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Did Robert Parker Just Fumble On The Goal Line? (The Wine Advocate Possibly Sold To Investors In Singapore)

While we can usually count on the wine world for providing news that can best be classified as odd-but-quickly-forgettable (Exhibit A: anybody remember the wine snob ghost??), the recent coverage of changes coming to Robert Parker’s The Wine Advocate reads like an elaborate April Fool’s (except it’s coming in December, 2012).

According to The Wall Street Journal, uber-critic Parker – who has quite recently vehemently and publicly stated his desire not to retire – is in the process of selling his wine newsletter to a group of investors in Singapore.

Felix Salmon has an interesting and well-written take on the news, and he sums up the collective “what the hell?!??” reaction of the fine wine world to the possibility of TWA moving in a direction that seems the polar opposite of what most wine insiders believed would be the future of TWA (and that includes insiders I know personally, who have direct access to Parker – so include me firmly in the “what the hell?!??” camp).

It’s long been believed that Robert Parker, whenever he decided to retire, would hand-off TWA as-is (given that he grew it literally from nothing using his own impressive hustle), grooming heir apparent Antonio Galloni to eventually take control of TWA (and speculated that Galloni, once given the full reigns, might shake up the editorial staff).

But the news coming from the WSJ suggests a very different path for TWA than what was brewing in the collective fine wine hive mind. Here are some of the highlights, as reported by Salmon:

  • TWA will be sold to a group of Singapore-based investors (described by Parker as “visionaries”), who according to Salmon have “no experience either in wine or in publishing”
  • Parker will retain the title of Chairman, but will be turning over editorial control not to Galloni, but to TWA’s Singapore-based correspondent, Master of Wine Lisa Perrotti-Brown
  • The print version of TWA newsletter will be retired (despite the fact that it’s profitable), and [see comments - RMP has corrected this via his twitter feed] there will be a specific Southeast Asian edition added, “aimed at corporate clients like airlines and luxury hotels”
  • A new China-based corespondent will be hired, specifically to report on the nascent industry of wines produced in Asia
  • Advertising – long shunned by Parker and often used by him as criticism against the intentions of other wine review publications – will be accepted at the electronic edition of TWA.

“What the hell?!??”

While one could certainly forgive Parker for wanting to bow out of the game (especially given the recent negative press levied against former TWA critic Jay Miller), this move to sell TWA doesn’t really pass the surface-level glance common-sense test when compared to how staunchly Parker publicized, adhered to, and defended the aspects and policies he felt made TWA stand apart from other critical wine publications.

Certainly no one is losing a ton betting on the wine frenzy happening in Asia right now, but other than financially the move just doesn’t seem to add up. Salmon sums it up best, I think, when he states that “none of this seems like the action of a man who wants to preserve his legacy” – certainly it doesn’t seem like the kind of consistent move you’d have expected from the man, particularly after his recent induction into the Vintners Hall of Fame in Napa, at a time when his favorable legacy in the wine world seemed all but a lock.

“What the hell?!??”

Will this move tarnish the legacy? Has Parker fumbled the ball at the goal line?

Assuming the deal actually goes through, then only time will tell…

Cheers!

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Napa’s New Calistoga AVA Already Showing Promise

Calistog-ava-pending_lg It hasn’t been all that long since Napa Valley’s hot and northern Calistoga area was awarded with its own AVA designation (for more on American Viticultural Areas, check out the Wikipedia article on the same topic). How has Calistoga wine fared since then, now that we’re coming up on some of the first bottlings to use the new AVA designation?

Based on my recent trip to Napa Valley, the answer is “pretty damn well.”

Napa Valley, for the most part, retains its varied soil profiles and gets warmer as you move north (much to the surprise and afternoon chagrin of many a tourist from the midwest and east coast), since the mitigating cooling effects that work their on the southern parts of the Valley have far less influence in the more northernly winegrowing areas.  I can personally attest to the 100+ degree F roasting that is possible in the 2PM afternoon sun in Calistoga – not fun for humans, but certainly good for the ripening of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes.

Far more interesting than the hot daytime temperatures in Calistoga (to geeks like me, anyway) is the relative uniformity of the soil types found there – unlike the rest of the valley, the Calistoga soil is almost totally derived from volcanic types, and instead expresses its differences in more-or-less rocky profiles (more rocky on the hillsides, more gravelly on the alluvial fans, and more silty in the central areas).  That’s not typical for Napa Valley, where you’re more likely to encounter anywhere from five to well over twenty different soil types within the same AVA.

The (relative) lack of soil differentiation hasn’t detracted from the Cabs one bit, which at their best tend to be less rounded in the palate than their southern Napa counterparts, and more focused in their black-fruit profiles.  They don’t jump out at you, but after a few minutes in the glass they seduce the hell out of you.  In a few cases, I was blown away by the quality of some of the wines that will be moving to the new Calistoga AVA on their labels – so don’t freak out when you start to encounter these beauties on the shelf, just because you aren’t yet familiar with the AVA on the label; you just might miss out on something stellar if you do!

Cheers!

Joe Roberts is a Certified Specialist of Wine and author of the award-winning 1WineDude.com wine blog.

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James Suckling Leaves Wine Spectator; We Yawn, But Wonder When Wine Media Will "Grow Up"

By now, many of you out there will have heard the news that long-time Wine Spectator editor James Suckling has left the magazine.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this bit of news has been getting so much coverage.

I think the mild wine media frenzy being drummed by Suckling’s departure from WS has more to do with the manner in which his bon voyage was administered – the announcement, made on-line, was short on both detail and tributes. Here’s an excerpt:

“James Suckling has been a significant contributor to the success of Wine Spectator,” said editor and publisher Marvin R. Shanken. “He will be missed. We are very fortunate to have significant depth in our editorial team. Moving these tastings to New York, where we have a larger staff and better logistical control, will allow us to strengthen our coverage of these important wine regions.”

Now, I don’t read Wine Spectator and James Suckling’s reviews mean little to me (as I suspect they do for many people in my generation and younger), but he’s certainly not without his fans and he’s been a WS mainstay for decades. I can’t help thinking that, while this news had almost no impact on my life whatsoever, that Suckling got short-shrift in his send-off. Some of the WS commenters on the announcement agree:

“I feel I would be remiss not to echo the sentiment that Wine Spectator missed an opportunity to give JS and his readers their due. The real story at this early moment is not who will replace him, but that he is leaving and what he has meant to the publication. It appears that JS has become a competitor.”

I mean, after 30 years, you get a half-hearted on-line send-off with what amounts to a back0handed compliment that the Bordeaux coverage will be stronger without you? I don’t have to be a WS reader or Suckling fan to realize that kind of send-off totally sucks. In fact, after that kind of public blow-off I just might become a James Suckling fan in the hopes that he does end up as some kind of competition for Wine Spectator.

The WS send-off strikes me as immature – I’ve worked decades in the IT business, and in the “real world” this kind of thing doesn’t fly and certainly doesn’t exude professionalism.

Hey, Wine Spectator: grow up, and properly thank the guy for decades of blood, sweat & tears already!

Cheers!
Joe Roberts is a Certified Specialist of Wine and author of the award-winning 1WineDude.com wine blog.

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PLCB Wine Kiosk Follow-up: (Not) Drinking Local

PennLive.com reportedly recently on the prototype wine kiosks in Pennsylvania that have been creating so much buzz – and ire – in the media lately.

What PennLive.com has pointed out is that the new-fangled Pennsylvania wine kiosks will contain no actual wines from Pennsylvania. Which is a blow to PA’s 100+ state wine producers, some of whom are making excellent wine (albeit in very small quantities) well worthy of more public attention.

This news comes just when I was starting to see an upside to these bizarre wine kiosks – namely, that it would mean a wine transaction without face-to-face contact with a PLCB employee, many of whom don’t know much about wine and some of whom have denied the very existence of Cabernet Franc.

Part of the issue for PA wine producers is that they’re too small to play in the state’s enormous monopoly wine distribution and sales system, which is prohibitively expensive for those smaller outfits – according to PennLive.com:

“Pennsylvania wine producers 773,100 gallons in 2008, and slightly less than 14 percent was sold through state stores, according to the PLCB. Selling to the state system means going through a process to get listed as a supplier to the PLCB. Only about 15 of the state’s 123 wineries have that status. To be listed, a vineyard has to deliver its product to the PLCB’s warehouse so it can be sold at Wine & Spirits Shoppes around the state. But it takes a larger-scale operation than most small wineries to pull that off…”

Certainly economics plays heavily into the decision to exclude PA wines (for now, anyway) – there just aren’t enough local wines from PA being sold via the PLCB, and the lower volume means fewer discount opportunities vs. other purchases that the PLCB can make.

Still, one would think that inclusion among the limited number of choices available in the wine kiosks, if rolled out to 100 stores statewide as is the current plan by the PLCB, would be a boon to PA’s local wine market and a move that would endear the PLCB to PA’s own in-state producers and locapours everywhere.

And it seems that the locapour movement is growing: earlier this year, DrinkLocalWine.com held the 2010 Drink Local Wine Conference in Virginia, and the state will host the 2011 Wine Bloggers Conference in Charlottesville (that news even made the Associated Press).

Seems that Local Wine in the U.S. is cursed to live in interesting times!

Cheers!

Joe Roberts is a Certified Specialist of Wine and author of the award-winning 1WineDude.com wine blog.

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New PLCB Wine Kiosks As Easy As 1,2,5,7,10…

Those of you who don’t have the (sometimes mis-) fortune of living in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania probably haven’t been following the entertaining on-going saga of the Wine Kiosk.
This strange idea is the brain-child of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, who have a state-run monopoly on the sale and distribution of alcohol in the Commonwealth (at this point, you might be wondering what the difference is between “State” and “Commonwealth” – “Commonwealth” allows you to have a billion more levels of government that can tax that hell out of you, I think). And the fine blogger and fellow PA-resident Lew Bryson has a particularly insightful take on the new kiosks, which have now entered the prototype phase.
Lew posted a video from the Harrisburg Patriot-News in which one of their reporters attempts to purchase wine from the kiosks, which the PLCB claim can safely dispense wine to a non-inebriated customer of legal drinking age in 20 seconds or less.
2010-06-30_084808It takes the reporter over 10 steps and 2 and half minutes to complete a transaction of purchasing one bottle from the kiosk. During the purchase, he has to –

  • Scan his driver’s license & credit card
  • Give his signature
  • Things get significantly weirder from there though – he also has to blow into an attached breathalyzer (which the PLCB warns “It is possible the machine may detect alcohol when a consumer hasn’t been drinking”), and
  • Stand in front of a camera so that a PLCB employee at a remote site can ID him.

Call me crazy, but I do not want to be the first person whose data gets hacked from one of these kiosks, since it sounds like enough data that it could be used by evil scientists to physically clone you and recreate your full identity. Big Brother is not watching you… we swear!
I’m stumped as to how the wine kiosk is a viable alternative to an actual human selling wine, or any safer than buying a wine from a trusted retailer over the Internet. Especially when you consider that Pennsylvania’s underage drinking rate remains above average for the 50 states and the Commonwealth remains above average in DUI fatalities per mile driven. It’s tough to blame PA residents like me for feeling a bit bitter, or faulting them if they conclude that the PLCB isn’t delivering on all of its promises or potential value for money.
Cheers!
Joe Roberts is a Certified Specialist of Wine and author of the award-winning 1WineDude.com wine blog.

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Wine Online: More Influential Than You Think

winebloggers-logo_square-jmv By the time you read this, I will be at the 3rd annual Americas Wine Bloggers Conference, as both a participant and a panelist. This year the event is being held in Walla Walla, WA, and the local (and not-very-local) sponsors are looking to roll out the red carpet to the 300 attendees, the majority of whom are independent bloggers.

The first conference was held in Sonoma, and by year two it extended to Napa as well. Both wine areas also extended the red carpet, but it was last year’s visit to Napa that really made me stop and reconsider the influence of on-line media in the wine world.

I’ve no way to accurately gauge that influence, and certainly there are many who would note that any particular blogger saying something good about any particular wine is NOT going to make an ant’s moustache’s bit of difference in increased sales for most wine brands. And for the most part, they’d be right.

But riddle me this, Batman: if collectively those (mostly) amateur voices didn’t have influence in the wine world, why on Earth would most of the wineries pay attention to the fact that a bunch of bloggers were getting together nearby? Why would they roll out the red carpet treatment for those (mostly) amateur writers? In other words, why else would they even care?

The fact is that wine regions are now competing to influence where the 4th annual conference will be held. Considering that just over 5 years ago most wineries hadn’t even heard of wine bloggers or wine blogging, that is an amazing a nd head-scratch-inducing turn of events. Vintank.com, a digital think-tank wine industry group based in downtown Napa, published a report last year in which they claimed, based on statistics, that the potential reach of all of those wine blogs, facebook pages, and twitter accounts when viewed collectively exceeds the subscription base of even the largest wine print magazines.

Navigating the wine blog field is a tricky endeavor due to the nature of the beast, which is widely distributed and full of professional and amateur voices alike. Some resources that can get you started:

The oral of the story, thought, is to at least get started in checking out wine blogs, especially if your only exposure to the wine world has been through the pages of printed magazines. Who knows – You may just find your new favorite voice in the world of wine.

Cheers!

Joe Roberts is a Certified Specialist of Wine and author of the award-winning 1WineDude.com wine blog.

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