Right on the main drag as you come into Rehoboth Beach sits a little gem of a wine bar.  The Wife and I stopped in there Thursday night and were both pleasantly surprised.

The three staffers that were on hand were all completely knowledgeable about wine.  Being Dogfish Head transplants, they also knew their beers.  There is a full menu available and a nice selection of small plates and cheese medleys.  It sounds like they’re doing a lot of marketing to get awareness up.  Business looked slow, understandable for a wine bar at the beach.  Beach businesses depend on tourism and if the tourists don’t know about it, a shop withers and fails.  So I enjoyed my Zin while The Wife talked to them about marketing and pamphlets and brochures and which guides to start advertising in.  When the conversation turned to website and SEO, I jumped in and offered my two cents (I am a wine blogger, after all).  Hopefully they’ll get all that going.

The by-the-glass menu featured over ten reds and over ten whites with selections from all over the world.  Prices were in the $10 range, with a red and a white on special for $6.

Vine Wine Bar adheres to my Five Wine Bar Tenents with the exception that they don’t serve olives because the olives “are marinating.”  I granted a pass.  The cheeses were phenomenal though.  If you’re a wino and find yourself in the Rehoboth Beach sun, Vine Wine Bar is completely worth a stop for a glass or two.

Vine Wine Bar
211 Rehoboth Avenue
Rehoboth Beach, DE 19971
(302) 226-2463
http://www.226vine.com/

I started this blog because I like writing and I like wine, neither of which are really related to my day job of Software Engineer.  When The Wife and I moved back to Maryland, I thought it would be nice to document our experiences with giving local wines a try.  Thus Vinotrip was re-born.

How’s Posting Going?

This is post 100 on this blog.  When I started, my goal was to post three times a week give or take a few posts here and there.  The posts haven’t come quite as easily as I’d hoped but it still isn’t laborious.  Writing is something I enjoy and so is posting on this blog.  When that changes, I’ll stop posting.

How’s The Traffic?

I’m surprised at even the modest traffic that my site receives.  Starting from when I enabled the Wordpress stats plugin, my traffic was beautifully linear. It spiked in May and leveled off in June.

Feb 215
Mar 295 (+80)
Apr 376 (+81)
May 577 (+201)
Jun 563 (-14)
Jul   e^Πi (-564) (Projected)

My post on Carpaccio Tuscan Kitchen in Annapolis gets a ton of traffic from Google for people seeking information about the restaurant.  The website for the restaurant is hard to find and the place is pretty new and this equals high Google rank.

The single biggest day was May 22 with 42 views.  This was strange because I didn’t have a noteworthy post that day, just something about freezing wine.

My story The Last Chinon from Wine Blogging Wednesday generated a lot of traffic too.  Getting your blog on sites like this drives a lot of traffic, especially if you put a little effort into the post.  Just link-hounding all over the place doesn’t get it done.

After Six Months, What Do You Think Of Maryland and Virginia Wine?

I feel like a putz for saying this, but frankly I’m disappointed.  I call myself a wine snob frequently but it is usually in jest.  I like all sorts of wines and see wines as a creation of the winemaker.  I feel bad when I write a post expressing my dissatisfaction over a wine, which is why some of the wines I drank didn’t merit a blog post.  It may be best to keep my mouth shut because I appreciate the effort.

I knew Maryland was in a nascent state of winemaking when I moved back here.  Thankfully, so are their prices.  Blowing $10 on plonk doesn’t bother me, I chalk it up to a learning experience.  It’s like watching a bad movie in that there is something to be gained in examining why it was bad.  And, the wine isn’t all bad.  I just wish there was more that was “not bad.”  I like Boordy and the Deep Creek Cellars (though I’ve only had the Deep Creek Cellars Artisan Red).  Elk Run’s Malbec wasn’t bad.  In the face of opposition from my friends, I liked St. Michael’s Winery Riesling.  It’s an exciting time in Maryland and I like how everyone is in on the game, including the Baltimore Sun.

Virginia deserves a stern look and a wag of the finger.  My first experience with Breaux went well and the wine route has been rocky and mucky since.  Again, as I’ve posted before, the wines do not justify the asking price in many cases.  The quality just has not been there on a consistent basis.

But Can’t You Just Enjoy Wine? Why Do You Have to Ruin Everything?  You’re Not Even A Wine Expert!

That last one wasn’t a question

You’re Not Even a Wine Expert, right?

No, I’m not.  I’d advise against taking seriously my opinions on wine.  Except my 1000 point system, believe that.

Even if I don’t enjoy a wine I’ll usually enjoy the experience of the wine: uncorking or unscrewing or whatever I did to this one, swirling it, smelling all sorts of whatnot, sipping it, then pouring it down the sink and lamenting the price I paid.  It’s fun.

And, it’s subjective.  If you adore the Chateau Morisette Cabernet Sauvignon and think I’m a fool for saying the finish tasted like tree bark then by all means order a case and go on a picnic to a park and fall in love.  I’ll be there with a White Burgundy.  Have fun, that’s what it is all about.

Super happy picture is a CC licensed photo from Flickr user Donna Cymek

Smelling like sunblock and Atlantic Ocean, The Wife and I dropped in to Delaware’s own Nassau Valley Vineyards in Lewes, DE.  Nassau Valley has “Delaware’s First and Only Award Winning Winery” as their marketing slogan, but it is a touch misleading or perhaps in need of a comma or two.  They were the first winery in Delaware, opening in 1993.  Since then, Felton Crest has opened and overnight Delaware saw their wine industry double from one to two.  Thus, the “Only” qualifier applies to “Award Winning” and not to “Winery.”  Got all that?  Tired of nit-picking?  Me too.

Nassau Valley has a pretty interesting walking tour of the history of wine, reaching way back to wine being the drink of kings because it was considered safer to drink than water.  The tour ends with a look into the winery production room and some brief info on Nassay Valley itself from inception to present.

The tasting is free for six pours out of the fourteen that they are currently producing.  We stuck to the dry wines and the Pinot Grigio was the outright winner of the day.  Their estate Chardonnay wasn’t bad but their estate Cabernet had some work left to be done on it.  I can imagine what a challenge it is to produce quality wine from Delaware grapes.  I do like the pioneer spirit, though.  All of the bottle prices on the dry side were up over $15, topping out at $23.

If you’re in the area or vacationing at the Delaware beaches, Nassau Valley is worth the visit if you’re into wine.  I’d like to see the bottle prices come down a touch or perhaps a little flair added to the tasting room.

Yesterday, someone from the Baltimore City Public Schools took an hour out of their day and ran through every listing in my Maryland and Virginia Winery Map.  I’m pretty sure it was manual and not a bot or search engine spider because it took them just a hair under an hour to get through all the listings. The same thing happened to my happy hour listings site last week.  Both sites were written in Ruby using the Rails framework, which lends itself to this sort of thing.

Companies go to great lengths to prevent this kind of information harvesting.  If you have sensitive information like private data or the stuff that Salesforce keeps around, then of course it makes sense.  But, we’re at the forefront of an age where non-private information is going to be free.  I don’t fly the rally flag that “information wants to be free,” I’m just saying that it will be free.  The music industry is realizing this.  The newspaper industry is realizing this.  The movie industry will get around to it soon.  People aren’t going to be able to make the same living doing the same things because the cost of replicating their information or art is going to zero and it is going there fast.

Instead of re-thinking business models or embracing change, people still get bent out of shape about it.  I don’t.  Go ahead and scrape the whole site.  The person who scraped it yesterday may have been doing something cool with it like making a collage or something.  Maybe they were just really into something I don’t understand.  Who knows.   I didn’t create the information on the winery map, I just went around and harvested it from all over the place, often from the wineries themselves.  I even made it easy to do (in case you’re thinking of joining in) by providing everything in list form.  Run that through your DB import script and go to town.  There are other winery info websites out there, some are better than mine, and I’m too busy to really worry about it.

My point is that everyone who makes money on sales of information has the clock ticking on them.  The wine business is lucky that their product is real and you can’t reel off a torrent of 2000 Grange.  You can, though, protect retail listings, or charge for your reviews.  Go right ahead, but that will change, and the next generation will find it to be a foreign concept.

Been working out of my satellite office in the Quality Inn on 54th St and Coastal Highway in Ocean City.  Couple of wine/alcohol related ramblings…

Mackey’s, a beachy bar across the street, makes margaritas with Jameson instead of Tequilia.  They are awesome.

Outside of an Exxon I saw a sign advertising Sutter Home White Zinfandel for $4.99 a bottle.  The bottom of the sign said “An Ocean City Favorite”  Maybe the iconic White Zin would be a good candidate for the 1000 point scale.

Barefoot Cellars is making a huge push out here.  I saw Barefoot a lot when I was in California.  It’s not bad for a $8 bottle, you can do far worse.  Lots of restaurants and shops carry it in Ocean City, though.  I was in a 7-11 yesterday and the Barefoot distributor reps were in there trying to get the cashier to give them the manager’s number so they could get the store to start stocking it.

Going to zip up to Rehoboth later this week then back home this weekend.  Planning to hit Nassau Valley Vineyards on the way home.

Photo is a CC licensed photo from Flickr user amishah

These days, lots of wine critics claim that they didn’t want to score wines, but their readership couldn’t process their results without numbers and turned into beer-swilling barbarians.  The reality is that nobody takes you seriously unless you crown a winner.  Remember back in little league when the kids were too young to keep score?  Right, nobody cared.  As soon as I turned six and my mom started toting a score book, everything changed.  Playtime was over.

While my goal here is not to be taken seriously (as I’ll prove by the end of this post), I would like to start scoring wines.  There’s a certain wine retailer re-launching a certain cellar management tool in which community scores feature prominently.  I’m excited for it but if I don’t start hanging two digits on the end of my wine reviews, I’ll be back in tee-ball.  Full disclosure: I am work closely with said certain company and am heavily involved with re-launch of said certain cellar management tool [Make sure this flies with lawyers -ed].

Here are the candidate scoring systems.

100 points
Made popular by: Robert Parker, get your fill here
Scale: You would think that wines could be rated 0-100, but you would be wrong. Each wine gets 50 points just for showing up, and it goes up from there.
Pros: Lots of room to slot wines between 50 and 100.
Cons: This room is never used.  Ratings have drawn into the upper 80s and 90s to the point where rating a wine as 82 is practically a declaration of war. A published score below 90 can bring financial ruin upon a winery or retailer. Some reviewers don’t publish scores under 90. Why not just call it what it is: a ten point scale.
Verdict: Too popular and much-maligned.  I’m too elitist to roll with the crowd.

20 points
Made popular by: UC Davis and Jancis Robinson
Scale: 1 through 20
Pros: Good for people who can’t count very high.
Cons: Not precise enough for even its devotees, who often tag .5 onto the back of their score to convert it to a 40 point scale.  Wines never rated under 10, so that brings it back to a twenty point scale.  Winos just multiply by five to the the 100 point equivalent anyway, so who’s counting?
Verdict: An exercise in futility.

5 stars
Made popular by: Movie critics
Scale: 1-5 stars, with maybe a half-star thrown in
Pros: Doesn’t insult the soul of wine by implying that all wine quality can be quantified.  Refuses to take a stance on who is better: an 89 point wine on a 88 point wine
Cons:After the inevitable “ratings creep” no wine will be rated lower than three stars, leaving us with 3, 4 or 5 stars.  Stars will be trimmed down to 1/4 points, allowing for twelve ordinal slots.
Verdict: Promising, but ripe for disaster

QPR (Quality to Price)
Made popular by: Lots of people, used heavily by Food and Wine Blog
Scale: Whatever the reviewer feels like
Pros: Seeks to normalize the relationship between wine price and wine quality.  A $10 wine will be “Good” for the money, and a $250 wine will be “Bad” for the money even though the $250 bottle may taste better than the $10 bottle
Cons: Subjective.  Scale slides given the reviewer’s wallet.  No numbers.  Annoying that it isn’t called QTP.
Verdict: We want NUMBERS people.  This is AMERICA.

Short and Sweet
Made popular by: Me on my soon-to-be-made-public tasting notes on Vinfolio’s Vincellar
Scale: Awesome, Excellent, Very Good, Pretty Good, Good, Okay, Bad, Awful, A mess.
Sample note: “Pretty Good.”
Pros: Don’t have to read an entire review to find out if the wine was worthless.  No snarky flowery language to tell you about the wine.
Cons: No snarky flowery language to tell you about the wine.  Running out of English words to slot in between “Okay” and “Good.”  “Adequate” anyone?
Verdict: It works for me, but not for the general populace.

1000 points
Made popular by: Me and a colleague
Scale: 0 through 1000 (inclusive), can be takes to this tenths if more precision is needed
Pros: No longer must two wines be tied at 90, leaving intrepid point chasers scratching their heads while they decide which wine will impress their friends more. The tie can be broken, with one wine receiving a 904.5 and the other falling short at 901.9. Finally, the question can be answered: which wine is better?
Cons: None that I can see.
Verdict: Winner winner chicken dinner.  It’s settled!  Starting now I’m going to start rating wines on the 1000 point scale.  Prepare for the MD/VA wine review revolution.

Image is a CC licensed photo of a highly rated wine from Flickr user thomashawk

Coming from up in the mountains of Floyd, Virginia, The 2006 Chateau Morisette Cabernet Sauvignon was lighter in in the glass than most Cabernets. Those accustomed to big, powerful Napa heavyweights will find that this wine looks and behaves more like a Dolcetto or middleweight Rhone varietal.

The wine smelled Earthy, something that I haven’t noticed in many Virginia (or Maryland) wines. The taste was jammy and fruity, with plum flavors. The backend lost its balance and gave way to alcohol and seedy, stemmy flavors. It was a little like chewing dried pine needles or the stems of grapes left in the bottom on the bag. After some time in the glass the whole experience improved, but it didn’t last long. The bottle was not long for this world.

Product Page

Baltimore Sun reported today on a great program that the Governor’s office puts on to support made-in-Maryland wine.

The Governor’s Advisory Commission on Maryland Wine and Grape is offering $147,000 in grants this year to be used for the variety of projects to put more made-in-Maryland wine in the glasses of consumers.

The cash can apply to a wide variety of things including marketing, seminars, or actual grape growing. Maybe I’ll apply for some so I can give my Maryland winery map a facelift.

Looking at the list of specific grant projects, there are some fun ones in there for sure. $30,000 to put on a new Maryland wine festival, just in case you didn’t get your fill of off-dry whites at Wine in the Woods. $28,000 is available to “continue the ‘Ask for Maryland Wine’ program.” I wonder if that has always been in there or if they’re cutting it loose to private industry this year for some reason.

Baltimore Sun Article

Press release here and finally the PDF of specific grant projects.

Break out the bubbly! The Wine Market carries the Kluge Blanc de Blanc in the wonderful half bottle size. The Wife and I split one over steamed crabs and corn on Friday night. Without knowing it, we were ushering in the boiling Baltimore summer. It has been humid and hot nonstop this past week in Maryland.

What better way to cool off than with chilled sparking wine? The Blanc de Blanc was fruity with lots of flavor. It wasn’t off-dry, but it wasn’t bone dry Brut either. I thought it went well with the seafood and corn. Recommended for the next time you’re celebrating something and want to stay local.

Picked this up from the LA Times of all places: Both Brooks Robinson and Eddie Murray have lent their names and likeness to a series of commemorative wines that will be sold for charity. Brooks Robinson Chardonnay and Eddie Murray 504 Cabernet Sauvignon are both on sale now and will be shipped in mid-June. Perfect drinks for whenever the Orioles are tagging Josh Beckett in Fenway.

The athlete’s proceeds from the sale will go to benefit the Baltimore Community Foundation, an organization that sponsors grants and endowments for Baltimore City. Mike Schmidt’s Zinfandel benefits the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, another organization near and dear to my heart.

Grapes for both are sourced from Paso Robles. I poked around but haven’t found anything about where they make the wine. I imagine the answer is “somewhere in California.”

Both wines can be ordered from Event Wines, a company that apparently specializes in this sort of thing: paring athletes with wine for charity.

Of course, what would a blog post be if I couldn’t sound off about the Maryland shipping laws? Neither wine can be shipped to Maryland, just as the Mike Schmidt 548 Zinfandel cannot be shipped to Pennsylvania. Contact your local state representative and try to persuade them to blah blah blah…

Who is in for a case? Link to product page.

Image is of third base in Nationals Park. CC licensed photo from Flickr user f1rstborn