In wake of some of the latest chatter about The Wine Trials 2010 (this one from Joe Briand, wine buyer for New Orleans’ excellent Link Restaurant Group, e.g. Cochon, Herbsaint, with a response from Wine Spectator executive editor Thomas Matthews), I thought it was time for a quick clarification of first principles here.

People have sometimes (often, maybe) misinterpreted The Wine Trials (and The Wine Trials 2010) as making the claim that no expensive wines are worth the money, or that cheap wine is generally “better” than expensive wine. In fact, I make neither one of those claims in the book.

Rather, my basic points are these:

(1) Evidence has shown that most everyday wine drinkers (not wine professionals) don’t prefer more expensive wines to cheaper wines in blind tastings. This is separate from the question of whether the properties of expensive wines are aesthetically superior in the minds of experts.

(2) Many (but certainly not all) expensive wines, such as the luxury brands from LVMH—which are advertised much like the group’s TAG Heuer watches, De Beers diamonds, Guerlain perfume, or Louis Vuitton handbags—are overpriced because such a large portion of their cost base is spent on marketing. This doesn’t just go for superpremium wines like LVMH’s Château d’Yquem, Krug, and Dom Pérignon; it also goes for brands like Cloudy Bay, a straightforward New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc whose price—without any apparent change in the production method—rose from about $15 per bottle to about $30 per bottle after LVMH acquired the brand in 2003 and began marketing Cloudy Bay as a luxury product.  To me, when the consumer dollar is going more toward advertising than toward materials or production, it’s a paradigm case of overpricing. It bothers me that the mainstream wine media doesn’t take brands to task for this. Read the rest of this entry »

The Times of London reports that Italian Minister of Agriculture Luca Zaia has dissolved the mozzarella di bufala campana consortium after a series of inspections revealed that “25 per cent of the cheese sold as buffalo mozzarella was fake because it contained 30 per cent cow milk.” Mozzarella di bufala, with its wonderfully funky water-buffalo-milk notes, is one of the main ingredients in some versions of margherita DOP pizza (although it’s not, as Alan Richman has wrongly stated, a required ingredient). It’s also frequently served raw as an appetizer, either on its own or with ham.

The Italian Ministry of Agriculture has a recent history of operating at the curious intersection of neofascism and culinary purism. Zaia’s “zero-tolerance policy” on food fraud became famous with his 2008 bust-up of cheating Brunello di Monalcino producers, which was hailed as a victory for consumers. But in a less-reported crackdown the following year, Zaia, a member of the extreme-right-wing Lega Nord—the political party that has advocated the seccession of Northern Italy—also instituted, with Berlusconi’s backing, a policy banning new “ethnic” restaurants from opening in certain northern Italian cities, including Lucca and Milan. It was a move that the left-wing newspaper La Stampa called “culinary ethnic cleansing.” Reporting on the policy, the Times of London quoted Lucca city spokesman Massimo Di Grazia as saying that “French restaurants would be allowed”; he was “unsure, though, about Sicilian cuisine. It is influenced by Arab cooking.” Continued the Times: “Asked if he had ever eaten a kebab, Mr Zaia said: ‘No—and I defy anyone to prove the contrary. I prefer the dishes of my native Veneto. I even refuse to eat pineapple.’” This, from the country’s Minister of Agriculture.

Sometime in 2001 or 2002, I recall meeting, and discussing pure-ingredient fervence with, Giorgio Alemanno, who was Italy’s Minister of Agriculture at the time (this was two Ministers ago). The man talked about wine with great passion. And like Zaia, he was also an absolute right-wing zealot. Read the rest of this entry »

In the course of reading Robert M. Parker, Jr.’s new Parker’s Wine Bargains: The World’s Best Wine Values Under $25, I noticed a couple of strange things. First, I was surprised to find the same winery, Casa Lapostolle—one of Chile’s most prominent producers—listed in both the Argentina and Chile chapters of the book, which were each authored by Wine Advocate critic Jay Miller (who was recently criticized in the Wall Street Journal for accepting a lavish junket in Argentina, which was first exposed by Dr. Vino).

And in the index, there are two successive entries for the winery: “Casa Lapostolle (Argentina), 14; Casa Lapostolle (Chile), 84.”

I figured this was just an editing/database mistake. It happens.

But things got stranger when I actually compared the reviews of the exact same wines in the two chapters. Aside from the words “black currant” and “black fruits,” their descriptions turned out to be totally different from each other. Here they are:

(From Argentina chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Merlot Cuvée Alexandre Apalta Vineyard. This Merlot has an attractive nose of black currant, blueberry, vanilla, and clove. The wine has good weight on the palate with layers of black fruits and a firm structure. Drink it during its first 6 years of life.”

(From Chile chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Merlot Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandre. The Merlot Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandra [sic] has aromas of cedar, spice box, black cherry, and black currant followed by a smooth-textured, ripe Merlot with ample savory black fruits, good depth, and a moderately long finish.”

Blueberry, vanilla, and clove have been replaced by cedar, spice box, and black cherry. Is there a wine-adjective dartboard in the house?

Moving on to the second double…

(From Argentina chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Cabernet Sauvignon Cuvée Alexandre Apalta Vineyard. Similarly styled but with the focus on black currants. It has enough structure to evolve for 2–3 years in the bottle and will drink well during its first 8 years of life.”

(From Chile chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Cabernet Sauvignon Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandre. The Cabernet Sauvignon Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandre has an expressive bouquet of smoke, pencil lead, spice box, black cherry, and black currant. The wine’s black fruit flavors linger into a medium-long finish.”

At least the black currants travel well.

Mistakes like this do happen. They don’t discredit the critics behind them; we all have slightly different experiences when we taste the same wine twice. And in this case, although the tasting notes are totally different, they’re not quite mutually exclusive, nor do they render dramatically divergent judgments/opinions about the wine (Parker ratings are not included in the under-$25 book). But I see it as yet another reminder of the arbitrariness of these fruit/spice adjectives, even in the hands of the world’s highest-end wine critics—which is particularly troubling when these opinions turn out to be so powerful in the marketplace.

The lead paper in the new issue of the Journal of Wine Economics is a study by Jonathan Reuter arguing that Wine Spectator wine ratings for advertisers were about one point higher than ratings for non-advertisers, when controlled against ratings from Wine Advocate. This is in spite of the magazine’s stated policy of tasting wines completely blind.

This from the abstract:

“In markets for experience goods, publications exist to help consumers decide which products to purchase. However, in most cases these publications accept advertising from the very firms whose products they review, raising the possibility that they bias product reviews to favor advertisers…Although the average Wine Spectator ratings earned by advertisers and non-advertisers are similar, I find that advertisers earn just less than one point higher Wine Spectator ratings than non-advertisers when I use Wine Advocate ratings to adjust for differences in quality.”

These are wine ratings, not the restaurant Awards of Excellence, which I’ve written about in the past Read the rest of this entry »

All this week (November 30-December 4), I’m guest blogging about Portland, Oregon food at the Powell’s Books blog.

Check out my posts there:

Monday, November 30: “Have you heard of the two best Chinese restaurants in Portland?”

Tuesday, December 1: “These, in my opinion, are the five best comfort-food dishes in Portland. Let the flame-wars begin.”

(Tuesday, December 1, 7:30pm: Fearless Critic Portland Restaurant Guide release event/Q&A/discussion/debate, Powell’s on Burnside. Thanks to all those who came and made the event a success.)

Wednesday, December 2: “Which trendy restaurants and bars are guilty of conduct unbecoming Portland, and which ones live up to the hype”

Thursday, December 3: “From soondae to seolleongtang, the hidden wonders of Beaverton”

Friday, December 4: Coming soon…

“You have got to brine it,” said Andrea Van Der Heyden of Van Der Heyden Vineyards as she hulked over my monstrous 28¼-pound Heritage turkey (a beautiful find, as it was feasting on Zinfandel vines the day before). Clearly, Andrea, like many across America during this time of year, was going out of her way to help me overcome the pitfalls of dry turkey.

As she should.

But with “brine turkey” at #12 on Google Trends today, it’s clear that the turkey-brining craze has hit new levels this year. Is the Food Network driving this bus? Alton Brown (who comes up in the first page of hits) preaches it. Sara Moulton swears by it. Just like roasting your turkey with a wine-soaked piece of cheesecloth was last year, or basting your turkey with orange juice was a few years earlier, it seems as if every Thanksgiving seems to come out with a new line of tools, gadgets, and fool-proof plans for housewives all across America to jump all over like the fall fashion line so they don’t serve the notorious dry piece of poultry to their in-laws. This year, there was an entire section of my local grocery store dedicated to brining needles, brining bags, and other brining accessories.

Don’t get me wrong: brining works. (On why it works, I’m sure the Food Network is running Good Eats Turkey episodes left and right, but Serious Eats really nails it here.) But brining can’t save an overcooked bird. It also takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of space, and there are more important things to be worrying about before Thanksgiving Day (like making sure your fantasy football team is set for the shortened week).

In my case, brining the 28¼-pound turkey that I acquired from Andrea would have required, at the least: (1) a bathtub; (2) a time machine Read the rest of this entry »

The CDC’s latest study defines “binge drinkers” as “people who said that at least once a month that they had five or more drinks on a single occasion.” Although there are rival definitions, this is not the first time the CDC has defined binge drinking as having five drinks.

Among the binge drinkers who might have participated in the study would be anyone who routinely orders the tasting menus with wine pairings at Le Bernardin, Jean-Georges, Daniel, or Per Se, four of New York’s top restaurants. Each of these restaurants pairs its tasting menu with seven wines, according to John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter’s excellent article last year on wine pairings.

If the federal government wanted to seek real ways of reducing traffic accidents, instead of vilifying people who enjoy multiple glasses of wine with dinner, it would take more of an urban-planning approach and subsidize programs like Denver’s Night Riders, which seems to have gone out of business. You would call the service like a taxi, and somebody would pick you up at a bar or restaurant, fold up his or her scooter, put it in your trunk, and drive you home in your own car.

“He was a product,” said President Obama in his melodic eulogy at Ted Kennedy’s funeral, “of an age when the joy and nobility of politics prevented differences of party and philosophy from becoming barriers to cooperation and mutual respect—a time when adversaries still saw each other as patriots.”

It was the only overtly political phrase of an otherwise carefully apolitical speech—the only Obama talking point, perhaps. The thing is, politics as “joy and nobility” (carefully chosen words, really) isn’t just about bridging partisanship. That’s what Obama turned it into, because that’s Obama’s shtick. He wanted to say—and it’s a debatable point, really, if you consider McCarthy—that there was a time when reasonable policy proposals wouldn’t lead to comparisons with Hitler, a time when politicians were understood to be philosopher-kings, and above such garbage.

But politics as “joy and nobility”—the joy and nobility (amidst tragedy and suffering) that the Kennedys embodied—isn’t really about that at all. It’s more about being born into an aristocracy, and about the notion that when you’re not just elected but actually one of the Elect, it’s understood that you have sex and drink and party and get STDs from Mexican prostitutes—that you do all of the other things that common people do, only more so.

It’s understood that you’re conducting yourself in the way that a real human being might conduct him- or herself if he or she were born into your position: spending your free time sailing and boozing and getting laid. That’s both natural and aristocratic. Going on a stilted date to Blue Hill Read the rest of this entry »

My recent post on bicycle inflation in Portland has touched off an unexpectedly spirited and, I think, fascinating debate—both on the Freakonomics board and in separate posts from bloggers and journalists, many of them from the Portland area, including Joseph Rose at the Oregonian. Interestingly, most of the responses have focused solely on my discussion of bicycle prices in Portland, and not on my more central observation that there might be evidence of an inverse relationship between the price of used bikes and the price of used cars in major US cities.

Many have written to corroborate my claim that used bikes are unusually expensive in Portland, while many others have disputed it, citing evidence of cheap bike-swap shops and some inexpensive bikes on Craigslist. On that point, it is important to note that I was measuring median prices, from a sample of 50 data points in each city, in order to offer a rudimentary hypothesis about trends in the market as a whole. To cite as a counter-example the mere fact that there are some cheap bikes for sale is to miss my more general observation of the relative medians and of the car-bike relationship in various cities.

This relationship, as supported by my extremely preliminary evidence, seems to suggest that in bike-friendly cities like Portland—cities in which a higher proportion of bikes are being used for commuting and transportation, and not just for leisure—bikes and cars are functioning more like substitute goods than they are in other cities; there may be, in such cities, an upward pressure on bike prices and a downward pressure on car prices. This is hardly a ground-breaking idea, but it’s a phenomenon that could merit further investigation as we consider ways of reducing emissions and gasoline consumption.

Last time I was in Copenhagen—one of Europe’s most bike-friendly cities Read the rest of this entry »

Portland, Oregon, the current darling of America’s food and environmental writers, is arguably the county’s most bicycle-obsessed city. Bike use was up 28% in Portland between 2007 and 2008, and on the Hawthorne Bridge, a main thoroughfare, bikes now make up 20% of all vehicles. The New York Times estimated in 2007 that there were 125 bike-related businesses in Portland employing 600 to 800 people. There’s even a store in the city that sells only tricycles.

When I arrived in Portland last month, the first thing I wanted to do was buy a bike and get around the way the locals do. Since I wouldn’t be in town for too long, and it wasn’t clear that I’d be able to take the bike with me when I left, I wanted something extremely cheap.

There were bike shops on every other corner in Southeast Portland, the sort of Brooklyn-ish neighborhood where I was staying. I walked into what looked like the grungiest of them—a store that sold mostly used bikes. There was one employee, and he was heavily tattooed and seemed pretty cool. I completely leveled with him Read the rest of this entry »