Ethics scandals are politico porn. They’re also fertile ground for undeserved scapegoating. But there’s one category in which, across the board, there’s not nearly enough public stoning going on: the world of information intermediaries. On the government side, that means regulatory agencies; in the private sector, it’s the critics, the expert witnesses in capitalism’s de facto justice system.

Information intermediaries, we’re to understand, are society’s check against puffery. They make careers of trustworthiness and accountability. In society’s service, they apply rigor to the claims of corporations and analyze their standards. For this hard work, they’re rewarded by the marketplace and by the United States—sometimes handsomely, sometimes not.

Two bits of recent news bring about two otherwise disparate intermediaries, both preeminent in their niches—Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, the publication whose critical appraisals are one of the central determinants of a wine’s success or failure on the marketplace, and the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency whose critical appraisals are the primary safety check against America’s airlines—systematically abusing that authority.

Jay Miller: Disfrutando?

Parker’s is one of the few wine publications that don’t accept advertising, for which he deserves praise. And it’s certainly acceptable to take free samples of wine from producers—that’s often the only way to taste new releases before they’ve gone to market. But the recent transgressions of Jay Miller, Robert Parker’s right-hand man, are spectacular indeed. In another classic case of the traditional print media jumping on the bandwagon of a topic that had been exposed quite a bit earlier by an incisive blogger—in this case, Tyler Colman, who goes by “Dr. Vino”—Miller’s series of all-expenses-paid vacation/junkets, financed by wine producers, have finally been reported by the mainstream media in a recent Wall Street Journal article.

Some of rumors about Miller’s behavior in Argentina go quite a bit further in scandalousness (more…)

Fresher wine, or just a pretty face?

I’m not sure which of the following two myths is more ridiculous: the myth that you can re-cork a half-drunk bottle of wine and keep it around for a week and have it “still be good,” or the mutually exclusive, but equally misguided, myth that you can keep wine from going bad with commercial “wine preserver” devices. The media is largely responsible for both of these myths—the first because of ignorance, and the second, perhaps, because of advertorial content and the power of suggestion.

What’s amazing is that almost nowhere in the media do I see discussed the magic solution to keeping leftover wine fresh—the solution that winemakers already know about—which I’ll discuss below. First, though, about the media myths:

Myth 1. You can re-cork wine and keep it around. I’m usually a fan of Consumer Reports, but their wine coverage has long been weak, and they got it embarrassingly wrong (and did the wine world a disservice) when they suggested that (more…)

The New Yorker’s recent profile of Fred Franzia has sparked a debate amongst the wine pundits on the question of why it’s so hard to find good American wines under $10, under $12, or even $20. I had an interesting conversation on this topic with Tyler Colman the other day. There’s a debate on the topic on Tyler’s blog, Dr. Vino, where he asks his readers to weigh in on these potential theories:

“Short-ish history of American wine with relatively few small growers, recent industry consolidation, the soil and/or climate, high land prices, producer greed/pride, the three tier distribution system, or the consumer as chump.”

Beautiful place, for a placebo

Eric Asimov at the New York Times has also recently commented on the difficulty in finding good, cheap American wines on his blog and in print. In the print article, he seems to gravitate toward the “shortish history” explanation, together with a discussion of a dominant social/consumer norm in the US wine market that leads producers to gravitate toward a single, uninteresting style (a style that I think has been promoted by many wine magazines). Asimov writes:

“In modern American wine history — post-1960 — the selection of grapes is monochromatic…In effect, then, California produces a small amount of top-flight wine along with an ocean of generic wine that seeks to imitate the top echelon, often through artifice like oak substitutes and additives. All too often, the choices are expensive cabernet or chardonnay, and imitation expensive cabernet or chardonnay.”

A similar perspective on Asimov’s blog:

“Very little wine is flawed in this day and age, now that we understand the science of winemaking and the importance of hygiene and temperature control in the mass-production of wines. But it is insipid… (more…)

In Adam Gopnik’s excellent piece about Gillette razors and innovation in the New Yorker, he discusses the fact that each new generation of razors—Gillette’s latest, the Fusion, now has five blades and a “triple-A battery inside, which makes it vibrate delicately to no particular purpose, like an old electric football game” (probably the best simile I’ve read all year)—doesn’t seem to work any better than the previous one.

Am I just five times more likely to cut myself?

This Gopnik explains with what he calls the “Devil’s Theory of Innovation”: briefly, that “cutthroat…competition produces stasis,” and that “we are born to be inherently frivolous aesthetes, who like change for change’s sake.”

I am deeply sympathetic to this point of view. In fact, Gopnik’s piece reminded me of a long law-and-economics argument that I had seven or eight years ago with Yale Law professor (and erstwhile Microsoft consultant) George Priest on the same topic: Gillette’s farcical march of purported technological progress toward ever more blades. The argument happened over a lovely dinner (more…)

The wine cultures of Spain and Italy are idealized. But much of the time, in real-life situations, their populations—whether it’s old men guzzling at midday or twentysomethings at night—actually favor beer.

Wine is still the thing to accompany a family dinner or elaborate restaurant meal in southern Europe, which is why their per-capita wine consumption remains higher than ours. But because Americans increasingly tend to order wine at bars, and Europeans generally don’t, this gap is closing rapidly. The US now beats Italy in total wine consumption.

In Italy, amongst young professionals, a far more popular nighttime endeavor than going to the sort of upmarket (or so-called “gastronomic”) restaurant where you’d order wine is getting a big group together at a pizzeria. And contrary to US stereotypes, the Italians actually almost never drink wine with pizza—it’s strictly beer (or Coca-Cola).

In most of Spain, it’s the cervecería—not the wine bar—that defines the nighttime casual-eating-with-groups culture, and there, draft beer (“caña,” typically poured in tiny glasses) is beautifully paired with what’s often eaten: raciones of fatty jamón iberico and sweet pan con tomate; marinated fish, garlicky shellfish, and vinegary vegetables; boiled octopus drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with paprika; or pinxtos/canapés (bites of food served on slices of baguette), which often come free with each round of drinks.

When Spanish or Italian beer comes fresh from the tap, its elegant taste profile can yield extraordinary pleasure. Mahou, Nastro Azzurro, Estrella Damm, Forst, and Cruzcampo may not be dissimilar from each other, but they’re all models of balance, clean, bright, and refreshingly bitter. They’re usually poured properly—allowing the head to collect into something creamy and dense—and, like dry Basque sidra, they’re well suited to the occasion, which is precisely what seems to have been lost in translation in America’s rapid adoption of wine as a cocktail.

Even at Spain’s expensive restaurants, beer is often offered as an apéritif (more…)

On culinary televangelism and the Parkerization of cuisine

In the introduction to his book La Cocina al Desnudo (roughly “The Kitchen Laid Bare”), the chef Santi Santamaría writes: “one of the greatest challenges faced by today’s chefs is to avoid becoming the court jesters of the snobs and the posh.”

One of the highlights of FENAVIN, Spain’s national wine fair, was a spirited hour-long debate on the status of Spanish cuisine between Mr. Santamaría (Santceloni, Racò de Can Fabes, EVO, Tierra; on the right end in the photo), one of Spain’s great culinary traditionalists, and José Carlos Capel (on the left end), a well-regarded food critic for El País who, generally speaking, embraces the avant-garde.

It was a debate to which Ferran Adrià, one of the pioneers of molecular gastronomy (the culinary movement to which Santamaría alternately refers as “cocina de la vanguardia,” “tecnoemocional,” and “cocina del laboratorio”), was surely invited—and didn’t come.

Perhaps Mr. Adrià felt no need to defend himself. In late April 2009, his restaurant, elBulli, was named the best in the world for the fourth year in a row in the annual survey of the World’s Top 50 restaurants, by the British Restaurant Magazine, while Santamaría is absent from the list entirely. Fellow molecular gastronomy houses The Fat Duck (UK), Noma (Denmark), Mugaritz (Spain), and El Celler de Can Roca (Spain) round out the rest of the top five. (The chefs of Noma and Mugaritz studied with Adrià.)

Santamaría, without being so immodest as to suggest that (more…)

Spain’s Felix Solís Avantis is probably the biggest wine producer you’ve never heard of, pumping out more than 200 million liters per year. The company’s industrial facility in Valdepeñas (in La Mancha, near Ciudad Real) is more or less the Death Star of wine factories. The warehouse alone is the size of an airplane hangar, and it’s so mechanized that there is not a human being inside it: giant, sliding robots whisk the cases from place to place, storing and retrieving vast quantities of wine.

The most interesting thing about Solís, though, is that, according to Ana Escamilla González, the director of marketing, the company actually produces only 10 wines in Valdepeñas, but they’re bottled and labeled under 400 different brands around Spain and the rest of the world. On average, then, each wine gets about 40 different labels, different looks, and different prices. Ms. González told me that the international “presentations,” as she calls them, are created in consultation with local marketing specialists. The Russian bottle, for example, has a warrior surrounded by lots of gold flourishes, while the Japanese bottle, she says, has “the same warrior, but without the gold.”

“Versioning” a product—varying it slightly and selling it under different brand names—is a well-known technique in marketing courses at business schools; among other things, it’s often a way of getting around laws that ban price discrimination. A classic example in the IT literature is the adoption of a device that intentionally slows the page-per-minute speed of a laser printer, so that the company can then sell a so-called “crippled” version of the same printer at a lower price and reach an additional market segment. Tim Harford reports in Slate that IBM did the same thing with the 486 processor: “the cheaper version was the expensive version with some extra work done on the chip to reduce its speed.”

I can’t decide if it’s less brazen or more brazen to employ the technique when the product inside the package doesn’t vary at all. Clearly, this marketing department is familiar with the wine placebo effect. Maybe they have their own name for it. In any case, they probably don’t sit around discussing it—instead, they trade on it.

Should we stage a Boston Wine Party, and throw our wine into the Atlantic?

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the bewilderingly diverse wines on display at this week’s FENAVIN, Spain’s national wine fair, is the price range: 2€–5€ is most common, trailed slightly by <2€ (a significant category, with strong representation from La Mancha, the wine fair’s home region) and 5€–10€.

In the 2€–3€ range are a vast assortment of sometimes steely, often aromatic, almost always appropriately acidic whites from Castilla-La Mancha and other lesser-known regions. If you want a 1994 or 1995 Gran Reserva from La Mancha—an eminently mature Tempranillo, Cabernet Sauvignon, or Tempranillo-Cabernet blend—it might cost you up to 6€.

All of this is a prescient reminder of the three-tined gouging of the American wallet—and, by extension, of the American palate—that defines our wine industry.

The first tine is regulatory: the unconscionable customs duties imposed at our borders, and, worse still, the preposterous bureaucratic labeling and testing rules that are imposed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. (Is there anything that more clearly reveals our government’s still-Puritanical view of wine drinking as a vice than this agency’s name?)

The irony of these idiotic rules, (more…)

At FENAVIN, the Spanish wine industry fair, in Ciudad Real on May 15 (blog entry at Aprende a Catar Vino (Spanish); articles about the talk at El Día del Ciudad Real, Cava Argentina, La Comarca de Puertollano, and Vendimia), I will talk talked to the Spanish wine industry on the following topics:

1. Are most wine critics impartial judges of quality, or are they really serving as public-relations advocates on behalf of producers? With evidence from my own empirical work, expository journalism, and a survey of the industry, I argue that most wine critics are really in the business of advertising wine, not judging it impartially. Critics are for sale. (more…)

In the course of damage control, Wine Spectator Executive Editor Thomas Matthews and others have made several questionable statements. Although it had been my policy not to respond to them (or to the name-calling–“mugger” has been my favorite), there seems to be enough uninformed debate going on in the blogosphere that I wanted to set some of these facts straight here.

1. WS writes: “We make significant efforts to verify the facts…We called the restaurant multiple times; each time, we reached an answering machine and a message from a person purporting to be from the restaurant claiming that it was closed at the moment.”

If it’s true that WS called the restaurant’s number (+39 02 4074 6174) multiple times during their “efforts to verify the facts,” and had trouble getting through, why didn’t they ever leave a message? Or send an email?

The only message WS ever left at the restaurant’s number was left after the award had already been granted, by an advertising salesperson asking if I wanted to buy an ad (starting at $3,090 and going up to $8,860). I’ve posted that message as an MP3.

(more…)