staff. I wanted to order a wine and then grill the chic and hip waiter over what grape varietals were in the wine but the restaurant only serves beer.

2:42 PM -- Return to our office. There are almost 15 messages for us, the vast majority dealing with the varietal composition of wines we sell. It takes over an hour to clear up all the confusion.

3:42 PM -- A representative from Verizon telephones calls to propose sending me a free cell phone. I give him my address and tell him to send it as quickly as possible. The representative then wants to know which service plan I want. I tell him I do not want a service plan but only want the phone, which he had graciously offered me for free. He insists I have to have a service plan. I tell him that if I have to have a service plan then the phones are not for free and that I will report Verizon to the Better Business Bureau for false advertising. The representative wants to know what I will do with a cellular phone that is not connecting to any wireless provider. I tell him that it is none of his business. I find the entire discussion a relief, having gone through a day of varietal discussion and legal argumentation. The Verizon representative eventually hangs up on me.

4:02 PM -- We receive a fax with a lot of orders from some hapless distributor who thinks they can make money with our product. We then have to spend 40 minutes doing the necessary paperwork to facilitate the movement of the brands from suppliers in France to the hapless distributor's warehouse somewhere in America. We have a mix of distributors -- some are hapless and some are dynamic. But to stay in business we need both of them. Some of the distributors who are hapless about wine are great personalities. Some of the distributors who are wine geeks are insufferably humorless. As Georges Prat has taught me, I look for a Geobalance. One thing is for certain -- as soon as the container arrives with out product one of us will obligated to go to the hapless distributors' city and do work-withs and have our firm receive bill-backs.

4:32 PM -- A New York retailer calls to ask if there is any more 1999 Morgon Javérnieres left in town. I tell him that there is no more Savennières. He says, no, not Savennières but Javérnières. I tell him that no, the Jasniéres has not arrived. I offer to send him a free cellular phone and hang up the telephone.

5:00 PM -- My daughter calls to speak to my wife and complain bitterly about her life.

5:12 PM -- My son calls to find out what we will be eating for dinner.

5:18 PM -- Someone calls to sell insurance.

5:30 PM-- Prepare to see my new Cardiologist. I just fired my old one, but regret that my new Heartman is not in a building where I can leave my bicycle as was my old guy. So, bikeless, I go down to Lafayette street to hail a taxi. After 12 minutes a taxi comes and a woman and I almost come to blows over who will get possession of the free cab. I ask her where she is going and it is on my way, so I offer to let her off for free. She seems hesitant but finally agrees. She's a very nice chain-smoking woman who is picking up her 4-year-old son at a day-care center. I go on to New York University Hospital and arrive at my Heartguy's office on time at 6:00 PM.

6:42 PM -- after sitting around for 42 minutes the guy finally sees me. At least he has the decency to apologize about the delay, the last Cardiologist never cared. Anyhow, the new one doesn't want to take any lab tests and pronounces me as fit as a beaver after poking at me some and taking an EKG. Fit as a beaver or some other medical term I did not understand. The only problem is that my homocysteine level is too high and he wants me to take a higher level of folic acid every day, along with a megadose of B12 and B16. Already I'm taking Baby Aspirins and Lipitor to lower my cholesterol. The Heart Guy makes this judgment based on old lab reports that my former doctor has forwarded him. Nevertheless, despite my insistence, he doesn't want me to take new lab tests but wants me to wait six weeks and take the new medication regimen and then take a lab test. He will then review the results and call me. I mention that we should make an appointment as I will be going to France around June 10th for the summer. He says it is unnecessary, that he'll look at the lab results in six weeks and then decide if I need to see him. Otherwise, I should call him in September when I return. Assuming, I'm still alive. So, finally, I have changed Cardiologists and get another indifferent guy. What's the point? At least the last guy, who I just fired, allowed me to bring my bike into his office. Of course, the last guy let me have a low level of homocysteine without any preventive measures. The guy was so busy with his busy practice and his hot tub in Great Neck (in which he was reported to study the Talmud!) to ever look at my chart or test results. The worst thing about being ill is having to see doctors. The only thing I could imagine that would be worse than this is being dependent on oenologues.

7:35 PM -- Arrive at the Duane Reade Drug Store to buy megadoses of B12, B6 and Folic Acid.

7:42 PM -- Take a cab crosstown to meet various wacky internet wine personalities at a famous Indonesian restaurant for dinner. I suspect that every detail of this evening will soon be appearing somewhere on the internet so I will leave it to others to chronicle the evening. All I will say was that the Rijsttafel was sumptious.

11:15 PM -- Arrive home. My wife informs me that Neocork, a leading manufacturer of synthetic corks, has initiated a multi-million dollar lawsuit against our firm. Something about libel, slander, Pineau d'Aunis and my having blabbed confidential material that led to the firing of one Stuart Yaniger. Steinfesse received the papers while I was being poked by my Cardiologist and sent a summary to our home fax.

11:47 PM – Fall asleep. I decided to call it a night as I had forgotten to get home to watch re-runs of Seinfeld that are now on at 11 PM, rather than 7:30 PM – having switched from the WB to Fox. Dream that George Castanza has been transformed into Steve Plotnicki. Or was it Stuart Yaniger?

2001-03-24T09:13:00.000-05:00

Rumors

The importer I work for, Louis/Dressner Selections, just lost a potential wine source because of the rumors of our imminent sale at a lucrative price to a faceless multi-national wine powerhouse.

The managing director of the wine producer in question told us at a power luncheon yesterday that he was looking for a firm with a personal touch. He wanted contact with his clients and wanted a marketing firm that knew how to sell his personalized wines. Given, he told us, the rumors of our sale to a larger, cash-endowed firm, he was going with one of our competitors. Someone who is on a much smaller, more humane scale.

Are these rumors true?

Who is buying out Louis/Dressner Selections?

Vivendi?

Allied/Domenecq?

Hublein?

Kysela Père et Fils?

Captain Morgan?

More to follow....

2001-03-19T07:52:00.000-05:00

Win a Z'Fogless Ultra Mirror!

The company I work for, Louis/Dressner Selections, is in acquisition negotiations with several major American importers. We have received several lucrative offers to buy us out but the major stumbling block seems to be our lack of a bulk wine producer with enormous quantities of "boxes" as we say in the wine trade. Unfortunately, we are poorly connected in the "box" circuit and I fear we will have trouble selling the company at a lucrative profit.

I am asking you, dear readers, to send me suggestions of possible French bulk wine sources where we can sell huge quantities at high mark-ups and still give the impression of bringing affordable wine to the market. The wine has to be adequate but not particularly good. The pricing has to be low and the "packaging" has to be superb (by this I mean labeling, etc.).

Please address all suggestions to me personally. My e-mail address is somewhere buried on the left of this screen. I would put a link here to my e-mail, but am not sure what the html code is for an e-mail link. Can someone help me out?

The winner of the contest will receive an exciting Z'Fogless Ultra Mirror. I bought this marvelous contraption yesterday at Bed, Bath and Beyond and took my first fogless shave in the shower this morning. I am very happy with this product and think it will revolutionize your shaving experience. Furthermore, there are numerous exciting uses for women (removing make-up, facial scrubs, beauty masks, etc.) and this is a gift that anyone out there will be proud and delighted to receive. For more information: Exciting Bulk Wine Contest!

Several prominent internet wine personalities have accussed me of resorting to shaving stories on this site when I have nothing interesting to say.

I categorically deny this charge.

By the way, someone seems to have a contract out on my life. Please contact me at the e-mail address somewhere on the left side of this screen if you have any information that would lead to the apprehension of the culprits.

Thank you.

2001-03-18T10:03:00.000-05:00

Back from Horrible Tastings in the Rhône

I just got back from a series of horrible tastings in the Rhône Valley. My God! The things people can make out of fabulous vineyards! It's mind-boggling!

The most interesting experience I had was being levitated by Geobiology guru Georges Prat in a restaurant in Châteauneuf-du-Pape. By coincidence, the nationally prominent American wine importer Neal Rosenthal was dining at the same time with his 23 person national sales staff. So at least I have some witnesses.

2001-03-06T13:19:00.000-05:00

Has the Northwest Texier Market Been Cornered?

Rumor has it that Tom Siegal at Larry's Market in Kirkland, Washington, has cornered the Northwest Eric Texier market (see Eric Texier's badly translated autobiographical statement below).

I'm off to an airport to get a plane to France and do not have the time to confirm this rumor.

More to follow.

2001-03-01T15:57:00.000-05:00

Clos Roche Blanche Pineau d'Aunis Survives Washington Earthquake!

You're all aware of the 6.8 earthquake that hit Seattle yesterday. Dozens of Seattle-area buildings and some schools were closed Thursday so engineers could assess damage from the most powerful earthquake to hit the Pacific Northwest in more than a half a century. While officials provided an early estimate of $2 billion in losses, Washington Gov. Gary Locke described the state as “really, really lucky” the destruction wasn’t worse.

Happily, there was no damage to the 100 cases of Clos Roche Blanche Pineau d'Aunis that was recently shipped to Larry's Market in nearby Kirkland, Washington. I spoke with Tom Siegel, the extraordinary manager of this store, and was assured that the remaining 99 cases had survived the quake and were in pristine condition in their temperature-controlled cellars.

What a relief!

2001-02-27T20:54:00.000-05:00

Gosh!

I've recently learned that what makes successful wine importers successful is that they say "Gosh" all the time. They do their best to say it to Robert Parker, but they also say it to their customers. It gives everyone a participatory sense of astonishment, a shared child-like fascination with the wines the successful wine importer is trying to unload on an unsuspecting public.

Alternatively, the successful wine importer finds some dimwit of a millionaire who has made so much money on the web or elsewhere that he/she cannot imagine anything more interesting, charming and sophisticated then getting into the wine racket. Tell the dimwit that he can come along with you to France or Italy or Spain and help you choose your special barrels and you have an open checkbook.

We're taking applications from dimwits with big checkbooks looking to get into the wine racket. I'm sick of our financial controller limiting us to 300 bottles a month. Any dimwit who wants to get into the wine business should e-mail me ASAP. My e-mail address is listed somewhere on this site.

2001-02-27T20:35:00.000-05:00

New Cuvée Busters!

Don't miss Franck Peillot's Altesse de Montagnieu 1999 Cuvée Buster! Only 600 bottles of this wine were made.

The wine is an experimental wild yeast fermentation which took five months longer to finish fermenting than the regular bottling. We also asked Peillot to leave some naturally occurring CO2. This wine is sort of available in New York City. Only 300 bottles have arrived as we lack major investors and internet venture capital guys to pay our bills. We are now limiting ourself to 300 bottles a month. I drank this wine two weeks ago at the producer's home so do let me know out there what you think.

Another New Cuvée Buster -- Estimated Arrival Date April 1!

I had asked Marc Ollivier at the Domaine de la Pépière to put aside 100 cases of 1997 Muscadet Clos des Briords and to let them get lost in the cellar for 5 to 15 years. To me, it was one of the best wines we ever imported and we imported the wine in the days when our financial controller would allow us to import 600 bottles a month! Olliver did not keep this wine for us.

Instead, he recently surprised me with the a special bottling of 1997 Domaine de la Pépière that came only from the old vines sites in the hamlet of Pépières. How old?

Honestly, why do you want to know?

The wine is sensational. We'll be selling the 2000 vintage at the same time (in increments of 300 bottles) but do buy some of this wine and put it aside somewhere in your cellar.

How long should you keep this wine?

As long as you like.

2001-02-27T19:49:00.000-05:00

Rhône Wines from Eric Texier

Eric Texier was born in Bordeaux in 1961 and has lived in Lyon (or thereabout) since 1979. By profession, he is an expert in building materials, and he spent a year studying that subject at the Illinois Institute of Technology. After years spent working in the leisure and the nuclear industries, he decided to make a career of his true passion, wine, in 1990.
He thought at first of buying vineyards, and did extensive research to find areas where vineyards were neglected or forgotten, and found two in his favorite spots, the Northern Côtes-du-Rhône. He also travelled around the world to discover vineyards and meet winemakers. Three regions made a lasting impression on him: Burgundy, for vinification methods and respect of terroir, Piedmont for the radical changes in style and fashions that occurred in the 80s, and Oregon for its winemakers’outlook, free and unencumbered by the weight of traditions.
Fusing his discoveries in these three regions, he defined his winemaking objectives and applied them to his chosen region of Côtes-du-Rhône:

- to vinify as burgundians do, with respect for each vineyard’s specificity (emulating Michel Lafarge in Volnay and the Ramonet family in Chassagne-Montrachet)

- to turn his back on the heavy, nondescript style of traditional CDRs, which often lack fruit, and let the vineyards express their character (as the great Piedmont winemakers, like Elio Altare, do)

- not to be restricted by old-fashioned principles and consider that boldness doesn’t contradict tradition, and work in a new style while respecting what the previous generations have achieved (like the winemakers in Oregon and Washington state David Adelsheim or Joan Wolverton).

In 1992, he went back to school, studying viticulture and oenology, then worked with Jean-Marie Guffens at Verget. Guffens taught him to respect the grapes and how to use the lees, and Texier went on to emulate his buying of grapes from owners who had respected strict viticultural fashions. When he left, he had adopted the following ideas: no clones, shy-bearing root stocks, plowing the soil instead of using weed-killers, moderate yields paid as if the grower had cropped for the legal maximum (for example, asking for 35 hectoliters per hectare in Côtes-du-Rhône Villages but paying for 42 h/h), green harvests, lutte raisonnée (viticultural methods used in organic agriculture), no anti-rot sprays and hand picking.

His winemaking techniques for white wines include sorting at the vineyard and at the winery, whole clusters pressed in a vertical press (that's the old fashioned wood kind), no added yeast, barrel fermentation (less than 10% new wood), elevage on the fine lees, 100% malo for the dry wines, minimal usage of SO2, fining and filtration only when necessary, no pumping, elevage in a naturally cool cellar (all wines are brought to the Beaujolais when fermentation is complete, to take advantage of an excellent cellar there, since those are rare in the south).

For red wines, he proceeds with sorting at the vineyard and at the winery, 100% destemming (most of the time), bringing grapes to the press by conveyer belt rather than pumps or screws, cold maceration under a CO2 blanket for aromatic extraction (5 - 8 days), no added yeasts, pigeage and remontage twice a day (breaking up of the cap by pushing it down, then pumping the juice over; this is done vat by vat with slow pumps) during both maceration and fermentation, temperatures controlled not to exceed 34 degrees C, elevage in 2 -5 year old barrels and larger capacity barrels (450 l), with as much as 10% of these new. No filtration; egg white fining if necessary before bottling.

Texier’s white wines include Mâcon-Bussières, Viognier, and, in vintage 2000, a rare Brézème white (all Roussanne) and Cassis (Marsanne and Clairette). The reds include Brézème (a 100% Syrah CDR), Côte-Rôtie and Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and in vintage 2000 Séguret, St-Gervais and Chusclan.

2001-02-22T11:13:00.000-05:00

Wine Importer is in Interactive Mood

I'm leaving a lot of messages this past week at Robert Callahan's Wine therapy board. I need some internet interaction -- it's lonely out here in my blog!

Take a look at Robert's excellent wine forum:

Wine therapy

2001-02-11T16:56:00.000-05:00

The Multi-Talented Dominique Derain

I tasted at Dominique Derain's cellar tonight and got to sample his new vineyards in Mercurey. He has .90 ares there (about 2 acres) and 2000 was his first harvest. The wine is very interesting and please consult Robin Garr's excellent Wine Lover's Discussion Group (WLDG) for extensive tasting notes.

I visited Derain with two van loads of American visitors. The first van was entirely from the American South, including representatives from Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas. The second van had Louis/Dressner customers from the Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Cleveland and Oklahoma City. All told, 29 glasses were passed around for us all to taste his Mercurey. Given he made only 35 hectolitres/hectare, sampling our group significantly reduced the overall availability of 2000 Mercurey for the 11 American markets represented in his cellar.

Anyhow, in the process of passing around his pipette 29 times, Derain told us about the quality of his first Mercurey crop and the comments of Mercurey's well-known Vigneron Michel Juillot.

Michel Juillot, who has made many great wines in his day, is one of the rare Burgundians who continues to roll his r's. Everyone used to, but it is now looked down upon as an ignorant peasant's pronunciation. Juillot is probably the last of the rolling r vignerons and one can only fear that when Michel leaves the earth, so does this particular patois.

Derain's imitation is both brilliant and hilarious. I heartily recommend that you stop next time you are in St-Aubin, try out some of Derain's biodynamique wines, and request Dominique's fabulous Michel Juillot imitation. This is a must for all Burgundy lovers.

I speak French with a New York patois and have all the classic problems of Anglophones in pronouncing the r correctly in French. This always made interaction with Michel Juillot difficult when my firm represented his wines. It also creates problems in my summer home of Poil Rouge in the Maconnais. My neighbor, Monsieur Riguet, is originally from the Charollais. He rolls his r's

Derain's estate appears to be Reverdy/Yaniger free. Derain is in biodynamie and Stuart is on public record as finding biodynamie to be just so much hogwash. The other problem is that Derain likes to put wax seals on his bottles and there seems to be a problem with using wav seals and sythetic corks.

Derain recently attended a Foucault jeebus. Derain feels that what is exception there is the cellar itself. Move the vinification elsewhere, out of that cellar that has seen generations of Saumur-Champigny, and you would no doubt not have the same wine. Even if it had massive distribution on the west coast.

2001-02-10T18:49:00.000-05:00

In Response to Popular Demand

We have acquired a significant stock of Chateau Pierre Bise Gamay. We will soon be importing vintages 1995, 1996 and 2000. Please search Robin Garr's excellent wine board for extensive tasting notes.

2001-02-10T18:31:00.000-05:00

Serial Jeebus Attacks!

The van has moved on and everyone seems healed. We are down to two vans, with one group breaking off to go to Paris to view an Opera on Saturday night. They are planning to attend the opening of Die Reverdy, an opera that will be opening in San Francisco in May. More about that later.

Highlights of the past few days include:

1. The Annual Clos Rougeard Jeebus -- Peter Weygandt, noted wine importer, informed one of our group that the prices at the Clos Rougeard are so high as they need to finance the daily jeebus feeding. That's one perspective.

Highlights of the Thursday morning Jeebus included the 1990 Bourg, a wine that made me thankful that I quit smoking and that my heart now receives a dose of oxygen. There was also the incredibly radiant, if not radioactive 1997 Moelleux Coteaux du Saumur. I resolved this would be the last Chenin Blanc I would ever drink....what would another glass add to the experience?

Louis/Dressner Selections now shares this estate with Stuart Yaniger, who will be importing industrial quantities for wine stockists in Northern California. One of the Foucault brothers (I forget which) told me that Yaniger guaranteed at least 800 cases in the bat of an eye wink. Or something like that.

One of the things that makes the wine so good here is the barrels from Dussieux. This is a local tonnellier who ages barrels the old way: three years outside. Unfortunately, other barrel makers are using intense industrial treatments to rush wood to market. The Foucault barrels are always incredibly harmonious and add something to the wine rather than detract.

One of many Foucault brother told me while we were tasting the 1995 Poyeux that the reason Osier Cote Rotie is so expensive is that enormous quantities are sent for free to Northern California to entertain important internet wine personalities at tasting events. I've never attended these events so I had nothing to say on this matter.

We then drove the two vans on to Saumur to let off one of our members at the train station. From there we were off to Chinon for jeebus number two.

2. This Jeebus featured endless bottled of Chinon from Domaine Bernard Baudry. " Gosh," I said to my assembled customers as they got back into the vans, "Chinon doesn't get much better than this." I have started saying Gosh because I understand that competitor wine importers use this term to pressure customers to buy their wines. Gosh!

I'm not certain what Bernard Baudry's relationship is with Stuart Yaniger, but I did notice a bag of sample synthetic corks in his cellar and a bumper sticker with the international 'Don't Drink Poulsard' symbol attached to Baudry's Peugeot. Mysteriously, I have lost 800 cases of my annual allocation at Baudry and I fear they are destined for bat winked Northern Californians. There is even talk of a Yaniger Six-Pack at one of the local wine outlets.

We then got back into the vans and drove about four hours to Sancerre. We had hoped to eat at the Pomme d'Or but arrived too late to be served. All the tables were taken up by people on the Peter Weygandt Tour, sampling Sancerre from one of Sancerre's prestigious Reverdy. The tour members were deciding whether this Reverdy should cold stabilize and filter his 2000 Sancerre or not. I have always been an admirer of participatory democracy (I have a signed photo of Tom Reverdy Hayden above my desk in New York City) and found this an overwhelming experience.

As I was fearful of losing customers or producers to Reverdy-Weygandt, especially given our recent losses to Reverdy-Yaniger, I hustled the two van loads out of the restaurant and made them eat at the only place that would take us. I had a Pizza au Crotin du Chavignol, which consisted of a frozen pizza with some goat cheese microwaved on top of the pie. I ordered a bottle of 1999 Sancerre from Hippolyte Reverdy, a distant cousin of Peter Weygandt-Reverdy, but no relation to Stuart Yaniger-Reverdy.

Frankly, I think people go too far with these hyphenated last names. I also agree that it is sexist that the child always bears the name of the father. But what would happen if Stuart Yaniger-Reverdy had a daughter named Ginger. And Peter Weygandt-Reverdy had a son named Frank. If Ginger married Frank would her name then be Ginger Yaniger-Reverdy-Weygandt-Reverdy? And what would their children be named. Enough is enough!

I had assumed that Yaniger-Reverdy was not importing Sancerre into California and was limiting their efforts to Brezeme, Pineau d'Aunis, Menu Pineau and Saumur-Champigny (800 cases from each appellation for stockists in Northern California and prestigious restaurant placements) until we visited the cellar of Jean-Paul Labaille the following morning.

3. Labaille-Thomas Cuvee Buster Sancerre Jeebus. We are now onto the forth (or maybe third) Cuvee Buster at this estate. There are 300 bottles ready to ship of the 1999 and we also got to taste the 2000 edition in barrel.

This wine comes from 75-year-old vineyards next to the Grand Cote. The 2000 had been harvested at 14.5 degrees and the 1999 at over 13.5. Gosh, that is very ripe for a Sancerre, I told my van loads of customers.

We may have trouble getting the wine. A Swedish importer has offered to buy it for 75 francs a bottle. If we match or beat the price than it will cost between $25.00 and $30.00 in retail outlets. Labaille also informed me that another American company had offered to buy the wine at 77 Francs a bottle and that they would fill the pipeline in a part of America where Louis/Dressner distribution is reputed to be weak. While no names were dropped, dear reader, the conclusion is obvious.

I'm in Beaune tonight and have tasted already at Sylvie Esmonin and Francois Legros. I have to get up early tomorrow to taste at Amiot-Servelle with a busload of customers with Southern drawls.

Goodnight.

2001-02-08T00:20:00.000-05:00

Internet Wine Personality Jeff Connell Emerges from Hotel Room!

Jeff Connell emerged from his hotel room today, inspired by the news that Stuart Yaniger has found a distributor in Northern California who will import 800 cases of Menu Pineau 2000 and sell all 800 cases in the bat of an eyelash.

Congratulations are due!

Jeff is considering a move to Emeryville upon his return to America.

More to come....

2001-02-07T18:11:00.000-05:00

Where have all the blogs gone?

Disease and pesitlence have seized my group here in the Loire Valley. We hope to have new reports soon, but my entire group (38 people travelling in three rental vans) has been overtaken by fierce stomach infections. Noted internet wine personality Jeff Connell is barely alive.

Details to come..

2001-02-04T17:06:00.000-05:00

Vintage 2000 Report: The Year of Pineau d'Aunis

That's right. Pineau d'Aunis.

This is a grape variety that is either acidic/austere or full/rich/complex. There's nothing in-between. It is not syrah, never has too much color and will never smell or taste like raspberry cheese cake. French oenologists have tried numerous enzyme/hormone treatments to get the much vaunted raspberry cheese cake effect (see my tasting notes below regarding Lindemans Bin 50 Shiraz) but alas, as the Angevins say, to no avail. Pineau d'Aunis is simply immune.

Vintage 2000 was a truly great year for this variety. Pineau d'Aunis easily hit 12 degrees or 13 degrees and the new century begins with a true treat for all Auniseans out there.

I'm blogging here in my beautiful hotel room at the 5 Star B&B Hotel outside of Angers. Yesterday, I attended a marvelous tasting in Bourgueil which grouped together Pineau d'Aunis producers from all over the Loire Valley. Some tasting note highlights:

Clos Roche Blanche Pineau d'Aunis Touraine 2000 -- lively and nervous, but rich stuff with floral overtones. Lightly colored, this superb wine can be drunk now or held for 18 months. It is best to wait two months to drink as the wine is still in cuve and the Clos Roche bottling team projects a late March bottling. So, push my projected drinking timetable back two months to allow sufficient time for the wine to be bottled.

Emile Heredia Coteaux du Vendemois 2000 -- There will be two bottlings of Pineau from this exciting new producer. Not only is 2000 a fabulous vintage for the Coteau du Vendemois it also marks a major turning point for the region -- they have been upgraded from VDQS to AOC. I am predicting that prices will rise dramatically here, so stock up now.

Heredia is a former photographer who has bought land in the area that consists entirely of 80 year old vines. There will be two different bottlings of 2000 Aunis here: one approximates the Clos Roche bottling and is meant as a light quaffer, but the other went through a 10 day fermentation, is almost darkly colored (please remember, dear reader, that darkly colored is a relative term and we are talking about Pineau d'Aunis here). I found this wine exotic and lovely. Drink now or hold 28 months. As with the example from the Clos Roche Blanche, I strongly advise waiting two months for the wine to be bottled before consuming it. This will be difficult to do, as the wine is so delicious now that you will be constantly tempted to open the tap on your old foudres and pour a glass for yourself.

Domaine de Belliviere - Eric Nicolas -- Coteaux du Loir
Pineaux d'Aunis 1999 - this young producer in Jasnieres has produced a superb 1999 that exhibits unctuous layers of rose hip water and hawthorne. As good as this 1999 is, I am anxious to taste vat samples of his 2000 tomorrow at the annual Loire Valley wine show in Angers.

I am also looking forward to meeting, once again, Nicolas' fabulous international commercial agent. This fellow, the agent, lives in Holland and has an international exclusive for numerous famous French producers. No one understands how he has achieved this position but there are rumors that one has to wear a bow tie and no socks if you expect to succeed in the international wine agent business.

Of course, Angers is filled with American importers clamoring to grab up as much Pineau d'Aunis 2000 as possible. I feel that our firm, Louis/Dressner Selections, is in a good position, but the competition is fierce, intense and often bitter.

In a sense the competition is unfortunate. The American wine trade is projecting enormous American market demand for Pineau d'Aunis 2000 and already some of my competitors have offered to pay in advance and to pay more just to get quantities of the best Aunisian cuvee. This is particularly true for the wines that have received 95 points and more in the press. These wines have yet to be bottled, but are already being offered in grey market channels, often from Switzerland.

We at Louis/Dressner are not here in the Loire just to cherry pick a good vintage. We buy and sell Pineau d'Aunis year-in and year-out. I hope the best names in Aunis understand that the current American obsession with Pineau is temporary and that Pineau producers make commercial arrangements that are in their long-term interests.

Unfortunately, the frenzy has begun and it is difficult to know how it will all end.

2001-02-04T17:05:00.000-05:00

Eric Texier Winemaker

Eric Texier is a new winemaker who we think is making superb Rhones. We have to write some promotional material about him and I have received the following e-mail in French from him, detailing his background and ambitions.

Someone will probably translate this soon, but until then, for those of you who read French, here it is:

Un petit CV

Je suis né à bordeaux en 19961. Je vis à Lyon depuis 1979.

J'ai 3 enfants : 11,8 et 4 ans.

J'ai une formation d'ingénieur en matériaux (une année à l'Illinois Institute of Technologie en 1983).

J'ai travaillé 15 ans dans l'industrie du loisir puis du nucléaire :

Clairement pas ma voie.

A partir de 1990, je décide de me reconvertir pour faire du vin, pour lequel je nourris une passion dupuis que j'ai 23 ans.

Au début je pense à acheter un vignoble.

Je fais beaucoup de recherches bibliographiques sur le vignoble français au 18ème et au 19ème siècles, pour trouver un vignoble inconnu oul abandonné afin de le faire revivre.

En 1991, j'en trouve 2 dans ma région favorite (les Côtes du Rhône septentrionales) : l'un d'eux est Brézème. L'autre sera ma prochaine surprise.

Je commence alors des démarches pour aquérir et replanter. En parralèle, je visite les vignobles du monde entier pour découvrir les différentes approches de la viticulture et de la vinification.

Quelques voyages me marquent beaucoup : la bourgogne pour la vinification et le respect du terroir, le Piémont pour le changement de
style de vins dans les années 80 et l'Orégon pour l'état d'esprit sans
le poids du conservatisme.

La synthèse des trois constituera le point de départ d'une "philosophie"
à appliquer à ma région favorite : les Côtes du Rhône.

- Vinifier à la bourguignonne dans le respect du terroir comme Michel
Lafarge ou les Ramonet.

- S'eloigner du style lourd et pateux, de l'absence de fruit des CdR
traditionnels pour aller vers des vins plus représentatifs de leurs
terroirs respectifs, à l'instar de grands vignerons du Piémont comme
Elio Altare.

- Ne pas rester prisonnier de préjugés passéistes et partir du principe que l'audace n'est pas l'ennemi de la tradition. On peut faire du neuf sur la base du travail des anciens comme l'ont fait les vignerons de l'Orégon ou le Washington comme David Adelsheim ou Joan Wolverton
(Salishan Vineyards).

En 92, je commence des études de viticulture en d'oenologie à Bordeaux.
Dans ce cadre je travaille chez Verget avec JM Guffens dont je suis un
client et dont la nouvelle démarche au sein de Verget m'intéresse :
acheter des raisins à des priopriétaires de vielles vignes sur des sites rares ou prestigieux, sur la base de règles de viticulture strictes.

Pour ma part j'ai retenu les suivantes : Pas de clones, porte-greffes
peu productifs,pas de désherbage mais du labour, Rendements modérés
payés sur la base du rendement maximal de l'appellation (par exemple 35 hl/ha payés 42 en CdR Villages), vendanges en vert, lutte raisonnée, pas d'antibotrytis, vendanges manuelles.

Guffens m'a appris le respect de la matière première et l'utilisation
des lies.

Ce qui m'a conduit à adopter les dispositions suivantes :

POUR LES BLANCS

Tri à la vigne et au cuvage, resurrage vertical en grappe entière,
débourbage naturel, pas de levurage, fermentation en fûts (moins de 10%
de neufs, je ne suis pas un inconditionnel du bois neuf), élevage sur lies fines, fermentation malolactique systématique sur les secs, utilisation minimale de SO2, collage et filtration uniquement si
obligatoire, pas de pompage sur les vins, élevage en cave naturelle à 10
12°C (nous remontons tous les vins finis dans le beaujolais pour y
bénéficier d'excellentes caves extrèmement rare dans le sud).

POUR LES ROUGES

Tri à la vigne et au cuvage, égrappage total en général, mis en cuve par tapis, macération à froid sous CO2 solide pour l'extraction aromatique (5 à 8 jours), pas de levurage, Pigeage et remontage 2 fois par jour en macération et en fermentation, contrôle des températures au delà de
34°C, élevage en barriques agées 2 à 5 vins et en 450 l neuves par 0 à
10% suivants les vins. Pas de filtration et collage aux oeufs si nécessaire.

Je mets en oeuvre cette philosophie depuis 1995 sur Brézème, Bussières
(par goût personnel pour le maconnais). Plus recemment sur Côte Rôtie et Chateauneuf.

Depuis 2000 et pour les années à venir sur les villages de Cotes du
Rhône et la Provence:
En 2000 : Séguret, St Gervais, Chusclan, Cassis et une rareté : un blanc du roussanne de Brézème).
Bientot : Crozes, St Joseph, St Peray, Cairanne, Sablet, Gigondas,
Bandol, Palette .

Voilà. Prenez ce qui vous intéresse et laissez le reste...

2001-02-02T18:40:00.000-05:00

Historic First Blog from Clos Roche Blanche

Imagine!

I forgot the power adaptor for me Casio Pocket PC and have not been able to blog (in fear of losing my battery charge) since I arrived in France on Wednesday morning.

Highlights of my trip so far:

1. A 1979 Brezeme Blanc that was one of the most memorable white wines I have ever enjoyed. Honied Rousanne from a great site. Drink now, or hold 15-18 years.

2. 1959 Romorantin Demi-Sec from Clos Roche Blanche -- what a cepage, what a vintage, what a wine! Drink now, or hold 15-18 years.

3. 1961 Morgon Cote du Pay -- like evolved and exquisite old Burgundy. Drink now, or hold 15-17 years.

4. 1985 Brezeme Rouge -- all syrah and with beautiful secondary aromas of apricot rinds. Drink now, hold, or cellar 8-12 years.

Keep tuned for more highlights.

2001-02-02T18:39:00.000-05:00

My Second Industrial Wine in Four Days!

Faithful readers will recall that I drank a Lindemans Bin 50 Shiraz 1999 on Friday. Tonight, I'm writing these comments on a plane going to Lyon. Actually, I will have to post this Blog from Charnay-en-Beaujolais on Wednesday morning, as there are no wireless connections here on Delta Flight 28.

Anyhow, I have been drinking the little-known, but thirst-quenching Vignes de la Bergerie, a wine that was given to me by me Delta Flight Attendant. This wine comes from a negociant I have never heard of named Les Domaine Paul Mas and is a Cabernet Sauvignon Vin de Pays d' Oc. It comes in an attractive 187.5 ML bottle with a screw cap.

Is it great wine? No. It is crappy industrial wine with no pretense to be anything other than crappy industrial wine. God only knows what type of wine the coop where Paul Mas bought this wine produced before they used industrial winemaking techniques. Perhaps vinegar.

Using industrial techniques, they can now produce a perfectly acceptable crappy industrial wine that goes well with the horrible airline food. The wine is thirst-quenching, has a little pepper and a little sweet fruit, and has no pretense to be anything other than a correct crappy industrial wine. It is truly non-grandiose in the best sense of the phrase. I liked it so much I had two bottles for a whopping total of 375 ml!

To me, this wine is far superior to the Lindemans Bin 50. That wine is not only a crappy industrial wine, but also has pretenses to be a profound beverage. Someone in Australia has worked hard to find just the right combination of enzymes, yeasts and vinfication tricks to make it smell and taste like raspberry cheese cake.

Paul Mas is happy just to produce a correct, drinkable crappy industrial wine and for that small service I have to salute his courage and decency. Of course, I have no idea if there is really someone named Paul Mas or if that is a made-up trade name. My suspicion is that this Mas guy is a fictional character, but I could be wrong. Nevertheless, my hats off to Paul Mas.

By the way, we've been experience a lot of turbulence and the flight is something short of pleasant. I get into Lyon at 7:35 AM, along with my partner Kevin McKenna, and we are then off to Domaine des Terres Dorees in the Beaujolais. We will taste all of Jean-Paul Brun's 2000 vintage and then go taste wine at two farmers where he has bought Brouilly and Morgon that he will bottle later this year.

I am writing this on my fabulous Casio EM-500 PocketPC, using a GoType! keyboard. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring the power supply with me and I have only about 7 hours of battery life on this unit. Kevin and I hope to find a power supply tomorrow morning in the outskirts of Lyon, where there are numerous stores selling everything a human being might desire. I actually know which chain sells my computer in France and we will be going there first thing to buy a new AC/DC adapter.

I remembered my passport, airline ticket, drivers license, French electrical plugs, French telephone adapter, my modem, computer, and my underwear. I left my AC/DC adapter in my office.

Merde.

I have a busy day ahead of me and need to get some sleep.

Bye.

Merde.

2001-01-30T14:29:00.000-05:00

Off on Exciting French Buying Trip

Last year I bought a container of Overnoy. I also tried to buy two Loire Valley estates specializing in Overnoy/Plagolles style wines from Chenin. Happily, both went out of business before they could ship us the wine.

Who knows what I'll find this year?

Stay posted here. I am armed with my Casio PocketPC, a modem, and plan to blog like crazy.

2001-01-28T16:14:00.000-05:00

Notitis

I'm sick of tasting notes. I get accused of wasting time and bandwidth by blogging. But I cannot imagine anything more useless than tasting notes.

It colors like cassis.

It smells like cassis.

It attacks the frontal with cassis.

It mids the palate with cassis.

It lingers with cassis.

Wow!

Change cassis to whatever you like and you have the reductive, all-purpose tasting note. How to reduce a year of work in a vineyard to a trite text that tells nothing about nothing. And with hedonistic gobs of nothingness, lingering on and on.

If the New York Giants can play in New Jersey and the Cleveland Browns can play in Baltimore and call themselves the Ravens, then certainly we can come up something more imaginative and engaging.

2001-01-28T14:02:00.000-05:00

Cross-Posting Australian Shiraz

Speaking of industrial wines. I had to give a seminar in Chicago on Friday and ran to a supermarket to buy what I imagined would be an industrial wine to serve blind.

Wow! My first Lindemans Bin 50 Shiraz!

The Lindemans' winemaker wrote of this wine:

Colour: Deep plum with a crimson rim.

Nose: The bouquet shows an assortment of aromas including black pepper, nutmeg, ginger and raspberry cheesecake.

Palate: The attractive and enticing nature of the bouquet is duplicated on the palate, which is succulent, soft and mouth-watering. The wine features fruit flavours of blueberries and mulberries with spicy, slight black pepper characters. A smooth, velvet like tannin structure frames these characters

I actually agree, more or less, with the winemaker's comments. I especially agreed with the raspberry cheesecake descriptor, although it was certainly a particularly sweet rendition of that venerable recipe.

At the same time I found the bottle horrifying and repulsive. A Frankenstonian wine.

Does this say something about the limitation of the tasting note as descriptive medium?

This is a very popular wine that sells in vast quantities.

But is it wine?

Inquiring minds want to know.

2001-01-28T10:19:00.000-05:00

Which Wine Will You Be Drinking During the Super Bowl?

I find it a barbaric sport and won't be watching.

The last football game I watched was the one where the Jets won the Super Bowl. The Mets won the world series that year, the Knicks won the NBA and man walked on the moon. With the exception of the guys walking on the moon, they were all New York teams. The so-called New York Giants have abandoned the Bronx for New Jersey. The Baltimore Ravens are in fact the Browns that abandoned Cleveland. There are no football teams in New York and the real Baltimore team is in Indiana, of all places.

This Super Bowl is a celebration of anti-terroir!

Maybe I'll watch and drink a Château St-Jean Cinq Cépages.

Someone poured one for me in Chicago. The one that was the Wine Spectator's wine of the year. It was like a tobasco sauce with some wine overtones. I can understand a wine with some tobasco overtones, but this was a new experience for me.

Speaking of the Giants, are Del Shofner and Y.A. Tittle still alive? Where are they?

I used to like Joe Namath. As a young man growing up in bucolic Queens, New York (one of New York City's famed outer boroughs), I used to sell hot dogs at Jet games. Broadway Joe and Howard Cosell would always give a little pre-game speech to all the hot-dog/soda vendors before Namath suited-up. In each speech, Namath would tell the assembled, pimpled teenagers how he had been up to 5 am with a stewardess he had picked-up at an East-Side Bar and doubted he would be able to play well.

2001-01-26T21:22:00.000-05:00

Muscadet Scandal Rocks Chicago

I've spent the past week in Detroit and Chicago. While Detroit has a normal wine market where retailers and civilians enjoy the delights of Melon de Bourgogne, there is no Muscadet to be found in Chicago! Frankly, I have no idea how to explain this situation, but there you are....

The only restaurant that seems to carry Muscadet is Shaws, which is renowned for its shellfish. This restaurant has two Muscadet, one cheap industrial one and a more expensive industrial one. Even if they want an average to decent Muscadet, there is really none to be found.

This bewildering situation is something I cannot explain. Please let me know by e-mail if you have any explanation.

On the other hand, the town is paradise for a Gruner Veltiner lover. One of the nation's top importers of Austrian wine, Vins Divino, is based in this town and is a full-scale distributor here. They have recently signed-on as the Chicago distributor for Therry Thiese, the excellent agent for German and Austrian wines. This should make Chicago the premier market for American lovers of the Wachau.

Chicago is also a great town for lovers of Marcel Lapierre's Morgon. While Kermit Lynch imports Lapierre's Morgons for the rest of the country, Lapierre is imported here by Barrique Wines. Lapierre has a close friend in Chicago, a French guy from the Maconnais who owns the admirable Le Bouchon and Sardine restaurants. These two bistros have always featured Marcel's Morgon and have created a word of mouth for the wine. They are everywhere and why not? The 1999 was delicious and the wine is much cheaper than it is in New York as it does not pass through Kermit Lynch.

In an odd development, Barrique Wines was bought last year by Vins Divino. This makes Vins Divino, undoubtedly, Chicago's biggest distributor of Gruner Veltiner and Unsulphured Beaujolais. Although rumor has it that Marcel Lapierre now lightly sulfurs his wines when they are sold on the export market. There were past stories of instability that gave the wine a checkered reputation. But when the wines are on, they have always been fabulous.

Even stranger, I was in a wine store named Shaffer's on Wednesday, a wine store in an unlikely place known as Skokie, and there in front of me was Marcel Lapierre himself, selling his Morgon to American merchants in the far-flung strip malls of American's heartland. Wow! I thought to myself. What's the likelihood of running into Marcel Lapierre, known throughout France as Le Marcel, along with one of his nephews who is starting a negociant business in the Maconnais/Beaujolais. Skokie is a lovely town, but it is not Macon.

I spent Thursday looking for FX Pichler at other Chicago retailers but did not see him. In all honestly, I'm not sure what Pichler looks like.

2001-01-23T00:13:00.000-05:00

Selling wine....

Is an exhausting and dangerous occupation. I'm back in the Holiday Inn Express in downtown Roseville, Michigan, having tasted 4 retailers on a dozen wines and after hosting a convival consumer dinner with the wine enthusiasts of Detroit. They are a very nice group.

Although my hotel television has HBO, I'm calling it a night.

By the way, the dinner was at a restaurant called Forté in Royal Oak. Avoid it like the plague if you're ever in these parts.

As usual, I'm selling enormous quantity of wines here. Thank goodness, our accountant says we need cash flow. She made a convincing argument, I thought.

2001-01-22T08:13:00.000-05:00

Count your blessings

Unlike you, dear reader, I am currently residing in a Holiday Inn located in Roseville, Michigan. I'm ostensibly here to sell wine, but some of my loved ones suspect foul play.

I dined last night with an area retailer who tried to impress me with a deeply flawed bottle of 98 Jaboulet La Chapelle. I matched the wine with a 93 Overnoy Poulsard, a wine which astonished everyone at the table. The retailer wants a state-wide exclusive.

I ask you, dear readers, what should I do?

Have to run. The Holiday Inn is about to run out of defrosted muffins. A complementary continental breakfast is part of the deal here. You also get free copy of USA Today!

2001-01-17T20:26:00.000-05:00

Famous Wine Critic Describes a Louis/Dressner Wine as "Nearly Mind-Boggling!"
And in the Best Sense of "Nearly Mind-Boggling!"
Wow!
I've not only been in a rut about keeping this blog up-to-date, I have also been lax in following the exciting wine press.

I was shocked to read that our firm actually imports and markets a 'mind-boggling' wine. We are not cited as the importer by the Famous Wine Critic, as we share this wine with another importer in the Midwest. But, finally, I could look my children Jules and Alyce straight in the eye, and say:

Listen up children, stand tall and be proud. Your mother and father import a "hedonistically-styled" wine that nearly boggled the mind of The Famous Wine Critic. Not only did he say it was nearly mind-boggling but he also wrote "Wow!" in describing the wine.

Jules was not impressed. "Big deal," Jules said and pointed out that 'nearly mind-boggling' seemed to be a qualified endorsement, falling considerably short of both mind-boggling and absolutely mind-boggling.

Of course not, I answered, the critic said the wine "is an amazing creation that pushed the sensory circuits into overdrive." You can't get much getter than an amazing creation and overdrived sensory circuits, I answered my son.

Jules and Alyce asked me what the wine's color was like, and I responded: the famous wine critic said it was "impressively saturated ruby/purble."'

Alyce then asked me what the wine smelled like and I said, according to the same critic, "the nose offers up sumptuous aromas of wood, spice, schored earth, and blackberry and cherry liquor."

Jules then asked if there was a long finish. Of course, I said, according to the wine critic it "possesses a 45-second-finish."

Both children wanted to know if we were now wealthy. They were disappointed to learn that this wine is made in small quantities and that the wine would never make us wealthy. Alyce suggested that we charge a fortune for the wine. We had considered doing that, but the wine seems to be available through numerous grey market channels at a reasonable price. We're out-of-luck.

2001-01-08T16:20:00.000-05:00

Going to Detroit to Sell Wine
I'll be off to Detroit soon to sell some of our horrible wine. I love that town and always read the excellent Detroit Free Press web site before arriving. This puts me in the know and helps me prepare for the often difficult negotiations I have with savvy Detroit's wholesalers, retailers and consumers.

What I find particularly useful is the Free Press' obituary column -- there is nothing more embarrassing for a salesman like myself to call an account only to discover that they are dead. This is not not only embarrassing, but often alienates the surviving family members, many of whom are responsible for major wine purchasing decisions.

I am always amazed, when I read these death notices, at the longevity of the average Detroit resident and the beautiful and literary names so many of them seemed to have. One can only hope that future generations of Detroitonians have names to match Joseph 'Jack'' Duda, Kathleen Joan Armbruster, Lillian K. Fishtahler and Reginald Napolean Forcade.

I also noted with sadness that Stanley Kowalski passed away on January 6th. I had always assumed that Mr. Kowalski was a fictional character, but in fact he had 10 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren! Some of the other recently deceased had over 30 great-grandchildren, all with fabulous names!

Some highlights from the current issue of the paper:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Detroit Free Press January 08, 2001 Edition
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ARMBRUSTER,KATHLEEN JOAN Age 79. January 6, 2001. Beloved wife of Merle. Loving mother of Ellen E. (Dale) Maynard, Kathleen M. Armbruster and Michael D. Armbruster. Dear grandmother of five. Dear great-grandmother of six. Dear sister of Billie (Walter) Wintemberg, Betty Russell and the late May Johnston. Visitation Sunday 5-8 p.m., Monday 3-9 p.m. at Harry J. Will Funeral Home, 25450 Plymouth Rd., Redford. Funeral Tuesday instate 10 a.m., service 11 a.m. at Nardin Park United Methodist Church, 29887 W. 11 Mile, Farmington Hills. Interment Parkview Cemetery.

BANNON, LEO G., Beloved husband of Luella. Dear father of Gregory (Linda) and Patrick (Heide). Six grandchildren survive. Services Wednesday 11 a.m. at Stanley Turowski & Son Funeral Home , 25509 Warren Rd., Dearborn Hgts. Visitation Tuesday 2-7 p.m.

BOGAN, JOSEPH F., Age 84, January 5, 2001. Loving husband of the late Margaret. Dear father of Joseph (Elizabeth) Bogan, Mary Ellen (Donald) Richmond and Gregory (Steven Kennedy) Bogan. Grandfather of Gary (Michele) Richmond, Donald Richmond and Shelley (John) Stewart. Great grandfather of Nicholas and Jennifer Richmond. Brother of Mary Teresa Hoffman. Visitation Sunday 5-9 p.m., Monday 12-9 p.m. at S.K. Schultz, a Trust 100 Funeral Home 21705 Gratiot at 8 Mile. Rosary Monday 7:30 p.m. Funeral Tuesday, Prayers 10:30, Mass 11 a.m. at Assumption Grotto Catholic Church, Detroit. Interment Assumption Grotto Cemetery

BRITCHKY, GEORGE, Beloved husband of Sally Britchky. Dear father of Sheri (David) Jaffa and Marc Britchky. Grandfather of Eden (Kevin) Elbinger and Sabrina Jaffa. GRAVESIDE SERVICE 11:30 Tuesday Morning at MacPelah Cemetery. Arrangements by the Ira Kaufman Chapel (248) 569-0020

CEJMER,RITA M., January 6, 2001. Beloved wife of Frank. Dear mother of Frank Jr. (Darlene), Scott (Regina) and Dennis (Mona). Grandmother of Gregory, Rochelle, Laura, Nicolle and Dalton. Sister of Fran Janiga. Visitation Monday 3-9 p.m. and Tuesday 12-9 p.m. Rosary Tuesday 7 p.m. Services Wednesday 9:30 a.m. from the John N. Santeiu & Son Funeral Home, 1139 Inkster Rd. (betw. Ford & Cherry Hill), to St. Raphael Catholic Church for 10 a.m. Mass.

DINGELDEY, ROBERT A. Age 70 of Wixom, January 6, 2001. Beloved husband of Nancy. Dear father of Michael (Andrea) Dingeldey, Carol J. Dingeldey, Jill K. (Gregory) Oliver. Dear grandfather of Nicholas Oliver. Dear brother of Lois Garth Owen. Also several nieces and nephews. Funeral from St. Anne Episcopol Church, 430 E. Nicolet, Walled Lake, Wednesday 11 a.m. Friends may visit at Lynch & Sons Funeral Home , 340 Pontiac Trail, Walled Lake (3 blks S. of Maple Rd.) Tuesday 4:30-9 p.m. Memorials to Huron Valley Sinai Hospital, Development office or the Alheimers Association Appreciated.

DOLECKI (PINO), IRENE January 6, 2001. Beloved wife of the late Joseph Pino and Alexander Dolecki. Loving mother of Jacqueline (Dominic) Calcagno, Patricia Pino, Sharon (Carmen) Beheler, Marilyn (Ronald) Valesano, Joseph (Sue) Pino, Leonard (Karen) Dolecki, Robert (Delores) Dolecki, and the late Al (Sarah) Dolecki, Jr. Dearest grandmother of 18 and great grandmother of 15. Visitation Tuesday 2:30-9:00 PM at Wujek-Calcaterra & Sons, Inc., 54880 Van Dyke (SHELBY TWP.) at 25 Mile. Funeral Wednesday morning for times and location call 810-677-4000. Interment Resurrection Cemetery. Founder and past president of Tryettes Group for the Handicap. In lieu of flowers memorials will be made by the family to the Solanus Casey Center Campaign, 1820 Mt. Elliott, Detroit 48207, Attn: Fr. Larry Abler.

DUDA,JOSEPH "JACK" P. Age 85. January 5, 2001 of Lincoln Park. Beloved husband of Jean. Loving father of Mary Ann (Robert) Dryps, Carrie (Jim) Gajewski and Rick (Vanna) Duda. Dearest grandfather of nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Visitation Tuesday 2-9 p.m. at the John K. Solosy Funeral Home, 3206 Fort, Lincoln Park. Rosary 8 p.m. Instate Wednesday 10:30 a.m. at Christ the Good Shepherd Church until time of Mass at 11 a.m. Interment St. Hedwig Cemetery.

FABIAN, RUDY, Age 85 of Trenton. January 5, 2001. Loving brother of Rose Stevens and Edward Fabian and the late Milan, Frank, John, Anton, and Mary Fabian. Dear uncle of several nieces and nephews. Visitation Tuesday 2-9 PM. Funeral Wednesday 11 AM at the Girrbach-Krasun Funeral Home, (Southgate Chapel), 15748 Fort. Interment Holy Sepulchre Cemetery.

FARINETTI, PATRICK A. January 6, 2001. Age 88. Beloved husband of Mary. Dear Father of Patricia (Richard) Martin, Dennis (Tammy) and Catherine Farinetti. Dear Brother of Marie (John) Spezia, Carolyn Farinetti and the late Theresa Hershberger., Also survived by five grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Visitation Tuesday 2-9 p.m. (with a Rosary at 7:30pm) at Wujek-Calcaterra & Sons, Inc. 36900 Schoenherr at Metro Parkway (16 Mile). Funeral Wednesday 10:30 a.m. at Funeral Home. Interment Resurrection. Memorials may be made to Alzheimers Association.

FISHTAHLER, LILLIAN K. January 7, 2001, age 84. Beloved wife of Edwin Spindler and the late Vernon F. Fishtahler. Dear mother of Laurence E. (Maria Elva) of Arlington VA., Carol E. (Richard) Cooper of Southfield, MI. and Brian V. (Constance Ann) of Troy, MI. Grandmother of Eric, Jesse, Eduardo and Camila. Family will receive friends at A.J. Desmond & Sons (Vasu, Rodgers & Connell Chapel) , 32515 Woodward (btwn 13 & 14 Mile) Monday 6-9 p.m. and Tuesday 2-4 and 6-9 p.m. Scripture service Tuesday evening. Funeral liturgy begins Wednesday 9:15 a.m. at the funeral home with procession to St. Regis Church, 3695 Lincoln at Lahser Rds for Funeral Mass at 10 a.m. Entombment Holy Sepulchre Cemetery.

FORCADE,REGINALD NAPOLEON Age 91, January 5, 2001, of Grosse Pointe Farms. Born in Bay City, Michigan. Dear husband of Mary Louise (nee Keane). In state Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. at St. Paul s Catholic Church School Gymnasium, 170 Lake Shore Drive, Grosse Pointe Farms, until time of Funeral Mass at 10 a.m. Interment at Mt. Olivet Cemetery. Memorials may be made to the Capuchin Soup Kitchen, 4390 Conner, Detroit, 48214 or Kenwood Pax Community, 799 S. Pearl St., Albany, New York, 12202. Arrangements by the Verheyden Funeral Home, 313-881-8500.

HOEFER, ALICE R., Age 82, January 6, 2001. Beloved wife of the late Augie B. Loving sister of Betty (Edward) Goliber, Cathy Malerich and the late Frank Malerich, Jr. Also many nieces and nephews. Funeral from Holy Name Church, 630 Harmon St., Birmingham, Wednesday 10 a.m. Friends may visit at church beginning at 9:30 a.m. Visitation at Lynch & Sons Funeral Home 1368 N. Crooks (bet. 14-15 Mile Rd) Tuesday 2-5 p.m. and 6-8 p.m. Rosary Tuesday evening. Contributions to Mother and Unborn Baby Care, Right to Life or Guesthouse.

JOUPPI, VIENO D., Age 93. January 6 of Trenton. Beloved mother of Gerald (Sandra), Thomas (Sally), Daniel (Donna) & Carol Jouppi. Dearest grandmother of ten and great grandmother of three. Friends may call from 1-9 p.m. Tuesday at the Martenson Funeral Home , 3200 West Road, Trenton. She will lie in state Wednesday from 10 a.m. until 11 a.m. services at St. Philip Lutheran Church in Trenton. Memorials may be made to St. Philip Lutheran Church.

KARCHNICK, JOSEPH F. January 6, age 98. Husband of the late Anna. Dear father of Mary Ann (Joseph) Trybus, Jean Suzanne (Daniel) Balagna, Joseph Ray (Cathy), Betty Reeves, Larry Faitel, Hubert (Verdella) Faitel, John Faitel and the late William Faitel. Also survived by 22 grandchildren and 23 great grandchildren. Funeral Tuesday 10am prayers at the Dearborn Chapel of the Howe-Peterson Funeral Home , 22546 Michigan Ave and 10:30am mass at Sacred Heart Church. Visitation 12-9pm Monday with rosary 7pm. Memorials to the Capuchins.

KNOLL,GRACE, January 7, 2001, age 93. Survived by many relatives and friends. Funeral service Wednesday 1 p.m. at A.J. Desmond & Sons (Vasu, Rodgers and Connell Chapel), 32515 Woodward (betw. 13-14 Mile). Family will receive friends Tuesday 4-9 p.m. Memorial tributes to Cranbrook Hospice.

KOLKE, JOSEPH A., Age 90. January 5, 2001. Beloved husband of the late Marie (Pietrzak) Kolke. Loving (Uncle Joe) to all of his nieces, nephews, great nieces and great nephews of the McFee, Kolke, Seward, and Kendzierski families. Also survived by his sister Eleanor Herber of Mio, MI. Visitation Tuesday 9:30 AM until time of Mass 10:30 AM at St. Isidore Catholic Church, 18201 23 Mile (at Romeo Plank), Macomb Twp. Memorials to The Capuchin Soup Kitchen would be appreciated. Arrangements by Resurrection Funeral Home, (810) 412-3000.

KOWALSKI, STANLEY J. January 6, age 87. Beloved husband of the late Anne. Loving father of Stanley, Jr., Dolores Krause and Diana Tulecki. Dear brother of Ann Pavlich. Also leaves 10 grandchildren and 15 great grandchildren. Funeral Wednesday 9:30 a.m. from the David J. Wysocki Funeral Home 29440 Ryan Rd. (N. of 12 Mile) to St. Louise Church at 10 a.m. Interment Resurrection Cemetery. Visitation Tuesday 2-9 p.m. Family requests donations to the Leukemia Foundation.

KUTCHEY, JOSEPH H. "PAPA" Age 62 of Armada, formerly of Macomb Township, died January 6, 2001. Beloved husband of Carolyn for 42 years. Dearest father of Joseph (Susan), Mary Ellen "Cooky", Michael (Sandra) and David (Laura). Loving grandfather of Daniel, Amanda, Jennifer, Benjamin, Joseph, Michelle, Elizabeth, Noel, Samantha and Jaclyn. Brother of Mary Jo Weingartz, Virginia Rozanka and Kay DaDeppo. Mr Kutchey was a life long farmer who graduated from Fitzgerald High School in Warren, Class of 1957. His farm was originally in Warren and moved out to Macomp Twp in 1965, He owned and operated Jos. Kutchey & Sons Produce Market on 10 Mile Rd. in Warren until just a few years ago when he semi-retired and his sons took over operating the market and farm. Mr. Kutchey continued to take part in the farm operation everyday. He was a former 4-H leader who enjoyed draft horses, deer watching, woodworking and his grandchildren. Visitation Monday 4-9 p.m. and Tuesday 1-9 p.m. with scripture service 7 p.m. at Wujek-Calcaterra & Sons, Inc 54880 Van Dyke (SHELBY TOWNSHIP) at 25 Mile. Instate Wednesday 9 a.m. at St. Isidore Catholic Church, 23 Mile at Romeo Plank Rd., until Mass at 9:30 a.m. Interment Resurrection Cemetery. Donations preferred to the Spinal Cord Society, 19051 County Hwy. #1, Fergus Falls, MN 56537-7609

LOVE, JEAN S., Age 79, January 7, 2001. Beloved wife of Robert C. for 50 years. Loving mother of Edward (Lynn), David (Carol) and Nancy (Paul Blome) Love. Dear grandmother of Jacob, Nicholas, Patrick, Ceit and Rachel. Funeral Thursday 10 a.m. at Bethelehem Lutheran Church, 35300 W. 8 Mile Rd., Farmington Hills. Visitation Tuesday 5-9 and Wednesday 2-9 p.m. at Thayer-Rock Funeral Home 33603 Grand River Ave., Farmington (1 blk. W. of Farmington Rd.) Memorials to American Cancer Society suggested.

MAKUCH, ELIAS, Age 76. January 6, 2001. Beloved husband of the late Stephania. Loving father of Mary (Eugene) Telka, Eugene (Barbara), Christina (Johnny) Sahagian, and the late John. Dearest grandfather of eight grandchildren. Brother of Dmitro. Best friend of Lucille Haymond. Funeral Tuesday 9:30 a.m. from the Jarzembowski Funeral Home, 18957 W. Warren Ave., at Artesian to St. John the Baptist Church for 10 a.m. mass. Visitation Monday 1-9 p.m. Panachyda Monday 7 p.m. Interment St. Hedwig Cemetery.

MILLIKEN,BERNADETTE M. 82, of Palm Harbor, FL., died Sat., Jan. 6, 2001. She moved to FL 1981 from Shelby Town- ship, MI. She was a member of St. Luke Catholic Church, Highland Lakes Golf Club, Quilters Crossing and an avid bridge player all in Palm Harbor, FL. Survivors include sons Michael of Carlsbad, CA, and Robert of Farmington Hills, MI; daughters Mary F. Boldt of Shelby Township, MI, Susan Milliken of Palm Harbor, FL, and Donna Hayes of Clarkston, MI; sisters Carole Krueger of Lake Orion, MI, and Jean Grish of Dunedin, FL; 15 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

MORIAN,RUTH L., January 7, 2001, age 78. Beloved wife of the late Ferdinand; dearest mother of Robert (Mary), Richard and Arleen Kageff; dear grandmother of Anthony, Juliane, Maria, Kirsten and Courtney; dear sister of William (Lorraine) Schmidt. Visitation Monday 3-9 p.m. and Tuesday 2-9 p.m. with a 7:30 p.m. Rosary Tuesday at the Kaul Funeral Home, 35201 Garfield (N. of 15 Mile), Clinton Township. Funeral Wednesday, for further details please call the funeral home at (810) 792-5000. Burial Resurrection Cemetery.

OFFERLE, RITA ANNE (nee PELTIER) January 6, 2001 of Toledo, formerly of Detroit. Beloved wife of Carl "Bud" for 41 years. Dear sister of Mary Peltier and Alice Werth of Grosse Pointe Farms, and Frank Peltier of FL. Services 12 noon Wednesday at the A.H. Peters Funeral Home 20705 Mack Ave at Vernier Rd, Grosse Pointe Woods. Memorial gathering 10 a.m. Wednesday. Memorials to the Capuchin Soup Kitchen appreciated.

RIEGLE, HELEN M., 92 Yrs. January 6, 2001. Mrs. Helen M. Riegle of Gaylord. Mrs. Riegle was preceded in death by her husband Charles Riegle in 1981. She is survived by her son Tom (Robyn) Riegle and two grandchildren: Jason and Julie Riegle. A Memorial Service will be held at a later date. Memorial contributions are appreciated to the American Lung Association. Arrangements by Nelson Funeral Home, 135 N. Center St., Gaylord, Michigan 49735.

WAGNER,JOHN J. SR., January 6, 2001, age 86. Beloved husband of the late Anna and Helen. Dear father of Evelyn and the late Delores and John Jr. "Jack". Grandfather of Anita and Jeffrey (Andrea). Great-grandfather of Kathleen. Brother of Emily and Harry (Jean). Funeral Thursday from at the D.S. Temrowski & Sons Funeral Home, 30009 Hoover Rd. at Common (12 Mile) with a Funeral Mass at St. Blase Church. Visitation Tuesday 5-9 p.m. and Wednesday 1-9 p.m. with an evening vigil Wednesday. Call funeral home for service times, (810) 751-0444.

WEEBER, MARJORIE BEATRICE January 5, 2001. Age 97. Loving wife of the late Frank (Buck). Dearest mother of Beverly A. Angellotti and Nancy L. Pacheco-Thiede. Dear grandmother of ten and great grandmother of 13. Visitation Sunday 6-9 PM and Monday 12-9 PM. Funeral Tuesday 11 AM from the Girrbach-Krasun Funeral Home, (River Rouge Chapel), 10783 West Jefferson. Interment Michigan Memorial Park.

WELTI,CARL LOUIS SR. Age 81, died suddenly Saturday, January 6, 2001, in Herrick Memorial Hospital, Tecumseh, Michigan, following a massive heart attack. Born in Detroit, Michigan on February 21, 1919. Lived in Rogers City, Michigan until the age of 9. Moved to Detroit east side where he was a resident for over 40 years. Moved to Farmington Hills in 1962 where he was a resident until 1984. Then moved to Presque Isle, MI, upon retirement. Employed with Detroit Edison s marketing department for 45 years until retirement in 1984. Member of Immanuel Lutheran Church in Alpena, MI, active in Lutheran Laymen s League as Past Zone Treasurer. Served in WWII as a First Lieutenant in the 102nd Infantry Division - K. Co. Served with Presque Isle Chamber of Commerce. Member of the Presque Isle Association Architectural Control Committee. President of the Presque Isle Island Association. Founding committee member of the Sunrise Side Chamber of Commerce. Past-president and Treasurer of the Detroit Direct Mail Club, Designer Lighting, and the National Direct Mail Association. Served on World Energy and New Detroit Organizations. Survived by his wife Marguerite (Jonske) whom he married in 1944. Dear father of Dr. Carl L. Welti Jr. (Beverly Maas), Carolyn L. Hoffee (William Hoffee), Thomas A. Welti (Terry Bridges), Mark W. Welti (Dr. Jennifer Groehn); eleven grandchildren. Preceded in death by two grandsons. Visitation Monday 4-9 p.m. and Tuesday 1-9 p.m. McCabe Funeral Home, 31950 W. Twelve Mile Rd., Farmington Hills. Funeral service Thursday 1 p.m. at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Alpena. Burial Memorial Park Cemetery, Rogers City. Memorials to Immanuel Lutheran Church.

2001-01-03T21:50:00.000-05:00

Corrected Mâcon-Vire
The entire senior management team at Louis/Dressner Selections thought that the special bottling we now have in this country was the Domaine de Roally Mâcon-Viré Cuvée 41-H. We were wrong and the wine is in fact called the Domaine de Roally Mâcon-Viré Cuvée 54-H. Our apologies to everyone out there who asked for a 41-H and could only find a 54-H. We have received angry phone calls from several retailers who were accused of fraudently peddling Cuvée 54-H in a marketplace that wants Cuvée 41-H. Please, please....there is no 41-H, it was an error on our part.

The 54-H was the wine that took nearly two years to bubble to completed fermentation. It is good. It was in one small steel vat, which I could have sworn was 41-H, but which turned out to be 54-H. I stopped using my Palm Pilot in people's cellars a couple of years ago. Its too bad, because I was able to keep on top of details like this when I was equipped with that machine. I then switched last year to a Vadem Clio, which is a clamshell Windows CE device, but I spilled wine from the Clos du Tue Boeuf (I believe it was the Menu Pineau) on the keyboard in the beginning of a one month trip to France. Since, I had a 30 days, no question asked guarantee with the unfortunate company that sold me the machine, I returned it for a full refund. I then bought another Vadem Clio from another unfortunate company and dropped it on the floor after two weeks of happy usage. American Express refunded that one. That Vadem Clio was a technological tour de force and they no longer make the machine. So, for the past year I have been without some sort of gadget.

I recently bought a Casio EM-500 PocketPC and hope that by using this sophisticated piece of machinery I will be able to keep track of the different cuvées in Henri Goyard's cellar. Although Goyard has retired and his vintage 2000 will be his last harvest.

Again, my apologies.

Stolen Chambolle-Musigny from François Legros
Speaking of theft and fraud...there have been a number of stories this past week about criminal rings being broken up in Burgundy.

Late this afternoon, we received a phone call from an anonymous Long Island teenager who had stolen a bottle of François Legros' Chambolle-Musigny from his father's cellar and drank the bottle. Turns out, the father has not noticed the theft but has subsequently spoken of his affection for this wine. The teenager called our office asking where he could buy a substitute.

Of course, we are firmly against teenagers buying alcoholic beverages. Additionally, the wine is sold out.

The anonymous teenager told me that he in fact enjoyed the wine.

2001-01-01T17:23:00.000-05:00

Numbers 7 through 11 of My Top 10 List of This Year's Louis/Dressner Selections' Imports

7. Chinon Croix Boissée 1998 from Bernard Baudry

Not a particularly good year, just a great wine. This is Baudry’s best site, although in young vines. Whenever I taste in the cellar it always interesting to see how the pedigree of the vineyard makes it stand out against other parcels that are in old vines.

There is just beautiful concentration and balance to this bottle. I’ve been drinking this over the past several months and only wish I had more. Kermit Lynch also gets this wine as does Neal Rosenthal. We're sold out, but they might have some.

8. Montlouis Clos Habert 1998 Demi-Sec from François Chidaine

Also a lousy year and a great wine. So many of the Layons are difficult to taste in 98, so many Vouvray make you think longingly for 1997, but this Montlouis is perfectly sculptured Chenin. I don’t know if it because he is in biodynamie, but Chidaine has made a grand vin here that could be mistaken for a great vintage. It's also time to talk more about the secs and demi-secs and less about the sweet wines. There is some shipping to Chicago and some to Connecticut. Otherwise, there is nothing around.

9. Bois du Boursan Châteauneuf-du-Pape 1997

Jean-Paul Versino is a charming character who has 40 some odd parcels in Châteauneuf, with the average age being 60-years-old. The yields are tiny, the élavage is in foudres and the wines have concentration and beautiful mouth-feel. The 1998 will be coming in soon (it was only recently bottled) but the 1997 drank beautifully throughout the year. We only started working recently with Versino – Paul Pernot in Puligny-Montrachet knows him and gave us his phone number about 18 months ago. There is none left.

10. Anything from Mittnacht-Klack --

We don't import this wine, but I love the name. Mittnacht-Klack. Mittnacht is Jean Mittnacht and Klack is Annie Klack, making them Mittnacht-Klack. Robert Parker has the following to say about them in French: Les grands crus du domaine Mittnacht-Klack ont une pureté aromatique et une richesse de sève qui les placent au premier rang de la production alsacienne. I'm not sure if Mr. Parker said the same thing about them in English.

My wife, Denyse Louis, grew up in Alsace. The first time we looked for a grower in Alsace we drove all over and tasted all over. We had an appointment in Pfaffenheim, parked the car in the town square and the local village drunk eyed us over. Finally, he said: "Vous avez les narrines des amoreuses." In English, this means: "You have the nostrils of lovers." We continue to be happily married.

11. Château St-Anne Bandol 1998 --

I like Mourvedre a great deal and Bandol is the purest expression of the grape. There is so much good wine being made in the AOC that I am happy we have one of the best estates. There are others.

St-Anne has hit a stride, after a few years of disorganization, and Françoise Dutheil de la Rochère, has now taken charge of the vinification. Her husband François had died right after the 1995 vintage and it took a while to get back on track. This estate is one France's forerunner's in organic production and was one of the first estates to decide to stop using sulphur.

I was once in Detroit seeing retailers and some retailer tasted this wine and asked what the grape varieties were. I told him it was Mourvedre and he told me he also loved Mourvedre. When I asked him which one was his favorite Mourvedre, he told me "Cline Cellars." At my next appointment, the retailer asked me what grape varieties went into the wine. I told him Bandol. He admitted that he didn't know that Bandol was a grape variety and I assured him that it was in fact one of the great grape varieties of the world. He should look it up in Jancis Robinson's book.

That's it. Happy New Year to everyone and happy blogging!

2000-12-28T16:35:00.000-05:00

Great Wine Articles in French Trotskyite Newspaper -- Don't miss it!

Liberation, The French Trotskyite Daily Newspaper, has a wonderful article on wine in today's issue. Don't miss it:
French Trotskyite Ultra-Left Wing Guide to Wine

Of course it is in French. If you don't read French you can use one of the many excellent translation machines now available on the web. I used the altavista engine to translate the introduction of the Trotskyite article and it works out fairly well. Altavista does not recognize Zinzins which is slang for a crazy nut, but the rest is certainly well done:

Zinzins thus. Not these investors z?institutionnels of the Stock Exchange. But a gallery of good bloated faces, with the fingers of fairy, a little odd know-how. Majority in dissidence, rupture of round of applause with the official organizations of the wine (Inao or Onivins). Coming very close to names prestigious or excluded from those. Being wary with l?égard of the large outputs, enemies of those which let " pisser the vine ", even followers, for some, of culture biodynamics (the ones, a little exaltés, others, right sympathizers). But all raising of the wines d?une already recognized quality or to discover. They?uvrent in Loire Valley, Champagne, Of Bordeaux, in Alsace, in Burgundy, in Côtes-du-Rhône wine and Languedoc. Their wines are sold at reasonable prices and, sometimes, with less wise sums. All are anarchists of the stock. To accompany them, Guy Renvoisé?nophile except par, which has surveyed the vineyards for forty years. And whose glance iconoclaste reassures in these times d?esbroufe and of quickly produced " collars ", quickly drunk, quickly forgotten. Zinzins ridges some with the already prosperous difficulties or, here their portraits, their tribulations, their successes. Listen to " l?âme wine which sings in their bottles ", as would say Baudelaire.

2000-12-28T14:51:00.000-05:00

Please welcome guest columnist Bob Ross. Bob is a well-known wine enthusiast, lawyer, real estate developer and internet wine personality. He's gracious, charming, knowledgeable and has put together an intriguing article analyzing the use of the word 'Gobs' in The Wine Advocate.

It's not so easy to write Tasting Notes and perhaps the whole notion of Tasting Notes ought to be outlawed. Certainly, it does not make great literature and is inevitably repetitive, superficial and approximative. So, it is easy to make fun of The Wine Advocate, a monthly journal dedicated to the tasting note.

Given that I'm a member of the wine trade, I have only the greatest admiration for the work done in The Wine Advocate and for the obvious capabilities of its owner and employees. But one does wonder if the use of the word 'gobs' says something about the type of Taste Noting going on there.

Unfortunately, Mr. Ross wrote this article using The Wine Advocate software and this analysis is only good through the end of December 1997. So future scholars will have to decide if Gobs has continued at the same pace, declined or accelerated. It would also be interesting to see if the other members of the staff use 'gobs' as much as the proprietor. There does seem to be a common writing style -- perhaps there is a 'Strunk and White Elements of Style' in the Tasting Note craft.

Anyhow, I'm not sure what it all means, but I think it is certainly interesting.....Joe Dressner

COPIOUS GOBS, SOME OODLES AND MORE.
By Robert C. Ross -- copyright Robert C. Ross

The thread began with a note indicating that Mr. Parker had used the word "gobs" in 856, or 4.1%, of the Tasting Notes in the database. A number of posters expressed surprise at how many times the word was used and others alluded to its unsavory meanings. This study:

1. Describes how Mr. Parker uses the word "gobs".

2. Describes the characteristics described by "gobs".

3. Collects classical meanings of "gobs".

4. Argues that Mr. Parker has created (or popularized) a new meaning "gobs".

5. Describes the appearance of "copious amounts" or "copious quantities".

6. Discusses "oodles" and other alternatives (both real and imaginary) for “gobs”.

7. Acknowledges the inspiration and help of others in preparing this study.

8. Quotes a sample of about 20% of the TNs containing "gobs of".

9. Samples occurrences of other words in the database.

1. How does Robert Parker use the word “gobs” in describing wines?

There are 21,076 TNs in the database; 856 TNs (or 4.1%) contain the word "gobs". Most wines were described as having "gobs of" one characteristic (168 examples), but two (19), three (10), four (2) or five (1) characteristics were also found. [The sample included the first 200 of the 856 TNs returned by the search engine in alphabetical order by producer.] Typical formulations include:

"gobs of fruit"
"gobs of smoky, ripe, black-cherry and currant fruit"
"gobs of glycerin, extract, and body"
"gobs of gobs of jammy black-cherries, smoke, spice, new oak, and herbs"

The word "gobs" appears in roughly equal relative amounts for red, white and rose wines:


Red	631	14,777	4.3%
White	216	6,122	3.5%
Rose	   9	   177	5.0%

The word "gobs" is not restricted to TNs of the wines of any particular country, although the percentages do vary rather significantly:


France	11,953	433	3.6%
USA	6,046	289	4.8%
Italy	1,571	82	5.2%
Germany	  555	12	2.2%
Spain	  325	14	4.3%
Australia	  214	13	6.1%
Portugal	  115	5	4.3%
Argentina	   95	2	2.1%
Austria	   87	1	1.1%
Chile	   85	3	3.5%

Similarly, wines of all regions have "gobs", with fairly significant variation:


California 	5,353	247	4.6%
Burgundy 	4,181	148	3.5%
Bordeaux 	3,183	101	3.2%
Rhone 	2,276	91	4.0%
Lang/Rous 	 840	46	5.5%
Piedmont 	 692	38	5.5%
Tuscany 	 596	28	4.7%
Null 	 531	20	---
Oregon 	 467	28	6.0%
Alsace 	 466	14	3.0%

Types of grapes have "gobs", with significant variation:


 Pinot Noir	3,334	126	3.8%
 Bord Blend	2,815	 89	1.3%
 Chardonnay	2,642	107	4.4%
 Prop. Blend 	2,118	102	4.8%
 Null 	1,723	 84	N.A.
 Cab 	1,539	 58	3.8%
 Zin 	1,085	 48	5.4%
 Syrah 	 872	 45	5.2%
 Riesling 	 711	 17	2.4%
 Nebbiolo	 479	 26	5.4%
 Merlot 	 469	 17	3.6%

Generally speaking, "gobs" is a sign of approbation. The following table lists the Parker numeric ratings for “gobs” wines. In my estimation, the average rating of "gobs" wines is three to four points higher than for non-“gobs wines. [This estimate is not based on a rigorous analysis, but is based on an earlier study which discovered that Mr. Parker awards significantly more wines a rating of 90 than 89 or 91, and more wines a rating of 92 than 91, resulting in what has become to be known as the 90 Point Peak. The 90 Point Peak is evident in the ratings of “gobs” wines.]

Note: The 70 and 71 ratings were awarded to wines in whose TNs “gobs” was used to describe other, better vintages of the same wines. The 72 was awarded to a Freemark Abbey Cabernet Sauvignon with “gobs of acidity”.

Of less statistical importance – one must ask if it is even theoretically possible for any part of this study to be “less” important than any other part – TNs for many different makers have "gobs". producers with more than 100 TNs include:


Jadot	231 	3
DuBoeuf 	200 	9
Chapoutier 	148 	4
Zind Humbrecht	137 	2
Beringer 	129 	4
Mondavi 	120 	2
Leroy 	119	1
Ridge 	105 	5
Faiveley 	101	5

Finally, the makers with the most "gobs" include:


DuBoeuf 	231 	9
Hudelot-Noellat 	8 	8
Steele	52 	8
De Loach 	43	7
Phelps 	79 	6
St Francis 	35 	6

2. What characteristics of wine are described by the word “gobs”?

So, you might ask, "gobs of" what? The most tedious part of this study was actually reading the TNs and trying to decide the answer on a case by case basis. The masochistically inclined are urged to read the appendix containing all 200 samples and the even more masochistic to read the entire data base of 856 TNs. I gave up after reading 200 of the 856 TNs (23.3%) containing the word "gobs". The following chart lists the characteristics described in this sample of TNs.


 Fruit 	146 
 Glycerin 	24 
 Oak 	15
 Spice 	10
 Alcohol 	9
 Tannin 	8
 Extract 	7
 Flavor 	7
 Herbs 	4
 Smoke 	3
 Concentration 	2
 Botrytis 	2
 Body 	1
 Lushness 	1
 Ripeness 	1
 Personality 	1
 Intensity 	1
 Richness 	1
 Body 	1
 Earth 	1
Cheese rind 	1
Purity 	1
Licorice 	1
Structure 	1
Grip 	1

Several comments may be appropriate:

(a) It is often not clear whether a given characteristic is in the nose only, the taste only or the finish only, or in some combination of the three. This ambiguity appears particularly in the TNs for "fruit"; what is one to make of the simple "gobs of fruit", for example? Where are they?

(b) Most of the "gobs" are not measurable numerically, the only exception is "gobs of alcohol" which can be measured, and by US law must appear on the label. However, Mr. Parker usually specifies that these "gobs" are in the finish and presumably not meant to be a measure of blood alcohol.

(c) "Concentration", "intensity", "purity" and "grip", and perhaps "structure" seem very non-"gobs" like under any definition of the word "gobs".

(d) "Cheese rind" occurs three times in the database, each time in the phrase "gobs of cheese rind". In one case, the phrase is approving, once disapproving and once merely descriptive.

(e) One phrase - "gobs of copious amounts of spicy, berry fruit" - at first struck me as redundant, but as discussed later, contains perhaps the key to what Mr. Parker means by the word "gobs".

3. Classic definitions of the words "gob" and "gobs".

Let us turn to what other writers and speakers think the word "gobs" means. The following definitions are taken from the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, the Random House Webster's College Dictionary, The American Heritage Dictionary, the Dictionary of American Slang, and Webster Unabridged Dictionary, 3rd edition.

Mouth or beak, possibly Gaelic or Irish.

Talk or conversation, as in "gift of gob" (usually "gab").

To prate or to brag.

Space left in a long wall in mining, particularly coal mining.

Refuse removed from such a space; "gob piles" of mining detritus.

A large sum of money. “Kevin Malone, the Dodgers' general manager, took exception to the charge by executives of other clubs, reported here last week, that he has hired scouting and player development people away from other teams by offering gobs of "Murdoch money." NYTimes Feb 28 1999.

Sailor, US slang, 1915 or a bit earlier.

A mass or lump which chokes up a furnace.

Molten lump of glass from which a single glass or bottle is blown.

Spit and to spit (noun and verb):

"And they thank God, and gob at a gull for luck." Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood.

“The TV news gobs out fresh horrors into the living room every evening; insulted by the specific urgencies of the neonate, that appalling dichotomy -- the one between our lives as we live them and the way that forces outside ourselves shape them for us -- seems less desperate than usual. Under the circumstances, a mercy.” Angela Carter, Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings.

Generally, a mass or lump of slimy material. "… suggestive of a gob of mud on the end of a shingle." Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad. In this sense, usually crude and often erotic.

A lump or mouthful of food, usually in animals: e.g. poisoned meat forced into a dog's mouth, feed forced into a goose to make pate, etc.

Mouthful, probably from Old French "gober", to gulp of Celtic origin, or from Middle French, gobet, meaning a mouthful, a bite or a piece.

Lump of substance chewed but not swallowed, like chewing tobacco or chewing gum.

Finally, the sense that Mr. Parker apparently uses the word “gobs”: a large quantity, usually denoted informal usage. Probably Middle English derivation. A typical list of synonyms for the word in the sense of a large quantity type list: SCAD, heap, load(s), million, oodles, quantities, ream(s), || rimption(s), slather(s), wad(s).

An Internet search for "gobs" using the Google search engine turned up 6,272 hits, many of them described above and including a large number from sex oriented sites. The Internet search indicates that there is a growing acceptance of the word in the sense of a large number, e.g.:

US Government freebies: Gob and Gob's of Free Stuff.
Gameblazer: gobs of screen shots.
Dolphin page: There's gobs and gobs of pages Haole's missed.
The book is written in a light style with gobs of "hands on" explorations.
Great Gobs of Grackles (500,000) on a New Jersey bird watcher site.
etc.

An interesting variant combining several meanings: "It was sticky business in Aberdeen, Scotland, where the city council had already spent months attacking one particularly insidious urban blight-chewing gum on sidewalks and streets. 'In some areas, the pavement looked like 101 Dalmatians, all covered with gobs of gray and black.'"

Thus, the word "gobs" usually means a large number when used to described quantity. In fact, I have found only four uses outside of the writings of Mr. Parker (and other wine critics) where size, rather than number, is meant:

General usage: "gobs of time".
William Faulkner: "High fat clouds like gobs of whipped cream."
Kraft Foods: "Great gobs of gooey food."
Camper’s song: “Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts and me without my spoon. We'll use a straw!” [Many variations.]

4. Robert Parker has created, or at least has popularized, a new meaning for “gobs”.

Mr. Parker has created (or popularized) a new meaning for the word "gobs". It is quite true that “gobs” is defined in terms of quantity. Theoretically, “quantity” could include both size and number, but in fact I have been able to find only four, somewhat problematic examples, where size, rather than number, is meant. None of the dictionaries I consulted gave any such example, except in the phrase "gobs of time" and “gobs of history”. (Mr. Parker never uses the phrase "gobs of finish"!) The Faulkner and Kraft Foods example do imply size, but shape and materiality are also important. The camper’s song defies analysis, and somewhat contradicts the hypothesis, so I’ll ignore it!

As far as I can tell, Mr. Parker is the leading writer using the word "gobs" to describe a large quantity in terms of size. Several of the classical meanings might well have resonated when he chose this word.

The basic word means "mouth" in Gaelic or Irish; mouthful in Old French.

Spitting is essential in wine tasting.

The mouthful of tasted wine is chewed but not swallowed.

Better wines are expensive.

But this is all speculation, and perhaps worse, amateur psychoanalysis. What seems to be true is that however unsavory its antecedents, Mr. Parker has popularized a new meaning of the word "gobs".

Other commentators have noted these unsavory aspects of “gobs”.

Dave McIntyre, Washington Sidewalks: “Wine writers often stretch the limits of our credulity in their efforts to describe various wines. (My wife questions my own tendency to use sexual analogies in tasting notes. Can a wine really be "flirtatious"?) "Gobs of fruit" sounds like something the cat hawked up. Who really knows what "wet leaves" or "cat's piss" taste like – and would we really trust such a person to tell us what wine to drink?

Tom Doorley, “World of Wine”, USA Today: “Now Parker is much maligned and he has a damn good palate if a rather limited vocabulary (his constant references to ‘gobs’ of fruit make me feel a trifle queasy).”

Nonetheless, Mr. Parker’s “gobs” have invaded the wine criticism of several writers. A Googles search returned over 200 examples of TNs written by wine critics using “gobs”, e.g.:

Bill St. John, Denver Sidewalk: “this Corvina cabernet blend brings gobs of dark fruit flavors” and “gobs of fruit”, etc.

Dr. Paul White, Wine Sense Home Page, New Zealand: “gobs of juicy pears lurking about in the finishing acidity”.

Jim at Interaxus: “gobs of fruit”, “gobs of rich fruit”, “gobs of tannins”, etc.

Peter Rockwell, The Wine Guy: “gobs of cassis-edged, blackberry fruit”, “match [kebobs] with funky red wines that present modern fruit character and gobs of juicy expression”, etc.

Passport Wine Club: “gobs of red and black fruits”, “gobs of forward fruit”, etc.

Zinfandel Restaurant, Chicago: “cult Cabernet Sauvignon with gobs of trademark new American oak, ripe fruit and firm tannins”.

Jerry Mead, California: “big gobs of cherry and cranberry (without the bitterness) fruit flavors”, “gobs of fruit and extraction”, etc.

Steve Pitcher: “keeps the gobs of oak, citrus-tropical fruit and butteriness from malolactic fermentation in excellent balance”.

Eileen Hallmark: “gobs of packed super fruited and pure Châteauneuf”.

Harvey Steinman: “gobs of honey, pineapple, citrus, spice and vanilla”.

Alexander J. Pandell, Ph.D., The Wine Alchemist: “94+ pts, C4+N4F4+A3+T3+E4TFR3: Rich red color; juicy fruit nose; gobs of fruit”, etc., etc.

David Outerbridge: “gobs of flavor, well worth waiting for”.

Yak Shaya: “gobs of winyness”, etc.

Guenoc Winery: “gobs of fruit”.

Richard Teitelbaum: “gobs of tannins”.

etc., etc., etc.

There are so many “gobs” that it is refreshing to find a critic that refuses to use the “gobs” formulation:

Domaine Tempier 1987 Cuvée Speciale La Louffe Bandol: Earthy but clean aromas. Spector says, "tree bark," and we all nod approvingly. Intense fruit flavor, smooth as silk, so extracted that it comes across as sweet. Dare I say, "gobs of hedonistic fruit"? Naaaaah ... Robin Garr, May 1996.

Quivira Vineyards 1994 Zinfandel ($14.75) - Easy quaffing, gobs of hedonistic, well, you know ... I do like Dry Creek Zins, and this is a highly approachable one. Another favorite. Robin Garr, May 1996.

Mr. Garr’s notes make it clear that Mr. Parker is the source for the “gobs” descriptor, an attribution supported by The Wine Boobs in Issue Number 5 of their scholarly Review, July 1996. The entire issue is worth reading for its exemplary illustrations of wine writing styles, but one Parker example clearly depends on “gobs”:

"... this phenomenal wine reminded me of the 1989 Rayas Châteauneuf-Du-Pape. It exhibits a roasted, black fruit character, sensational concentration, gobs of glycerin, and a heady, spicy, nearly mind-boggling finish. This truly profound wine should make superb drinking over the next 10-12 years."

Incidentally, other commentators have gone further, and caricatured Mr. Parker’s style with the phrase “gobs of hedonistic fruit.” It is true that “fruit” appears in 53.4% of the TNs, “gobs” in 4.1% and “hedonistic” in 1.2%. However, all three words appear in only 21 TNs during this time period, and usually describe the wine drinker or the wine generally. There are no pure examples of the formula; these two are the closest I could find:

“Made in a hedonistic, low acid, plump, juicy (gobs of fruit) style, the 1996 is hard to resist.” [1996 Gloria St. Julien].

“Rich and opulent, with a thick, chewy texture, low acidity, and gobs of fruit, this hedonistic, decadently oaky, fruity wine will continue to drink well for 10-12 years.” [1990 Haut Marbuzet].

Nonetheless, Mr. Parker has put an indelible stamp upon the world of wine criticism championing the use of the word “gobs”.

5. The rise of “copious” in Mr. Parker’s TNs; a relatively new, more accurate formulation?

Let us return to Mr. Parker’s phrase in one of the TNs in this collection: "gobs of copious amounts of spicy, berry fruit". At first reading, this phrase appeared to me jarring, and clearly redundant, but after some though, it occurred to me that this might be one of those fortuitous errors that reveal a significant new truth. I compared the appearance of "gobs" and "copious" in the data base over time. The number of “gobs” had increased over the first three years, fell and held steady in the fourth and fifth years, and then fell again in the sixth year:

The pattern for "copious" (which occurs in two combinations - "copious amounts" and "copious quantities") - shows a very different pattern. The use was relatively stable for the first four years, grew a good deal in the fifth year, and grew again significantly in the sixth year, the same year that showed a great decrease for "gobs".

A perfunctory examination of about 100 “copious” TNs shows the interchangeability of the phrases "gobs of", "copious quantities of" and "copious amounts of". Statistical tests of characteristics and the other criteria described above in detail for "gobs" give similar results for "copious".

One may fairly conclude that "copious" is driving "gobs" out of Mr. Parker’s TNs, and one can only applaud the change. First, "copious" does not have the unsavory connotations of "gobs". Second, it is clearer that amount rather than number is meant; one can only hope that "copious amounts" supplants "copious quantities" over time. Third, the phrase almost always describes where the copiousness resides: in the aroma, the taste or the finish; the vagueness of "gobs" in this respect is greatly reduced. Mr. Parker is to be congratulated for this improvement.

6. “Oodles” and other options for “gobs”.

Oodles. Did "gobs" drive out "oodles"? Paul Winalski makes the interesting observation that Mr. Parker has stopped using "oodles" in favor of "gobs". My Webster Collegiate defines "oodles" as "a great quantity", indicates the word is of unknown source and dates from 1869. The focus is again on quantity, and "oodles" seems to imply a larger number than "gobs". Synonyms include: scad(s), gob(s), heap, jillion, load(s), million, quantities, slew, thousand, trillion.

Unfortunately, analysis of this database sheds little light on this important hypothesis. There are only 38 occurrences of the word "oodles" during this six year period:

30 “oodles” wines were red; 8 were white. Ratings ranged between 85 and 98. 21 were from France; seven USA; six Italy; two Australia; and one each for Germany and Spain. Six were Pinot Noirs; four were Bordeaux Blends and Nebbiolo; there were three each Cabs, Chardonnays and Zins; there were two each Gamay, Proprietary Blends and Syrah; and there were one each Albarino, Muscat, Pinot Blanc; Sangiovese, Sauvignon Blanc and Scheurebe.

“Oodles” TNs read as if "gobs" could just as well have been used: 33 TNs deal describe fruit: "with oodles of ripe fruit", for example. The remaining five TNs are:

oodles of apple, butter, orange-like flavors
oodles of flavor and glycerin
oodles of flavor
oodles of fruit, glycerin, and soft tannin in the finish
oodles of glycerin and intensity

It appears that the era of "oodles" in Robert Parker's TNs had come and virtually gone by 1993. Further research by a more highly motivated researcher will be necessary to uncover that particular story.

Other alternatives to “gobs”.

As indicated earlier, Mr. Parker did use other alternatives to “gobs” during the six year period. For example, “loads” appears 253 times, usually in phrases like “loads of fruit”, with the same wide range of loads of other things: flavor, tannin, concentration, glycerin, spice and even promise. [“promise” appears 249 times in the period, usually in a phrase like “promises to last for another ten years.” When used as a noun, I found only one “loads of promise”, but several examples of “considerable promise.”] Ratings of “loaded” wines are very high and appear to be about two points higher than “gobs” wines: the 90 Point Peak is particularly pronounced for “loaded” wines:

214 reds and 35 whites are “loaded”; and the varieties, countries, areas and producer data is similar to “gobs.” Finally, usage of the word shows a somewhat erratic pattern, but “loads” seems to be joining “copious” in supplanting “gobs” during 1997 – is it too much to say, beginning to help carry the load?

Some have argued convincingly that “considerable amounts” is a synonym for “gobs”, although careful philologists point out that “gobs” are probably significantly bigger than “considerable amounts”. The data supports caution on this significant issue. There are 1,239 TNs containing the word “considerable”, but almost none contain the phrase “considerable fruit.” Instead, we find considerable finesse, praise, amber, rust, structure, tannin, opulence, etc. A study of this word would clearly reward careful analysis.

Some critics have proposed “a great deal of” as a synonym for “gobs”. The phrase has not escaped Mr. Parker’s notice, of course – it appears 86 times during the six years. But, interestingly, the vast majority of these examples are used to describe tiny quantities: e.g. “not a great deal of complexity.”

Other critics have proposed “tons of” as an alternative. The phrase appears 200 times, the great majority of the time in the technical sense: e.g. “an average of 2.8 tons of fruit per acre.” However, there are a few examples where “tons” takes the place of “gobs”; one use that particularly tickles the author’s fancy is the construction “tons of new oak (perhaps excessive amounts for many tasters).”

“Lots” is another word that has been suggested as a useful synonym for “gobs”. The word does appear 85 times during the six year period, but in a technical sense only: e.g. “Marchand harvests and vinifies in three lots: The first is made up of the 10-14 and 18 year old vines, the second from vines averaging 25 to 45 years of age, and the third is composed of the oldest vines, ranging from 50 to 65 years old.” We will have to wait and see if Mr. Parker adopts this second meaning as an alternative to “gobs”.

“Masses” is another possible contender. The word appears 38 times, sometimes with respect to large numbers of people, e.g. a “deliciously hedonistic wine that would satisfy the masses”. As an alternative to “gobs”, “masses” occurs about 25 times, in examples such as:

“This huge wine displays masses of concentrated, rich fruit….”
“Tasters will not have to wade through masses of tannin, alcohol, and glycerin….”
“The nose offers up masses of ripe, jammy black fruit….”
“masses of black-cherry/plum-like fruit”
“huge masses of sumptuous tropical fruits”
“huge masses of fruit”
“huge masses of fruit and glycerin”

Again, we will have to see how Mr. Parker proceeds. One can only point out that “masses” is a bit small in his mind since it is so often modified by “huge”. [“Huge” is huge in the data base with 1,243 appearances. An enthusiast could safely use this word to identify wonderful wines, but that analysis is clearly beyond the scope of this study. A summary of “huge” ratings demonstrates the hugeness of this word:

The 90 Point Peak is beautifully prominent in this sample.]

A few words are classically considered synonyms for “gobs” but have apparently not been used by Mr. Parker: scads, slew, million, rimptions and wads.

Two synonyms with limited uses are interesting. The word “heaps”: was used three times, each time to describe the amount of fruit. One TN is particularly lovely, combining “heaps” and “gobs”: “With heaps of fruit and gobs of life left, [the 1980 Storybook Mountain Zinfandel Reserve Estate] is amazingly impressive for a 12-year old Zinfandel. Do not be surprised to see it last for another 20-25 years.

The word slathered was used only once: “New oak is also slathered on the exterior of this wine, much like shaving cream piled on a man's face.” The author believes this sentence cries out for “gobs of shaving cream”, but the absence of “gobs” has forced him to seek solace in William Faulkner’s lovely “gobs of whipped cream” quoted above.

At the same time, Mr. Parker provides many other possible avenues of research for the diligent student: “impressive” [2,284 examples], “much” [1,618 examples], “huge” [1,606 examples], “superb” [1,366 examples], “massive” [774 examples], “mouth filling” [468], “mouthful” [241 examples], and many others, all provide gobs of opportunity for wine lovers to make their own marks in this fascinating field.

7. Acknowledgements.

I would like to thank several members of WLDG for their encouragement, help and inspiration in creating this study:

Jim Dove, for seeing a bit of Robert Parker in all of our tasting notes.

Nick Alabaster, for pointing out there's a bit of The Bob in all wine lovers.

Peter Curran, for pointing out the unappealing aspects of "gobs".

Robin Garr, for thanking Peter for not mentioning that
… and for pointing out the dark side of "gobs of hedonistic fruit".
… and for providing a forum for posting this relatively useless study.
… and for teaching me a non-Parker way of writing TNs.

Paul Winalski, for a fascinating side street named "oodles", even though it turned out to be a narrow alley.

Jon, for expressing a healthy level of doubt, encouraging me to preserver in a dark moment.

Michael Brandt for challenging the “new usage” theory with “Great green gobs….”

Jamie Goode, for introducing me to the TN note generator from the Maths Department at Monash University in Australia [unfortunately a UNIX based program, a language I refuse to learn before I get through several other wine regions].

Stuart Yaniger, for suggesting that another computer program might do the trick … and for a lovely joke about millionaires.

[BTW: "millionaire appears 15 times during the six years in question; the scores range from 87 to 100; 10 are reds and 5 are whites; and the wines come from five areas: Bordeaux - 4; Burgundy - 6; Rhone - 3; and one each California and Castilla Leon.] [So why does a millionaire care about an 87 point wine? "If you are a millionaire who wants to buy wine for a child born in 1987, [the Pétrus 1987] will still be in reasonable condition by the time he or she turns twenty-one."]

Don Demuth, for his comments on Asian Spice. [207 TNs.]

Most of all, thanks to Robert Parker, for writing these fascinating and informative notes; for putting over 20,000 of them together in an easily searchable format; and for encouraging us to believe that "Scores do not reveal the important facts about a wine. The written commentary that accompanies the ratings is a better source of information regarding the wine's style and personality, its relative quality level vis-à-vis its peers, and its value and aging personality than any score could ever indicate."

Finally, any errors are my own!

:-) Bob

8. A Sample of 200 “gobs” and one copious.

These fragments are taken from 200 of the 21,076 TNs in Parker's Wine Adviser and Cellar Manager, Version 3.71; this Version covers “The Wine Advocate” issues from February 21, 1992 through December 19, 1997 [nos. 70 - 114]. There are 856 TNs that use the word "gobs"; this sample consists of the first 200 returned by the program, apparently in alphabetical order by producer. The characteristics are preceded by the phrase "gobs of" in the TNs themselves.

1990 Abbaye de Tholomies Reserve Minervois -- gobs of glycerin, extract, and body.
1990 Enrico e Marziano Abbona Barbera -- gobs of spice and ripe fruit
1985 Giovanni Accomasso Barolo Rocchette -- gobs of Tannin
1992 Adelaida Cellars Zinfandel Late Harvest -- gobs of Fruit
1993 Adelsheim Pinot Noir -- gobs of ripe cherry fruit
1991 Adelsheim Pinot Noir Elizabeth's -- gobs of sweet fruit
1994 Domaine l'Aigueliere Montpeyroux -- gobs of red and black fruits
1994 Domaine Des Aires Hautes Pinot Noir -- gobs of sweet cherry fruit
1990 Alderbrook Chardonnay -- gobs of Fruit
1990 Marchesi Alfieri Barbera D'Asti La Tota -- gobs of ripe, sweet, jammy fruit
1992 Allegrini La Poja Vino Da Tavola -- gobs of Concentration
1993 Elio Altare Barolo La Morra -- gobs of fruit and glycerin
1990 Elio Altare Barolo -- gobs of sweet fruit
1991 Elio Altare La Villa Vino Da Tavola -- gobs of toasty new oak
1990 Altesino Palazzo Altesi Vino Da Tavola -- gobs of sweet, smoky, black-cherry and curranty fruit
1994 Altesino Palazzo Altesi Vino Da Tavola -- gobs of ripe jammy cherry and plum fruit
1990 Altesino Brunello Di Montalcino -- gobs of glycerin and alcohol
1990 Altesino Brunello Di Montalcino -- gobs of glycerin and alcohol
1995 Ambra Barco Reale -- gobs of smoky, ripe, black-cherry and currant fruit
1994 Ambra Carmignano Riserva -- gobs of fruit
1990 Bertrand Ambroise Corton Les Rognets -- gobs of fruit
1992 Bertrand Ambroise Nuits St Georges -- gobs of glycerin
1991 Bernard Amiot Chambolle Musigny -- gobs of black-cherry fruit
1990 Domaine des Amouriers Vacqueyras -- gobs of peppery, black-cherry, earthy fruit
1993 Domaine des Amouriers Vacqueyras -- gobs of peppery, black-cherry, earthy fruit
1995 Domaine des Amouriers Vacqueyras -- gobs of black cassis fruit
1992 L’Angélus St Emission -- gobs of ripe, chocolately, cassis fruit
1993 Arbor Crest Sauvignon Blanc Bacchus -- gobs of spice and alcohol
1994 Arbor Crest Sauvignon Blanc Bacchus -- gobs of spice and alcohol
1989 Argiolas Turriga [Sardinia] -- gobs of fruit
1993 Argiolas Costera [Sicily] -- gobs of black cherry and raspberry fruit
1993 Domaine de l'Arjolle Sauvignon -- gobs of rich, honeyed, melony, grapefruit
1991 Domaine Arlaud Pere et Fils Clos-- gobs of glycerin, alcohol, and lushness
1993 Domaine Arlaud Pere et Fils Clos -- gobs of sweet, jammy fruit
1991 Domaine de l'Arlot Nuits St Georges -- gobs of velvety, fat fruit
1992 Domaine de l'Arlot Nuits -- gobs of jammy black-cherries, smoke, spice, new oak and herbs
1989 d'Armailhac Pauillac -- gobs of velvety fruit
1989 Arnauld Haut Médoc -- gobs of fruit
1990 Arnauld Haut Medic -- gobs of glycerin
1990 Robert Arnoux Romanee St Vivant -- gobs of oriental spices
1991 Robert Arnoux Slos De Vougeot -- gobs of jammy fruit
1992 Arrowood Cabernet Sauvignon -- gobs of supple, ripe fruit
1992 Arrowood Malbec -- gobs of blackcurrant fruit
1994 Arrowood Syrah Sara Lee's Vineyard -- gobs of licorice and cassis fruit
1994 Au Bon Climat Pinot Noir Rincon -- gobs of spicy new oak
1994 Aubert Cairanne Goutillonnage CDR -- gobs of pepper, spice and over-ripe red and black fruits
1993 Avignonesi Grifi Vino Da Tavola -- gobs of smoky, spicy new oak
1993 Azelia Barolo -- gobs of ripe cherries
1988 Badia a Coltibuono Chianti Classico -- gobs of sweet black raspberry, black cherry fruit
1991 Bancroft Chardonnay Howell Mountain -- gobs of rich fruit
1992 Rene Barbier Clos Mogador -- gobs of smoky, toasty vanillin
1991 Gilles Barge Cote Rotie -- gobs of rich fruit
1994 Barraud Macon Vergisson La Roche -- gobs of lemony, buttery flavors
1991 Domaine de Barret Cotes De Gascogne -- gobs of fruit
1990 Lucien Barrot Châteauneuf Du Pape -- gobs of ripe luscious fruit
1992 Lucien Barrot Châteauneuf Du Pape -- gobs of glycerin
1993 Domaine Bastide Blanche Bandol -- gobs of blackcurrant and raspberry fruit
1993 Domaine Bastide Blanche Bandol -- gobs of earthy, black-raspberry fruit
1992 Domaine Bastide Blanche Bandol -- gobs of extract
1994 Domaine De Baubiac -- gobs of blackcurrant and berry fruit
1993 Ch de Baun Chardonnay Reserve -- gobs of sweet, honeyed Chardonnay fruit
1992 Beaucastel Coudoulet De Beaucastel -- gobs of ripe, leathery black fruit aromas
1978 Beaulieu Cab Sauv Private Reserve -- gobs of spicy oak
1951 Beaulieu Private Reserve Cabernet Sauv -- gobs of chewy fruit
1976 Beaulieu Private Reserve Cabernet Sauv -- gobs of glycerin and extract
1995 Beauregard Pomerol -- gobs of fruit
1989 Bel Air Lalande De Pomerol -- gobs of fruit
1994 Albert Belle Crozes Hermitage -- gobs of olive-tinged, blackcurrant fruit
1994 Benziger Chardonnay -- gobs of honeyed ripe fruit
1994 Benziger Chardonnay Reserve -- gobs of honeyed ripe fruit
1996 Benziger Imagery Series Viognier -- gobs of citrusy, peach and apricot aromas
1994 Benziger Zinfandel -- gobs of ripe fruit
1985 Beringer Cabernet Sauvignon Priv Res -- gobs of tannins
1992 Beringer Cabernet Sauvignon Priv. Res -- gobs of black fruits
1992 Beringer Sauvignon Blanc -- gobs of honeyed herb and smokey-scented fruit
1992 Beringer Zinfandel -- gobs of black-cherry fruit
1992 Bernardus Pinot Noir Bien Nacido -- gobs of rich black-cherry fruit
1991 Bethel Heights Pinot Noir Estate -- gobs of fruit, glycerin and heady alcohol
1989 Bethel Heights Pinot Noir Reserve -- gobs of rich fruit
1929 Beychevelle St Julien -- gobs of chewy, sweet fruit
1953 Beychevelle St Julien -- gobs of fruit
1992 Black and Blue Proprietary Red Wine -- gobs of pure, persuasive and intense blackberry and cassis fruit
1996 Nekeas Vega Sindoa Tempranillo -- gobs of fruit
1990 Jean Boillot Volnay Fremiets -- gobs of chewy, sweet, expansive Pinot fruit
1992 Jean-Marc Boillot Puligny Montrachet -- gobs of tropical fruit
1993 Pierre Boniface Apremont -- gobs of floral, citrusy fruit
1994 Bonnet Entre Deux Mers Bord. Blanc -- gobs of fruit
1992 Bonny Doon Ca Del Solo Il Fiasco -- gobs of fruit
1995 Bonny Doon Sauvignon Blanc Pac Rim -- gobs of fruit
1994 Boscarelli Boscarelli Vino Da Tavola -- gobs of black cherry fruit
1990 Boscarelli Proprietary Red Wine -- gobs of flavor
1990 le Boscq Medoc -- gobs of flavor and glycerin
1990 le Boscq Vieilles Vignes -- gobs of flavor and glycerin
1994 Bott-Geyl Gewurztraminer Sonnenglanz -- gobs of extract
1990 Bouchard Pere et Fils Echezeaux -- gobs of tannin
1990 Roman Bouchard Valreas CdR -- gobs of black cherry flavor
1990 Bouree Chambolle Musigny -- gobs of sweet fruit taste
1990 Bouree Gevrey Chambertin -- gobs of sweet fruit bouquet
1990 Domaine Bouscasse Madiran -- gobs of tannins in the finish
1994 Boyer-Martenot Meursault Les Charmes -- gobs of buttery, popcorn, smoke and toasty scents
1994 Bridgeview Pinot Noir Reserve -- gobs of jammy black cherries, raspberries and high quality toasty vanillin
1992 Lucien et Andre Brunel les Cailloux CDP -- gobs of glycerin and extract
1993 Brutocao Chardonnay Bliss Vineyard -- gobs of ripeness
1992 Brutocao Zinfandel Unfined -- gobs of berry fruit in the finish
1993 Burgess Cellars Zinfandel -- gobs of copious amounts of spicy, berry fruit
1994 Ernest or J et F Burn Pinot Blanc -- gobs of fruit
1990 Ca Rome Barbaresco --gobs of rich cherry fruit
1989 Ca Rome Barolo Vigna Rionda --gobs of lusty, cherry fruit
1994 la Cabanne Pomerol --gobs of rich, chewy black cherry fruit
1993 Jacques Cacheux Blee Echezeaux --gobs of new oak
1992 Calera Pinot Noir Mills Vineyard --gobs of fruit
1989 Calon Segur St Estephe --gobs of soft tannins
1992 Cambria Chardonnay --gobs of honey tropical fruit
1996 Cambria Syrah Tepusquet Vineyard --gobs of fruit
1990 Cameron Pinot Noir Unfiltered --gobs of spicy, earthy, leafy Pinot fruit
1994 Chateau de Campuget Costieres --gobs of ripe fruit
1994 Chateau de Campuget Merlot--gobs of sweet berry fruit
1990 Cantenac Brown Margaux --gobs of rich, expansive, concentrated fruit
1990 Cap--gobs of de--gobs of Mourlin St Emilion --gobs of glycerin and alcohol
1994 Capendu L'Excellence Corbieres --gobs of herb--gobs of tinged, peppery, black--gobs of cherry and raspberry fruit
1990 Dott G Cappellano Barolo --gobs of extract, glycerin, alcohol, flavor and personality
1991 Carbonnieux Graves --gobs of rich, creamy--gobs of textured fruit
1992 Carmel Vineyards White Zinfandel--gobs of fruit
1993 Carmenet Vin De Garde Moon --gobs of intensity, concentration and richness
1989 Domaine Cauhaupe Jurancon Quintessence Du Petit Manseng --gobs of botrytis
1992 Caymus Cabernet Sauvignon--gobs of toasty oak and cassis fruit
1989 Domaine de Cayron Gigondas --gobs of thick, chewy, chocolate, hickory--gobs of flavored fruit
1995 Chateau De Cazeneuve --gobs of fruit
1991 Bruno Ceretto Barbera D'Alba Piana --gobs of cherry, strawberry and curranty fruit
1986 Certan de May Pomerol --gobs of extract, tannin and body
1982 Certan--gobs of Giraud Pomerol --gobs of sweet, jammy, earthy, tobacco, mocha, chocolate, berry fruit in nose
1992 Chalk Hill Chardonnay Estate --gobs of flavor
1993 Chalk Hill Chardonnay Estate Bottled --gobs of vanillin--gobs of scented new oak
1990 Chandon de Briailles Corton Bressandes --gobs of cherry fruit in finish
1994 Chandon de Briailles Corton Clos Du Roi --gobs of concentrated fruit
1993 Domaine de Chante Perdrix--gobs of overripe black--gobs of cherry, apricot, and peach--gobs of like fruit
1994 Chantegrive Graves Bordeaux Blanc --gobs of ripe fruit
1993 Chapellere Laurett Madiran --gobs of black fruits
1993 Chapoutier Hermitage Chante Alouette --gobs of fruit
1990 Chapoutier Barbe Rac CDP--gobs of glycerin
1992 Chapoutier CDP La Bernardine --gobs of rich, chewy fruit
1996 Chapoutier Crozes--gobs of Hermitage --gobs of ripe fruit
1994 Domaine de la Charbonniere CDP --gobs of rich black--gobs of cherry and raspberry fruit
1991 Domaine Jean Chauvenet --gobs of deep black--gobs of cherry and curranty fruit
1993 Chehalem Pinot Gris Reserve --gobs of fruit
1992 Chehalem Pinot Noir Ridge --gobs of earthy, black--gobs of cherry fruit
1992 les Chemins de Bassac Vdp D'Oc --gobs of red and black fruit
1991 Domaine du Chene Condrieu--gobs of heady, peachy apricot fruit
1987 Cheval Blanc St Emilion --gobs of sweet, smoky oak
1990 Cheval Blanc St Emilion --gobs of smoky, blackcurranty, and cherry fruit
1995 Domaine Cheysson Chiroubles --gobs of fresh, lively fruit
1990 Dom. de Chezeaux Gevrey Chambertin--gobs of glycerin
1993 Daniel Chopin--gobs of Groffier Clos De Vougeot --gobs of black--gobs of cherry fruit
1990 Daniel Chopin--gobs of Groffier Nuits St Georges --gobs of glycerin and alcohol
1994 Christom Pinot Noir Mt Jefferson Cuvee --gobs of black--gobs of cherry fruit
1993 Cigliuti Barbaresco Serraboella --gobs of cherry fruit, earth and cheese rind
1986 Cinnabar Cabernet Sauvignon Estate --gobs of fruit
1990 les Clos de Paulilles Collioure --gobs of spice
1993 Clos L'Escandil Minervois --gobs of black--gobs of raspberry fruit
1992 Clos Pegase Merlot Estate --gobs of attractive curranty, vanillin, smoky aromas
1991 J F Coche Dury Meursault Les Perrieres --gobs of juicy, succulent, lush fruit
1993 Colgin Schrader Cabernet Sauvignon--gobs of glycerin
1995 Colli Amerini Chardonnay Rocca Nernia --gobs of tropical fruit
1995 Colli Amerini Carbio --gobs of cherry fruit
1990 Colognole Chianti Ruffina --gobs of red and black fruits
1995 Domaine la Colombette Sauvignon Blanc --gobs of fruit
1990 Chateau la Colombiere C du Frontonnais --gobs of flavor and purity
1995 Jean--gobs of Luc Colombo Cornas Jlc --gobs of black fruits
1995 Jean--gobs of Luc Colombo Cornas La Louvee --gobs of black fruits
1994 Jean--gobs of Luc Colombo Cornas Les Ruchets --gobs of ripe fruit
1994 Concha Y Toro Merlot Trio --gobs of black--gobs of cherry fruit
1993 Jean--gobs of Jacques Confuron--gobs of black fruits, licorice, herbs and oak
1992 Jean--gobs of Jacques Confuron--gobs of fruit and glycerin
1992 Jean--gobs of Jacques Confuron--gobs of glycerin
1974 Conn Creek Cabernet Sauvignon --gobs of glycerin
1987 Giacomo Conterno Barolo Monfortino --gobs of glycerin
1990 Coppo Barbera D'Asti Pomorosso --gobs of glycerin
1990 Cormeil--gobs of Figeac St Emilion --gobs of rich, succulent black fuits and herbs
1993 Edmond Cornu Ladoix --gobs of cherry fruit, spice and oak
1993 Cosentino The Zin --gobs of cherry and raspberry flavor
1990 Coste--gobs of Caumartin Pommard Fremieres --gobs of tannin
1995 Domaine De La Cote CDP--gobs of tannin, structure and grip
1992 Coturri Cabernet Sauvignon--gobs of peppery, cassis fruit
1993 Coturri Pinot Noir Horn Vineyard --gobs of rich, jammy, sweet plum and raspberry fruit
1994 Coturri Zinfandel Philip Coturri Estate --gobs of spice, pepper and jammy black--gobs of cherries
1971 Coutet Cuvee Madame --gobs of botrytis
1990 Thomas Coyne Zinfandel --gobs of black--gobs of cherry and peppery black--gobs of raspberry fruit
1991 Thomas Coyne Zinfandel--gobs of black--gobs of cherry and peppery black--gobs of raspberry fruit
1994 Domaine Lucien Crochet Sancerre--gobs of fruit
1995 le Crock St Éstephe --gobs of sweet black--gobs of cherry and cassis fruit
1995 Yves Cuilleron St Joseph --gobs of fruit
1991 Yves Cuilleron Condrieu Vieilles Vignes --gobs of fruit and alcohol in finish
1992 Cuvaison Pinot Noir --gobs of flavor
1990 Dalla Valle Maya Proprietary Red Wine --gobs of sweet fruit
1992 Darting Ungsteiner Bettelhaus Riesling --gobs of bold, exotic fruit in nose and flavors
1995 Dauzac Margaux --gobs of jammy fruit
1992 de Loach Chardonnay --gobs of fruit
1990 de Loach Chardonnay O F S --gobs of fruit
1991 de Loach Chardonnay O F S --gobs of fruit
1993 de Loach Chardonnay O F S --gobs of tropical fruit

9. A sampling of word counts.

These word counts are taken from the 21,076 tasting notes in Parker's Wine Adviser and Cellar Manager, Version 3.71; this Version covers “The Wine Advocate” issues from February 21, 1992 through December 19, 1997.

Four words sometimes described as typical in Mr. Parker’s writing occur as follows:


gobs 	856	4.1%
hedonistic 	248	1.2%
over extracted 	199	0.9%
bomb 	28	0.1%

NB: the total word search returns 1090 occurrences for "gobs" [5.1%], so there is some sort of a sorting error in the data base. The most obvious explanation – more than one “gobs” in a TN – does not seem to hold true. The same discrepancy occurs with other words; one of the oddest is the high count of the letter “s” as a word, for example.

A selection of other interesting occurrences:


fruit 	11,270 	53.4%
nose 	8,256 	39.2%
I 	7,999 	38.0%
finish 	7,258 	34.4%
rich 	6,690 	31.7%
full bodied 	6,118 	29.0%
oak 	4,094 	19.4%
vanillin 	708 	3.4%
my 	2,666 	12.6%
reveals 	2,508 	11.9%
impressive 	2,284 	10.8%
concentration 	2,251 	10.7%
Plenty 	2,233 	10.6%
great 	2,118 	10.0%
Readers 	2,009 	9.5%
attractive 	1,949 	9.2%
outstanding 	1,932 	9.2%
jammy 	1,918 	9.1%
elegant 	1,875 	8.9%
smoky 	1,868 	8.9%
delicious 	1,857 	8.8%
purity 	1,794 	8.5%
personality 	1,720 	8.2%
extremely 	1,350 	6.4%
saturated 	1,076 	5.1%
extraordinary 	1,059 	5.0%
you 	759 	3.6%
exotic 	622 	3.0%
Kacher 	592 	2.8%
Profound	570	2.7%
unquestionably 	432 	2.0%
pain grille	115	0.7%

and so on.

Incidentally, “pain grille” is a recent and growing addition to the vocabulary:

Historically, the first reference was in the August 23, 1994 issue:

“1991 Domaine Capion Vdp Futs De Chene (86) - $7. Aged in oak barrels, the 1991 VDP Futs de Chene exhibits a tell-tale, smoky, vanillin scent, a pain grille note, plenty of red and black fruits, medium body, tasty, creamy richness, and a spicy, soft finish. Importer: European Cellars, Eric Solomon, New York, NY.”

Despite its lowly beginning, “pain grille” indicates a wine to watch:

2000-12-24T22:19:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas!
I cooked for 35 people tonight and am absolutely exhausted. I've been drinking 1990 Pierre Overnoy Vin Jaune all evening (I've been through 2 and 1/2 bottles and I'm not finished) and am in no shape to write anything coherent.

Merry Christmas to one and all!

2000-12-22T14:09:00.000-05:00

Some Christmas Thoughts from The Wine Importer

Dear a wine importer thinking out loud readers:

What a triumphant 2000 my blog has had, thanks to you!

We began the year with a very ambitious agenda: to be the unquestioned leader in wine importer self-promotion and blogging. Let us savor just how well we have met our goals.

As we previously reported, in the fiscal year that ended November 30th a wine importer thinking out loud achieved a record number of unique hits and record-breaking site traffic. The even more wonderful news is that once again the blog is off to a superb start in our new fiscal year with the publication of our Top 10 Louis/Dressner Selections Wines of the year. During the first twenty-two days, we have posted double-digit increases in net traffic and unique hits over the comparable period in fiscal 1999/2000.

We’ve achieved these numbers, of course, because of you, our blog reader, and your unprecedented demand for more and better wine blogs.

At a time of consolidation and cutbacks in web publishing elsewhere, our Team of Blog writers, with their unrivaled autonomy and empowerment, have recently
announced the creation of some half-dozen new wine blog projects, presenting many exciting new wines and new producers to the internet public. The potency and diversity of our U.S. blogging efforts are paralleled by our sister companies in France, Belize, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Trinidad where despite adverse local economic conditions, they are thriving.

In addition to development of our authors and our blogging programs, in 2000 we undertook major initiatives and made significant investments in key operational areas and in exciting new technologies. I’m not saying that our blog will be able to deliver wine aromas and tastes over the web in the next few weeks, but be patient and continue to follow this space.

In celebrating our many successes and new areas of growth for 2000, it is important to recommit ourselves to our core values as we set even greater goals for 2001. We look forward to continuing to be a blog site whose work ethic is second to none. A blog determined to carry forward its rich heritage of blogging and service excellence to meet the challenges of the readers and the blogging marketplace of the future. A blog site always striving to create an internet space where we can feel supported and stimulated.

a wine importer thinking out loud’s accomplishments in 2000 are certainly a tribute to our blogging excellence, but they are just as surely a tribute to our greatest strength and resource: you.

Thank you and Merry Christmas to All,

Joe Dressner

2000-12-22T08:36:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to Robert Callahan, Wine therapist
There are several forums on the web for wine discussions. Finally, someone has set-up an interesting community for people impassioned by real wine. Be sure to check-out Robert Callahan's Wine therapist Board. This promises to be an intelligent, humorous, pointed and controversial spot on the web for wine lovers. Callahan is doing a superb job of moderating and enlivening the board. Keep up the good work.

2000-12-21T22:18:00.000-05:00

Blog Back
The Blog server has been out the past three days and I have not added new zany and informative posts. Each night I had many interesting things to say but the server was down. I suppose I could have recorded my thoughts in an older technology like Microsoft Word and posted them here when the Blog server worked again, as my wife and children suggested, but to do so would have seemed at odds with the whole esprit du Blog. I am so drained from this three-day process of wasted and unchanneled creative energy that I have nothing to say tonight. I'm also very upset with the entire Peter Finkelstein affair, as is my wife and children. Cut the poor guy some slack, he's not calling for genocide! I also drank a bottle of Pierre Overnoy Savagnin today, which I'm tempted to add into one of the remaining slots of my top 10 list, but my wife and children feel it would be unwise for M. Overnoy to have two spots in the coveted Top 10 list. I received an e-mail from a well-known wine internet personality accusing me of being the Marquis de Sade of the wine internet. My wife and children find this characterization objectionable. Speaking of prominent internet wine personalities. Brad Kane has agreed to be the guest blogger on March 23rd. Mayor Lindsey died. Incredibly, I think Mayor Beame is still alive and still every bit as short.

2000-12-17T22:26:00.000-05:00

Numbers 5 and 6 of My Top 10 List of This Year's Louis/Dressner Selections' Imports
I’ve been busy working the past few days and apologize in advance for not having blogged lately. I am in desperate need of guest bloggers, something along the lines of what David Brenner and Jay Leno used to do for Johnny Carson. Any interested party should contact me by e-mail. I am going to need some help during the holiday season, particularly as one of my business partners is on vacation for the next three weeks. I will gladly tolerate opposing viewpoints, although it is hard to call this web site a ‘viewpoint.’

5. Quinta do Infantado Ports

We became port importers through a convoluted route. We used to work with Marcel Richaud in Cairanne, a very good producer, who took a vacation to Portugal in maybe 1995 or 1996, I forget. I happened to go visit Richaud after he came back and he insisted that I taste some open Infantado bottles he had brought back from the Douro. Richaud wound up there because the owners of Willy’s Wine Bar in Paris, who are good friends of Richaud, told him that he had to visit Infantado when in Portugal as they were simply the best. That they most closely approximated what Richaud was doing, real vignerons working their soil, letting their wine express their terroir. I was thrilled with the wine – by its authenticity and richness. So many ports are so dominated by sugar, here was a meio-seco, a semi-dry wine that didn’t emphasize sweetness as there was just so much material, so much terroir to show. I like naturally made wines not because they are ‘correct’ but because I think they make the best wines and here was a port estate moving toward organic viticulture which was not a consulting oenologists creation but the real item. You could taste it in the bottle. Honest.

I called friends in the States and Infantado was already represented, with the country divided between two importers. It being a small world, Robert Callahan turned out to be good friends with João Roseira from Infantado. Infantado eventually needed a new importer on the east coast and we got the gig.

You might object that it is unfair to have Quinta do Infantado ports as wine number 5 as there are so many different bottlings ranging from ruby, tawny to vintage. But to me, what is so striking about Infantado is the quality throughout their offerings. I don’t believe there is a better Ruby in the marketplace and the Organic Vintage Character along with the Estate Reserve are just smashing. It’s a domaine, not a négociant with a ‘low-end’ and a ‘high-end’ and much as the great domaines have a level of greatness throughout, Infantado makes great ports.

6. Clos de la Roilette Fleurie 1999 and Clos de la Roilette Fleurie Cuvée Tardive 1999

Once again, I’m cheating. There are two bottlings here, the regular and the Cuvée Tardive (a selection of the estate’s best parcels). I always visit the Cru Beaujolais in the February after the harvest and always stop first at the Coudert estate. Tastings here take forever as we taste many cuvées and then endless bottles of olders vintages are brought out. And we talk, chat, smoke (unfortunately I’ve had to quit as has Fernand Coudert, the father and founder of Roilette), joke and get a little drunk. It’s a ritual.

We started here with the 1989 vintage but 1991 was the best we’ve done. It was a great, even historic vintage for the Cru Beaujolais that was badly viewed as 1991 Red Burgundies had a bad reputation and the press/public always views the Beaujolais as a weaker sibling. But they pick earlier in Cru then in the Côte d’Or and 1991 was a superb summers until it rained. But everything was always in the cuverie at Roilette before the rains began. The vintage approximated the Côte Rotie more than Vosne-Romanée.

When I started tasting the Coudert 1999s I remembered the excitement of tasting the 1991s there. The 1999s are not far off. It’s a Fleurie, but in fact Roilette is really one of the great climates of Moulin-à-Vent. Don’t rush to drink this wine though. Put some aside and give it a few years.

The oddest thing about it all was that the vintage does not seem exceptional elsewhere. It is a good harvest, but northing more. Except for the Coudet.

Sentence fragments again.

I need some guest bloggers.

2000-12-13T22:44:00.000-05:00

Concerned Consumers Unnecessarily Upset Over Reported Mondeuse du Montagnieu Shortage
I've received numerous e-mails today from consumers worried about point 19 in my post yesterday:

19. Receive a fax from Franck Peillot telling us he is sold out of Mondeuse and has little Altesse left.

I have only myself to blame for this confusion. I forget that having an unabashedly self-promotional blog is a weighty responsibility. I'm afraid that I triggered an unwarranted Peillot panic today and want to apologize to everyone out there.

Yes, Franck Peillot has nothing left in his cellar and we have nothing more to buy. But containers have been shipped, another one is about to leave France and the last one will leave in two weeks. Peillot's Mondeuse is available and for sale throught the American distribution network, principally in New York, Connecticut, Boston, Detroit, Minnesota, Washington State, Arkansas, Las Vegas and Hawaii. From our narrow perspective of importer, the wine is sold out. Of course, the distributors, restaurants, hotels (in Las Vegas, a booming wine scene!) and retailers holding stock of this wonderful wine see the issue differently and I have received irate phone calls from many of them about my announcement that Mondeuse has depleted.

Maybe the Mondeuse should be on My Top 10 List of This Year's Louis/Dressner Selections' Imports. Spots 5 through 10 are still open. By the way, I want to delay revealing the remaining six wines as I would like the excitement to climax on New Year's Even when I will announce number 10. I'm also tired.

My Swiftfolder bike is at its creator's workshop in Brooklyn for repairs and modifications (see www.swiftfolder.com) and I am using my old hybrid bike. When riding my hybrid bike, my body is in a different, less comfortable position than it is on the Swiftfolder. My chest, which was recently cracked open for heart surgery, is aching tonight and making me tired. I wasn't going to add anything tonight to this site but felt that I was obligated to answer all your Mondeuse concerns. And hearing Vice-President Gore and Governor Bush speak tonight made me realize that it was important for the nation's unity that I continue my work here.

It has taken a while to get good wine from the Bugey into America and I am optimistic that we can change the marketplace here in America. I believe things happened for a reason, and I hope the long wait for Bugey wines will heighten a desire to move beyond the bitterness and anti-Bugey partisanship of the recent past.

Our nation must rise above a house divided. Americans share hopes, wines and goals and values far more important than any viticultural region. Republicans want the best for our nation. And so do Democrats.

Our preferences in wine may differ, but not our hopes.

I know America wants reconciliation and unity. I know Americans want progress. Americans want wines from France's Bugey region. And we must seize this moment and deliver.

Together, guided by a spirit of common sense, common courtesy, common goals, and the wines from France's Bugey region, we can unite and inspire the American citizens.

Together, we will work to make all our public school excellent, reaching every student of every background and every accent, so that no child is left behind.

Together, we will save Social Security and renew its promise of a secure retirement for generations to come.

Together we will strengthen Medicare and offer prescription drug coverage to all of our seniors.

Together, we will give Americans the broad, fair and fiscally responsible tax relief they deserve.

Together, we will put a chicken in every pot and a bottle of wine from France's Bugey region in every carafe. Whether that carafe is rich or poor. Black or white. Young or old.

Together, we will have a bipartisan foreign policy true to our values and true to our friends. And we will have a military equal to every challenge, and superior to every adversary.

Together, we will address some of society’s deepest problems one person at a time, but encouraging and empowering the good hearts and good works of the American people. This is the essence of compassionate wine importerism, and it will be a foundation of Joe Dressner's administration.

These priorities are not merely Joe Dressner's concerns, they are America's responsibilities.

During the fall campaign, we differed about details of these proposals - but there was remarkable consensus about the important issues before us: excellent schools, retirement and health security, tax relief, a strong military, the wines from France's Bugey region, and a more civil society.

We have discussed our differences; now is it is time to find common ground and build consensus to make America a beacon of opportunity in the 21st century.

I am optimistic this can happen. Our future demands it, and our history proves it. Two hundred years ago, in the election of 1800, America faced another close presidential election. A tie in the Electoral College put the outcome into the hands of Congress.

After six days of voting, and 36 ballots, the House of Representatives elected Thomas Jefferson, a great fan of the wines from France's Bugey region, the third President of the United States. That election brought the first transfer of power from one party to another in our new democracy.

Shortly after the election, Jefferson, in a letter titled reconciliation and reform, wrote this: “the steady character of our countrymen is a rock to which we may safely moor … Unequivocal in principle, reasonable in manner, we shall be able to hope to do a great deal of good to the cause of freedom, Mondeuse and harmony.”

Two hundred years have only strengthened the steady character of America. And so as we begin the work of healing our nation, tonight I call upon that character:

Respect for each other.

Respect for our differences

Generosity of spirit

Sentence Fragments.

And a willingness to work hard and work together to solve any problem.

I have something else to ask you to ask every American. I ask for you to pray for this great nation. I ask your prayers for leaders from both parities. And I ask you to pay for France's Bugey region.

I thank you for your prayers for me, my family, the Bugey and I ask you to pray for Vice President Garr and his family.

I have faith that with God’s help we as a nation will move forward together, as one nation, indivisible. And together we will create an America that is open, so every citizen has access to the American dream and a bottle of Bugey.

An America that is educated, so every child has the keys to realize that dream. And an America that is united in our diversity and our shared American values that are larger than race or party.

Bugey is more than a honor, more than an office. It is a charge to keep, and I will give it my all.

Thank you very much and God bless Bugerica.

Sleep well.

2000-12-12T21:59:00.000-05:00

My Apologies, I Was Too Busy to Write-Up Numbers 5 and 6 of My Top 10 List of This Year's Louis/Dressner Selections' Imports Today
Wow! We had over 11,000 unique hits yesterday! Who are all you people? Unfortunately they are all going to expect my numbers 5 and 6 tonight and I haven't had the time to write them up.

I've had a busy day as a wine importer and then went home to my children and dog. No time for my Top 10.

My work activities today included:

Rode my bicycle to work through 50 mph gusts. Almost lost my eyeglasses on the Williamsburg bridge. I'm blind without them.
Received a fax from Bernard Baudry that he had only 1/2 the quantities of wine we had ordered the day before.
A Boston retailer calls us to let us know that the fabulous Vacqueyras Cuvée Prestige 1998 has a cork saying 1999. What do we know about this and what does he tell his customers? It's all news to us. We fax the producer.
Received a fax from the Clos du Caveau verifying that they had made a mistake and used a cork with 1999 written across the cork to bottle their 1998 Vacqueyras Cuvée Prestige (or maybe it was their Cuvée Spéciale). The wine is exceptional, so I'm not too upset. I have them fax us an explation of this error, Denyse translates, we fax retailers who have this wine in stock.
One of our suppliers is doing a survey. They want me to answer by e-mail the following question: "What does our Domaine mean to you?"
Responded to a fax from a producer in Mâconnais who wonders why he is not being paid. Oddly, he is being paid.
Worked on the Louis/Dressner web site.
A distributor in New York needs Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Registrations we have for Claude Maréchal's Chorey-les-Beaune, along with an authorization letter from us, addressed to Mr. To Whom This May Concern, to use our BATF registration. They had ordered one case of this wine and customs was threatening to hold up an entire container of wine if they did not have this all-important material. We dropped everything.
Another distributor in another state calls to ask us to fax them immediately our BATF registrations for François Legros' Chambolle-Musigny and Amiot-Servelle's Bourgogne Rouge along with an authorization letter from us to use our registrations. Customs was threatening to hold up their container.
A retailer calls asking why his 5 cases of Domaine de la Ferme St-Martin Côte-du-Rhône was not delivered. Inquiries are made. Retailer calls back 10 minutes later to say the trucker had just arrived.
I call a distributor in the midwest to find out why they have not paid our bills. They say they did not receive invoices when the goods shipped three months ago. We fax them the invoices.
I order a Casio EM-500 PDA. This will make my life fabulously organized and allow me to take copious notes in grower's cellars of future contestents for the Top 10 List of This Year's Louis/Dressner Selections' Imports. I bought the first model of the Palm Pilot when they came out years ago, but tired of using them. I now slavishly purchase and use anything that has anything to do with Bill Gates. Its unlike me, but I've become a syncophant of Microsoft.
I field phone calls from three different telecommunications companies that want us to sign-up for their long-distance plan. I tell them we pay 3 cents a minute for France and they say they can't match that but offer other, innumerable benefits.
A stockbroker calls and calls me Joe immediately, talking to me like we're long lost high-school buddies. I hang up the phone while he's talking.
A consumer calls from Florida. He likes only one wine in the world, the Brouilly Vieilles Vignes from Jean-Paul Ruet. But it is not available in Florida. His son lives in Brooklyn and will be driving to Florida soon and he would like his son to buy two cases from a New Yorker retailer and transport the wine to him. Of course, all this is illegal and I want nothing to do with the whole affair.
A vague social acquaintance is having a company party at a restaurant in Manhattan. She calls and wants to know how we can get the restaurant to buy our wines, in lots of three to six bottles, perhaps four different wines.
I get called "Lou" for the first time in two weeks. A secretary from one of our distributor customers calls and asks for Kevin. I tell her that Kevin is not in and she says: "Oh, this must be Lou." I don't argue the point with her.
Receive a fax from a producer who wants to know when we are going to finally ship the wine we reserved. We have no prospect of selling his wine, but I suppose we will ship it at the beginning of the year and lose money.
Receive a fax from Franck Peillot telling us he is sold out of Mondeuse and has little Altesse left.
I receive yet another e-mail from Brad Kane. He seems to have been embolded by the turn-around in George W. Bush's fortunes.
I left a message on the voice mail of our best retail customer in the Detroit area. I have done this for months, since we shipped him a load of wine over the summer, and he doesn't call back. He will call back one of these days and order a lot of wine and we will ship it to him. He will then not call back for months.
I sent faxes to various distributors around the country reminding them to pay some bills.
Went to lunch.
Returned to work and the day continued in much the same fashion as above.

2000-12-11T19:37:00.000-05:00

Corrected Mâcon-Vire
The entire senior management team at Louis/Dressner Selections thought that the special bottling we now have in this country was the Domaine de Roally Mâcon-Viré Cuvée 41-H. We were wrong and the wine is in fact called the Domaine de Roally Mâcon-Viré Cuvée 54-H. Our apologies to everyone out there who asked for a 41-H and could only find a 54-H. We have received angry phone calls from several retailers who were accused of fraudently peddling Cuvée 54-H in a marketplace that wants Cuvée 41-H. Please, please....there is no 41-H, it was an error on our part.

The 54-H was the wine that took nearly two years to bubble to completed fermentation. It is good. It was in one small steel vat, which I could have sworn was 41-H, but which turned out to be 54-H. I stopped using my Palm Pilot in people's cellars a couple of years ago. Its too bad, because I was able to keep on top of details like this when I was equipped with that machine. I then switched last year to a Vadem Clio, which is a clamshell Windows CE device, but I spilled wine from the Clos du Tue Boeuf (I believe it was the Menu Pineau) on the keyboard in the beginning of a one month trip to France. Since, I had a 30 days, no question asked guarantee with the unfortunate company that sold me the machine, I returned it for a full refund. I then bought another Vadem Clio from another unfortunate company and dropped it on the floor after two weeks of happy usage. American Express refunded that one. That Vadem Clio was a technological tour de force and they no longer make the machine. So, for the past year I have been without some sort of gadget.

I recently bought a Casio EM-500 PocketPC and hope that by using this sophisticated piece of machine I will be able to keep track of the different cuvée in Henri Goyard's cellar. Although Goyard has retired and his vintage 2000 will be his last harvest.

Again, my apologies.

Stolen Chambolle-Musigny from François Legros
Speaking of theft and fraud...there have been a number of stories this past week about criminal rings being broken up in Burgundy.

Late this afternoon, we received a phone call from an anonymous Long Island teenager who had stolen a bottle of François Legros' Chambolle-Musigny from his father's cellar and drank the bottle. Turns out, the father has not noticed the theft but has subsequently spoken of his affection for this wine. The teenager called our office asking where he could buy a substitute.

Of course, we are firmly against teenagers buying alcoholic beverages. Additionally, the wine is sold out.

The anonymous teenager told me that he in fact enjoyed the wine.

2000-12-10T18:25:00.000-05:00

Numbers 1 and 2 of My Top 10 List of This Year's Louis/Dressner Selections Imports
OK, perhaps this is a crass thing to do but who cares? The following were my favorite wines that Louis/Dressner Selections imported this past year. To qualify, wines had to arrive after December 31, 1999 and before January 1, 2001 (Eric Texier's Côte Rotie won't be here until after January, so it does not qualify, for instance).This list is inherently subjective and self-serving -- I am a principal in Louis/Dressner Selections after all -- and is part of this web site's campaign of unabashed self-promotion.

Domaine des Terres Dorées Beaujolais Rouge Mise Printemps 1999 -- actually the Mise Printemps does not appear on the label, but this was the first bottling of the young vines cuvée from Terres Dorées. I consumed about 24 bottles of this, with some help, during July in St-Gengoux-de-Scissé, where I have a home. I had gone there after undergoing 4 heart bypasses in late May in New York. Food and wine tasted terrible for several weeks after the operation and then white wines started to taste well. My cardiologist assured me this was a common reaction due to all the anesthethia that had been loaded into my system. I had tried to have natural bypasses, using techniques I learned as a Lamaze coach for the birth of my two children, but the surgeon would not go for my idea. But by late June though, I could taste and enjoy reds once again.

Jean-Paul Brun of Terres Dorées was nice enough to come visit me in St-Gengoux after we arrived and to bring two cases of the above wine. The flavors were intense for me -- beautiful red fruits, delicate cherries and spice, perfectly balanced with just the right amount of acidity. A finish that seemed to go on forever. The 24 bottles were among the most pleasurable wines of my life. This wine may not appear anywhere else as the Wine of the Year (The Wine Spectator has already published their list and I am waiting to see the other lists) but frankly I don't care.
Clos Rougeaurd Saumur-Champigny Clos Poyeux 1997 -- I have commented about this wine somewhere below. It is radioactive. The Bourg might be the better wine in the future, but for perfect drinking, right now, this is just superb.

More to come....

2000-12-03T23:41:00.000-05:00

Quick Thoughts About The Wine Spectator Top 100

I just returned from vacation and read my e-mail. Someone was kind enough to send me The Wine Spectator's Top 100 Wines of the Year.

Much to my astonishment, I not only agree with all 100 wines chosen, but I also agree with the order of preference.

They're doing great work over there on Park Avenue South!

2000-11-27T20:43:00.000-05:00

Some Thoughts Before Leaving on Vacation
The wine business is exhausting. From planting the vines, to pruning and cultivating the fields, to treating the vineyards (of course, only with organic concotions), to our annual summer green harvest (although I think we are finally getting to the point where we will simply prune in an extreme fashion rather than wait for vine growth to get out of hand during the summer), then the harvest, vinification, élévage, bottling, label registrations with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms, shipping the wines and having customs break up the container to be certain there is no contraband hidden in the boxes of wine and that the real labels correspond to the labels we registered with BATF (see above), finding customers for the wines, negotiating sample allocations, pricing structures, and marketing strategies with distributors in 20+ states, participating in distributor tastings around the country where I tell everyone that Helen Turley was the consulting oenologist for our Cour-Cheverny producer François Cazin.

Then we take out full-page advertisements in The Wine Spectator in the hopes that this will buy us favorable reviews only to discover that something named Cinq Cépages from a Château that isn’t even in France or a country that speaks French is the Wine of the Year, to hearing people call me Lou Dressner (even though there is no such person), to having people tell me how much they respected my late father Lou Dressner who I'm told was one of the great men of the wine trade (my father’s name is Sam, he is alive and he has never been in the wine business, although his profession has never been clear to his immediate family (by the way, the company is named Louis/Dressner because Denyse Louis was one of the two original partners (the other being myself) before we went public and I felt as a gentleman we should put her name first with a slash seperating our two names)), on to shipping fabulous wines from France that undergo secondary fermentations when they arrive in our warehouse.

Then there are in-store consumer tastings with plastic cups that dental hygenists would not use for mouthwash, to being ‘bill-backed’ by the stores that do the in-store consumer tastings for the cost of the plastic cups, to chasing our modest bills from customers making millions of dollars selling wines from California and enormous French négociants that taste well in plastic cups who insist that the "check is in the mail." Next I'm thrown off numerous wine internet boards on the grounds that I'm delusional and not writing enough about wine (i.e. smelled like raspberries, long finish of cassis that lingered forever), then having four heart by-passes done by a wonderful surgeon named Aubrey Claudius Gallaway who bears an uncanny resemblance to Pierre-Jacques Druet of Bourgeuil, to finally sitting back and drinking a fabulous Clos Habert 1998 Demi-Sec from François Chidaine in Mountlouis and plotting sales of thousands of cases across America to discover that Chidaine has only 20 cases of the cuvée left in France and did not make any in 1999....it is an exhausting profession.

I'm ready for a vacation. Denyse and I are off to a small sailboat in a non-viticultural ocean tomorrow where there is no phone, no wine reviews and no government warnings. I am bringing the collected works of Sidney Sheldon with me and plan on reading them in their entirety using techniques I learned years ago when taking an Evelyn Woods Speed Reading Course. Or maybe it was Stanley Kaplan, I forget. Regardless, I’ve never read any of Sheldon’s books but have always noted the rave reviews he gets from Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times. So, I will not be around for about a week and this new site of mine will not change for a few days.

The Clos Rougeard from Frères Foucault

Some parting thoughts: the firm I work for, Louis/Dressner Selections, has a cult wine in a country where no one has ever heard of the producer. There are a few Loire geeks and some French sommeliers who know about the Clos Rougeard made by the Frères Foucault but not altogether that many. But in France, people don't say their names, they whisper it, almost in awe -- The Frères Foucault. Often it is in fear, although no one knows what there is to be afraid about. No one can get an appointment there, no one can find the wine outside of three star restaurants and a legend has built up around Nady and Charlie Foucault. France is also filled with thousands of people who are ‘super-copain’ (loosely translated this means big buddies) with Nady or Charlie or both, but one is never certain if this is true or not since it is rare to get an audience with the Foucault where one can verify who they do in fact know or not know..

The wine is cabernet franc from great vineyards that have been in the family for generations. For generations, the Foucault family has worked the vineyards organically before people talked about 'organic' or had certifying authorities that require endless paperwork as part of the certification procedure. The Foucault have always limited yields to incredibly low quantities to get concentration, raised their wine in barrels (even the great-grandfather who was a tonnelier) and never deformed the wine with oakiness because the oak always helped the élévage of great raw materials. Their cellar is cold, damp and houses innumerable treasures.

Years ago, Charles Joguet was viewed in America as the signature producer of Cab Franc in the Loire. Joguet now has nothing to do with the estate that bears his name, having been bought out and thrown out by his accountant, and there is no doubt that the Foucault are making the highest expression of Cabernet Franc on this planet. The wines are just plain radioactive. Even better than Bruce Schneider!

We get three cuvées: the Clos, Clos Poyeux, Bourg. We just got in the 1997s and they are expensive and rare and grab some if you can find them. There are a few stores and restaurants in New York, some in Boston, maybe on the West Coast, perhaps someone in Detroit. There is no secondary, grey or auction market as the wines have not been reviewed by Robert Parker, The Wine Spectator or any of the usual suspects. So I doubt you will find any.

2000-11-26T16:07:00.000-05:00

A Useful E-Mail Received About a Thoughtful Web Site
I just received an e-mail from one of this site's readers suggesting that I take a look at The Definitive Guide to Shaving. This Totalshavingsolution commercial site plugs a product similar to the Somerset Shaving Oil that I discussed in my post below. But if the careful reader eliminates the commercial aspects of the site that are there solely for narrow promotional reasons, they will encounter a rather long, detailed and well-thought out analysis of optimal shaving techniques. The site covers many important issues such as:

The eternal question of whether long or short shaving strokes are the best way to shave a beard.
How to compensate for dreaded razor drag.
How to avoid skin irritation.
The problem of razor clog.
Handling bleeding problems.
Aftershave: Yes or No?
Should shaving be done in the shower and can it be done using the revolutionary braille method?
and many others....

While I do not agree with all the commercial conclusions made by this site, and one should bear in mind that they are trying to sell product, there is still much thought-provoking material that I think is of interest to everyone.

2000-11-26T10:49:00.000-05:00

Additional Thoughts about Charles McCabe, My Favorite Critic
I shaved about 30 minutes ago and realize that I left out an important element of my shaving philosophy.

I have to do a great deal of travelling as a wine importer. I spend the summer months in France, where we have a home in the Mâconnais, but use our home to travel around viticultural France to see our vignerons. In February I go to France for between three and four weeks to taste the new vintage, talk business with our growers, and usually to take some gullible American customers of ours on a tour of our producers. Lastly, I have to travel in America, visiting various cities where I try to convince gullible distributors, retailers and restaurant owners to buy our wines. All this travelling is extremely wearing and I have spent years trying to figure out how to pack for these various trips.

Bear in mind that I am large fellow and my clothes take lots of space in my luggage. For several years I would pack for my winter trip with enough clothes to last for two weeks, which usually required two suitcases that were tiresome and draining to drag around with me. I would time my trip so that I would wind-up in the Beaujolais after about two weeks and quickly get my clothing to a dry cleaner/blanchisserie in Anse (near Villefranche). By sheer coincidence the two brothers who own the dry cleaner are childhood friends of our former supplier of Rully and Givry and they would quickly do my clothing, although they would not give me a discount. Commercial clothing cleaning is extremely expensive in France -- the whole deal would cost me about $40 to $50, depending on the currency -- and is more of a luxury service than in New York City, where I reside for most of the year. New York City seems to have thousands of dry cleaners, even more dry cleaners than Duane Reade Drug Stores, and all of these dry cleaners bill themselves as authentic French Dry Cleaners. Of course, there is no such thing as a French Dry Cleaner and I have always wondered what the origin of this term might be. When I first started going to France I tried to figure out if there was a truly a native dry cleaner culture, distinct from the American dry cleaner culture, that has inspired our dry cleaner industry. This is the case for French cuisine, for instance, but does not turn out to be the case for dry cleaning.

My neighborhood in Manhattan has one French Dry Cleaner per 12.3 residents, according to the latest Census Bureau figures. There is even a cleaner named Madame Paulette. There is no Madame Paulette at Madame Paulette and the whole story makes no sense. I understand why California WIneries call their wineries Château Something-or-Other, as this recalls the prestigous wine estates of France and is a clever marketing ploy. But why French Dry Cleaners?

Anyhow, I had no choice but to end this packing/travelling regiment because we stopped buying wine from our Givry/Rully producer who was overcropping and raising prices in direct proportion to his annual yield increases, leading to a dilute wine of little interest to anyone. Our Givry/Rully producer was a good friend and I always regretted that we stopped working with him, but we had little choice as the wine was becoming dilute and bad. Simultaneously, his wine was selling like crazy in France at high prices and he had no incentive to do any better. Of course, this ruined our friendship with the grower and I was quite depressed by the whole turn of affairs. Given that I was no longer going to see the grower, I could not in good conscience take my dirty laundry to his dry cleaning childhood friends in Anse!

Around the same time, I stumbled upon Doug Dyment's excellent web site on travelling with one carry-on bag: The Compleat Carry-On Traveller. Having studied this site, I now travel with but one carry-on bag filled with polyester clothing (all of which have several secret pockets to carry money and sensitive documents) that signal Europeans that I am an American rube. I also have various gadgets that are meant to lighten my travel load.

This brings me back to the problem of shaving. I've never liked an electric razor, even when it was dual voltage, and have always preferred the manual jobs. The problem is which shaving cream to travel with? For years I liked Noxzema and would buy their smaller can for travel, even though it was still quite large and consumed a large spot in my luggage. But Noxzema stopped producing the small can (although maybe they still produce them but New York City's Duane Reade Drug Stores have discontinued carrying the small cans) and I would have no choice but to carry the enormous regular Noxzema regular size can. I suppose what I always liked about Noxzema was that it was 'medicated' and seemed truly bracing first thing in the morning. But when I thought about it, it made no sense to cover your face with a white cream that made it impossible to see the very skin you were shaving. Some years ago I tried Edge Gel, which is transparent and comes in convenient travel sizes, but I found it gave a horrible shave. It turned out that Edge's protective shielding gel not only made it impossible to cut or nick your skin, it also made it impossible to shave your beard.

Finally, through the advise of Doug Dyment, I have discovered Somerset Shaving Oil. As Mr. Somerset says:

At first, it seems totally impractical: requiring only two or three drops of this lightly fragranced liquid to be rubbed into the beard. What follows has to be experienced to be believed.

A liberal splash of water activates its extraordinary lubricating powers, allowing the blade to simply glide through the toughest bristle.

It's 100% natural, made from only pure essential oils and menthol giving an almost perfect shave, free from nicks and razor burn. It contains no alcohol or astrigants and won't irritate even the most sensitive skin. Used over a period of time, the oil actually conditions, leaving the face moisturised and supple.

It's also incredibly economical, each little 1/4 oz bottle delivering up to 90 perfect shaves. And being small,it's also very portable - perfect for travelling!

I give this product my strongest recommendation -- if I had a choice between a 1997 Saumur-Champigny Poyeux, an absolutely radioactive bottle of wine from the Frères Foucault and the Somerset Shaving Oil I would take the Poyeux, but would regret it the next morning when I woke up to shave. Click on the link above and you go the the Magellans web site, where you can order this wonderful product. Magellans specializes in travel gear and I have no commercial relationship with them. But, if you order Somerset Shaving Oil by December 15th and mention that Joe Dressner, A Wine Importer, sent you there, they will ship you a complementary bottle of California Cult Cabernet! Please note that the Magellans' on-line order screen has a spot for a special message to their customer service staff -- you should mention The Joe Dressner, A Wine Importer, Promotional California Cult Cab Offer in that spot. Alternatively, if you speak to them by phone, please mention promotional offer TJDAWIPCCCO. In fact, if you mention TJDAWIPCCCO on the on-line order form it should be sufficient to get you the free bottle.

2000-11-25T18:04:00.000-05:00

Charles McCabe, My Favorite Critic
I get so sick of Parker, The Wine Spectator and all the various other wine journalists that I often think of Charles McCabe, my favorite critic.I should note here that I do like Steve Tanzer, who I know personally, for being somewhat more tentative then the rest of the bunch. And of course, Steve is a helluva-a-guy!

McCabe was a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle along with Herb Caen -- a powerful one-two morning punch for City residents. I lived in San Francisco from 1975 to 1980 and greatly enjoyed both columnists, McCabe was perhaps best know for his motto Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art, but I always remember him for his muckraking columns against America's razor blade manufacturers.

McCabe's theory was that America's razor manufacturers were intentionally making blades that required weekly replacement. Periodically, they would develop new shaving technologies that were seemingly superior -- the twin-edged and then triple-edged blade come to mind, although McCabe did not live to see the triple-edged. At product launch, these new blades would be extremely-sharp and last weeks. But as months and years went by, the razor companies would purposely lower the level of razor quality, ensuring that once again the shaver had to replace the blade on a weekly basis. This would create a perceived market need for an even newer technology and a new product would be introduced yet again that would work fine for several months and then once again degrade in quality. Ad infinitim.

I was very happy with Gilette's entry into the triple-edged market and was perhaps one of the first consumers to buy the Mach III when it was introduced. In fact, I was so overwhelmed with the performance of this machine, I was enthusiastically converted to Gillette's contention that this was the most important shaving innovation since the 1960s (although I was too young to shave until about 1968). But two years have gone by and I note that the blade cartridge, which seemed almost immortal at product introduction, now requires constant replacement. And those hard to get smooth spots are becoming the impossible to get smooth spots.

Happily, Alyce Dressner, my 12 1/2 year old daughter, constantly peruses the Drugstore.com site and I learned that the Schick company has now come up with its own triple-bladed system, the XTreme III (Schick XTreme III Site). Of course I immediately seized the opportunity to order these new razors and found the overall experience to be qualitatively superior to the Mach III. But still, it lacked the excitement that was there when the Mach III first came into the market. The XTreme III is incrementally better than the Mach III, but nothing more than that.

During this time of disappointment, I accidentally tried out another Schick blade. I am currently going to a physical therapist three times a week to remobilize my chest. My chest, which was once mobile, was recently cracked open to make way for four heart bypasses. Or quadruples bypasses, as they say in the medical trade.My physical therapist turns out to be organized like a luxury gym and oddly my insurance pays for the whole shebang, including the luxury showers outfitted with luxury cosmetics and razor blades. Just this week, they changed blades from an uninteresting Gillette disposable to a fascinating ergonomic Schick twin blade that I had never seen and that I decided to try out. What a shave!

It is not principally the ergonomic design of the razor that makes it so interesting as it is the inclusion of the One-Push Cleaning System. The shaver pushes this button during the shave and a clever mechanism pushes a small plastic strip between the twin blades, quickly dislodging any dirt or whiskers that might lead to clogging and eventual blade dulling. Again, I cannot recommend this blade highly enough and hope all interested readers will take the time to look at Schick's inspired web site dealing with this new technology: The Schick ST Disposable. Not only is this the best blade in the marketplace but it is also one of cheapest -- I bought a 15-pack today at Rite-Aid Drugs for only $5.99! Of course, there is always the possibility that the razor will go dull in several months or in a year. But until then I'm convinced.

There is a lesson here for wine lovers. They've been making twin-blades and disposables for some time now. Finally, it is an incremental improvement to an old and tested design that qualitatively advances the shaving experience. Not fancy new shavers or elaborate blades. The market always come back to the tried and true and demonstrably effective. Novelty, for the sake of novelty, eventually fatigues.

There is a lesson here for wine lovers.....

2000-11-24T07:59:00.000-05:00

Thinking About Beaujolais Nouveau on the Day After Thanksgiving

I was unduly pessimistic and had a lovely time. Great Neck is cultured, civilized and they make delicious overly-elaborate-mishmash-dishes.

It was a good idea to bring wine. They had a Linden Chardonnay from the State of Virginia, "aged in new barrels" according to the wine's back label, that they were very enthused about. The back label also told us that the wine has lots of exotic fruits and was delicious. I view these type of back labels on American wines as a great service to the consumer, cautionary notes that are far more important than the useless Government Warning (I rarely drive and will never be pregnant) and am always pleased that the winery is considerate enough to warn that the wine is going to be over-oaked and over-yeasted and generally horrible. So, I drank the Domaine des Terres Dorées Nouveau instead. My mother liked the Nouveau a great deal but she is inclined to like our wines and in no sense can be considered a barometer of popular public taste. I agreed with her though.

My view of wine has very much been shaped by working with Jean-Paul Brun of the Domaine des Terres Dorées in the Beaujolais. Denyse and I have worked with Jean-Paul for 10 vintages and our notion of non-interventionist winemaking and the importance of natural yeasts dates to our initial tastings with Jean-Paul. Jean-Paul was receiving press in France for his beautiful production of non-yeasted and non-chaptalized Beaujolais, something that seemed almost revolutionary when compared to the the bottlings from Georges Duboeuf which still dominate the Beaujolais scene.

Until recently, Duboeuf was using an industrial yeast called the 71B, which was added to his wines during fermentation and which gave aromas of bananas and tasted like candies. Duboeuf has now moved on to other industrial yeasts and a system called thermo-vinification but Jean-Paul remains part of the tiny minority of Beaujolais vignerons who still produce something authentic. We loved Jean-Paul's wines when we first tasted them and realized that his notion of winemaking was central to making wine rather than beverages. Jean-Paul remains a maverick, constantly hounded by the local authorities in the Beaujolais for bucking modern trends, but over the years we have been able to find growers like him from all over France. But the vigernons working naturally are truly rare today and the industrial beverage-making segment of the wine business dominates both the new world and the old.

Take the Linden Chardonnay I could have consumed in Great Neck yesterday. What is this thing I didn't drink? I consulted their web site today for more information. Particularly intriguing is their use of both Burgundian and Australian yeasts! What could they possibly be talking about?

The world has gone mad and the people at Linden Chardonnay couldn't be happier! Of course Linden Chardonnay itself is of little importance. I had to travel to my cousin's Thanksgiving celebration in Great Neck to see a bottle of the stuff for the first time and I still haven't drank a drop. What is more important is what Linden Chardonnay says about the current wine zeitgeist. Perhaps I'm nuts, but doesn't the following description sound like a repulsive, concoted wine with little relationship to nature, vines, wine or enjoyment?

1996 Chardonnay
Aromas: Pear, melon, almond and hazelnut.

Flavors: Apple, toasty oak, and vanilla with a creamy, citrus finish.

Food Pairings: Rich fish like salmon, or earthy foods like risotto with mushrooms and roast chicken with polenta.

Vineyards: Estate Vineyard (79%), Fauqier Co., on top of the Blue Ridge at an elevation of 1,350 feet on a south and east slope. Deep, well drained, volcanic origin, greenstone based soils. Vine age is between 9 and 14 years. Contributes pear aromas and a crisp, citrus finish.

Flint Hill Vineyard (21%), Rappahannock Co., elevation of 900 feet, rolling terrain with several soil types. Vine age is between 16 and 18 years. Contributes melon flavors and a rich middle.

Vintage: Cool summer and a cooler fall. Harvest dates were Oct. 3 & 4, 1996.

Winemaking: 100% barrel fermented in 95% French oak and 5% American oak using Burgundian and Australian yeasts. Aged on the lees in the barrel for 10 months. Bottle aged for 18 months before release. This wine ages wonderfully for many years. 1,065 cases produced.

2000-11-23T09:41:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving Wines

Frankly, no wine is going to go well with our Thanksgiving dinner. Its not even a dinner, as it is starting at 3 pm and my cousins live in Great Neck, a suburb of New York City. My son Jules finds this early-eating barbaric but not surprising, as it is taking place in a barbaric suburb. Jules has nothing against Great Neck but perceives all suburban life as barbaric. He is only 14 1/2 and lacks the experience and maturity to know just how right he is about 3 pm Turkey dinners and Great Neck.

We're invited to a relative who will make a mishmash of sweet and salty dishes to prove how creative and talented they are in the kitchen. Some of these dishes will probably taste terrific and we'll no doubt have a good time. Beer would probably be a much better companion to this meal (although I leave what goes well with cranberry sauce to greater minds than myself).

Since Denyse and I are wine importers we have to bring wine. Generally, my relatives know little about wine but think it is nice that we have wines that have the name Dressner on the back label. At least that is the view in my father's family, where they tend to have the name Dressner and our wines can be viewed as vanity items. Unfortunately the Thanksgiving dinner is at relative's on my mother's side and they couldn't care less about the Dressner name being on the back label. They like wines from Long Island. We will have to pretend that we like the wine that our hosts serve. We won't.

I'm bringing a Beaujolais Nouveau from Domaine des Terres Dorées as an aperitif -- every wine critic says that Noveau goes well with Turkey but they are out of their minds. But as an aperitif it should be nice and Denyse has not drank the wine since it arrived this week. I'm also bringing a Bernard Baudry Chinon Croix Boisés 1998, a great wine from a great site in an average years. Of course, sweet wines are always a hit so I'm bringing the Château Pierre Bise Quarts des Chaume 1997 and an Estate Reserve Port from Quinta do Infantado.

American holidays are always difficult for me as I fear major disasters are taking place unattended at work. Our vigernons are not on holiday and who knows what urgent faxes are being sent to our office as I type these notes. I'll go in tomorrow in the hopes of defusing several major crisis and avoiding imminent bankruptcy. I have a family to support, you know.