Dave McIntyre blogged a few weeks about the effect of the rain on the vintage. Lenn Thompson and Evan Dawson of New York Cork Report blog about the harvest faced by New York state wineries. (These are excellent wine writers, by the way; if don’t already, I recommend following them for their excellent coverage of local wine.) I’ve seen numerous other thoughts on the 2011 harvest via Twitter, from wine writers, winemakers, and wine enthusiasts alike.

But it turns out this isn’t just the case on the East Coast. This month’s Wine Spectator opens with “Harvest 2011 Begins as a Nailbiter” on page 13. Writers Mitch Frank and Augustus Ward discuss 2011′s effects on Europe and our West Coast, not even getting to the weather’s effect on other states or other regions around the world. (Then again, if you’re not familiar with it, Wine Spectator usually only features Europe, our West Coast, and Australia and New Zealand.) The difference in perspective is interesting, though, and proof that, foreign or domestic, winemakers face very similar challenges regardless of locale.

(Update: Several pages later in Wine Spectator, James Molesworth writes about the place of the loca-pour ideology within the locavore movement; he focuses on the Finger Lakes region of New York State, but makes the point that “It’s time for sommeliers and retailers to take notice and show more support for the support for the efforts of the growers.”)

What are your thoughts on 2011? Are you just going to hunker down with your 2010s and wait for 2012? Or do you think we’re playing a game of Chicken Little?

The issue at hand is that wine consumers in Maryland cannot order a bottle of wine from an out of state retailer and have it shipped to their house. This is because Maryland law dictates that alcohol retailing in Maryland flows through the Three Tier System: producer-distributor-retailer-(you)

For more on the three tier system, read Tom Wark’s blog Fermentation. He talks about it a lot and he’ll describe it in better detail that I can.

The problem is that the liquor distributors (and some retailers) like things the way they are, so they oppose changes to the system.

Why are they against it?

The public reason

The final argument that they’re clinging to is that underage kids will have access to a world of wine which will be delivered to their door. Maryland will be helpless to enforce the age limit for purchasing alcohol. Society will descend into darkness and oblivion.

This is, of course, total bunk. No college kid is going to pay $7.99 plus $5.99 shipping for a bottle of Yellowtail to be delivered to his dorm room next week. It just isn’t going to happen. See previous post for more.

Second, UPS and FedEx will not just leave a bottle of wine lying around if you aren’t home to receive it. They require an adult to sign for the package if the package contains wine. I know through personal experience that both UPS and FedEx are extraordinarily vigilant about this.

The private reason

The distributors like things the way they are because it is profitable. Can’t blame them. If I were one of the few people entitled to buy alcohol at a discount then resell it to consumers at a significant markup, then I’d probably pull the “it ain’t broke don’t fix it card” too.

It is important to note this: proponents of direct wine shipping to Maryland are not trying to dismantle the three tier system and run distributors out of business. If direct shipping to Maryland becomes legal, distributors will still thrive doing what they do. They provide a service and fill a need to the retailers and restaurants and this need will continue to exist. Millions of Marylanders are still going to buy from their local shop. Very little will change.

Well, do we not have more important things to worry about?

Look, I’ll agree that this is a trivial issue. Maryland has real problems to deal with. Push this through and let’s get on with it.

Do we really have a chance?

In previous years, no. The bill hasn’t even made it out of committee. Now that some committee members have come on board, chairwoman of the Senate Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee is threatening to refuse to hear the issue at all. Essentially, she’s saying “well you guys won’t even get the chance to vote on it, because I don’t think it’s fit for a vote.” See previous coverage here and here and plenty of other places.

In short, unless the bill is voted on in committee, then there is absolutely no chance of it passing.

What can I do?

Write to your Maryland state Representative or Senator and let them know how you feel about the issue. Support Marylanders for Better Beer and Wine Laws for they are the ones on the front lines of this. Finally, if you really feel passionately about this, make note of who opposes the bill and vote accordingly come November.

Since then I have published 217 posts (and at least 400 typos) about Maryland and Virginia but plenty of others about everything else in the wine universe. I was going to go back and include a top 5 list of my favorite posts, but WordPress is slow today and I don’t feel like clicking back and back and back. If you have a favorite, drop a line in the comments.

Wine blogging, in general, underwent a boom in 2008 and early 2009 and now seems to be trailing off. Initially struggling for respect and recognition, the trumpet sound of the Wine Blogger has quieted. There just isn’t all that much interesting to talk about. Bloggers that post early and often have to reach for asinine topics and wild tangents just to keep their fingers moving on the keyboard. This is, at least, preferred to the dreaded “I bought it, I drank it” post which dominates much of the wine blogoshpere.

So if wine blogs aren’t interesting, what of the subject that they cover? Is wine interesting enough to merit books and blogs and newspaper columns, all pretty much saying the same thesis over and over: “Wine isn’t all that complicated!” The fact is that wine is both infinitely complex and stupidly boring. Tasting rooms are so typical that if you’re seen one, you’re seen them all. Maybe one has cheese. Another, classical music playing. They all have a Chard that isn’t in the California Style, an oak monster, a fruit bomb, and an overpriced reserve wine. Join the wine club. Wine critics decry the death of the tasting note, but the fact is that critics are getting so absurdly flowery in their notes that you need a dictionary just to decode what your wine will taste like. There are only so many words you can use to describe a wine, especially when 95% of wine is produced with no soul, slapped with an authentic looking label, marked up to $25, and sold out immediately. No wino like to say it, but slapping a 91 on one wine and an 89 on another tells me which you preferred. That’s all we really want to know.

But while it all looks and feels the same on the surface, every glass of wine is different from the last. Even from the same bottle, filling up your glass and taking in a big whiff of the fermented grape juice gives you something different than the last time. That’s what makes wine different from anything else. It comes from the Earth, ferments in some oak and as long as it hasn’t been messed with too much, comes out feeling authentic and whole. Enjoy the simplicity and the complexity, and don’t forget to share it with someone else.

To see how one would vault into the elite club, it’s best to examine the club members in the first place. What does it take to be there?

Produce good wines

Sorry to be obvious about things, but that is what gets attention. It begins and ends with the wines. My experience with Virginia wines is that there are some quality spikes but across the board, the quality just isn’t on par with New York. But Virginia doesn’t need a broad swath of awesome wine. Virginia needs three or four wineries to take a common varietal like Cabernet and just knock it out of the park for three straight years.

Stay boutique

Nothing promotes the image of plonk more than mass production. There are plenty of good wines that get rolled off in 100,000 case lots, but they don’t drive reputation. Small production winners drive a reputation for quality. Whispers and friendly tips about “this hard to find gem” get your winery on the map.

Get a score from a big gun

There’s tons of talk about how the wine recommendation engine is changing. Social media rules, old journalism drools. It’s great to see people getting their wine information from lots of different sources. In the future, the hope is that wineries are viewed on their merit, not their reputation.

But that isn’t now. Now, Virginia needs a score.

Parker hasn’t ever marked up a Virginia wine over 88 points, and that happened back in 2002: both White Hall Vineyards Petit Verdot and Chehalem Petit Verdot scored 88. The last time Wine Spectator ran a feature on East Coast wines, nothing out of VA cracked 86. That isn’t going to get it done. I don’t know if Tanzer has even reviewed a VA wine. Anyone?

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to get a more recent score out of these guys. Anyone have Parker’s direct line?

Others are cocked and ready to step up and be a big wine producing state. States like Texas and Idaho (No, Udaho!) are starting to get whispers around the wine world regarding their increasing quality. It’s good to see quality wine coming out of uncommon areas and it will be fun to find out who is the next one to make the leap.

“We have probably sold 150 cases. It’s been going like crazy,” O’Herron said recently.

Clearly my snarky jabs at the wine prices at Black Ankle aren’t working. Forty dollars a bottle and the wine is flying out the door. The recession is over!

Seriously, though, I’m having trouble getting my head around this. A wine, made from fruit grown in Frederick County, is going for $40 and demand hasn’t even blinked.

Link to Crumbling Rock info page.

More prattling about wine, social media, bloggers, and the societal value of such over at Dr. Vino. Dr. Vino himself will be giving the keynote address at the annual meeting of the California Association of Winegrape Growers.

Much of my talk in Sacramento will focus on wine blogs as well as “social media,” such as Twitter, Facebook, Open Wine Consortium, or the group Wine 2.0.

Were I giving the talk, here’s my short version: It’s coming, people. Hire a college kid as an intern to manage your Facebook/Twitter/Blog identity. Do it now.

Finally, Howard Country Times put out a rundown of major festivals upcoming during 2009 in Maryland and on the East Coast. The usual suspects are there (Wine In The Woods), there’s info on Wine Festivals in New Orleans and Aspen. Either would make a nice road trip.

Surely, the good times can keep on rolling, right? Some people think so. In the back of the September 2008 issue of Decanter, hidden behind all the gentlemanly and refined five-star wine ratings, was a blurb in the Collectors’ News section that headlined

£10m case of claret, anyone?

Setting the bar high right off the bat, no doubt. The small article in Decanter cites ancient wine retailer Berry Bros & Rudd releasing their “Future of Wine Report.” There are some good nuggets in the report, reasoned predictions, and some bold claims:

Berrys believes, by 2058, global bidding wars will take place for the top wines and the most soughtafter wines will become prohibitively expensive and extremely difficult to obtain.

Okay, sure. Sounds reasonable.

Simon Staples, Fine Wine Sales Director at Berry Bros. & Rudd believes: “If values increase by 15% per annum, as they have been doing recently, a case of 2005 Ch. Lafite-Rothschild, currently available for £9,200, could be worth just shy of £10 million by 2058.”

Without question, a stratospheric projection that is meant more to raise eyebrows than to be a solid prediction of future returns. Mr. Staples qualified his claim. “If values increase by 15% per annum…” he starts. Well, sure, that is a factual statement. If value increases by X%, value will be $Y on date Z. I have a compound interest calculator that can do that too. Here we go.

Gary, Senior Blogger at Vinotrip, believes: “If values increase by 26% per annum, a case of 2005 Ch. Lafite-Rothschild, currently available for £9,200, could be worth just shy of £1 billion by 2058.”

The point of the quote was not to stress low-level accounting. Mr. Staples’ point was to promote the strength of fine wine as an investment vehicle for the long-term future. Decanter has published Wine Investment Guide to this end. The website of The Wine Investment Fund prints front and center “Fine wines can make you money*. It is a fact.” (The asterisk leads to the disclaimer that past performance does not guarantee future returns.) A cool £10,000 gets you into the fund. Liv-Ex, a platform for merchants to trade fine wine, has an index that they publish alongside the numbers for the FTSE 100, S&P500, and the Nikkei 225. Their indices, the Liv-Ex 100 and Liv-Ex 500, have beaten the other markets handily over the last few years. Their Fantasy Cellar has appreciated 16% this year alone.

All of these factors—from Berry, Bros & Rudd handing out rosy speculations of future performance to a fine wine index blowing past traditional investments–sound a lot like those NASDAQ cheerleaders from 1998: just buy, buy anything, it’ll go up over time.

One can look back even farther if bigger returns are necessary to lure you in to buying a case of First Growths. In her book Emperor of Wine, author Elin McCoy writes of wine critic Robert Parker’s motivations for starting The Wine Advocate in the 1970′s. One such motivation that McCoy cites was Parker’s displeasure over a bottle of Ch. Lafite-Rothschild that cost twelve dollars. Picture that for a moment. A First Growth Bordeaux being bought for $12, and the consumer thinking that was too much for what he was getting. It is a staggering thought.

So, it’s a rosy outlook for people who invested in wine ten years ago. When everyone finds out bout it though, it’s time to bail. Let’s take a look at the five year auction result chart for nearly any First Growth Bordeaux. They all look the same.

That’s 1982 Latour on the left and 1982 Petrus on the right. Up up, and up. There is a problem, though, on the far right of each chart. The one-year charts all look the same too: and they’re flat.

More charts can be found on Wineprices.com

The usual culprits can be named in this flattening of wine prices. A huge rise has to stop sometime. Global fear and catastrophic losses in the stock market. China is slowing down. Russia is on the verge of complete collapse.

I’d love to recommend that you move some money out of the market and into fine wine, but I can’t. Stock prices are too juicy right now and it looks like the fine wine market is going to putter around flat or even recede a little bit. To make money in wine, you need homerun-style returns because of the cost of storing the wine and the cost involved with shipping it and selling it. Flat prices don’t mean you break-even with your wine, it means you lose 20%.

I can, though, recommend that being selective about investing in wine can be a healthy add to big investment portfolio. If you have over $10,000 of cash in your portfolio, call in someone who specializes in this sort of thing and see what they have to say about purchasing, storage, and selling. The usual wine cliche applies: even if the value goes to zero, you’ve still got some good wine on your hands.

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

Millennial-generation adults who are already having a significant impact on the wine industry “don’t give a crap about Wine Spectator and Parker,” he said. “And I think that’s a little dangerous in this town.” (from wineandvines.com)

It’s the “Power to the people speech” that is both cliched and accurate. Vaynerchuk is a pioneer on the bleeding edge of Wine 2.0, a technology movement that trails actual technology by two to three years. He’s right that Napa’s brand power fails to reach newer wine consumers. He’s also right that many wine consumers wouldn’t know what to do with a Wine Advocate score if the shelf-talker jumped out and bit them. Everyone is all up in arms about this, talking about the fall of Napa and Bordeaux unless they change their ways.

Power to the people and the beats and the wine

CC Licensed photo from Flickr user Drunken Monkey

Two points are being overlooked. The first is obvious and the other is not.

Napa isn’t having any trouble selling their prized Cabernets at triple-digit prices. In fact, sometimes their pricing almost seems like a joke, like they’re pushing it and laughing about it. Not only are they selling out, but some wines get flipped for a huge profit immediately suggesting that Napa is leaving money on the table. We’re in an age where pricing a small production Cabernet out of Napa at $60 seems restrained. Drinkward Peschon releases at $50 and everyone pats them on the back (and buys up all the wine). Until that changes, no amount of Twittering will get Bill Harlan to set up a group on Facebook.

Second, rage-induced change is cyclical. The very Robert Parker who is targeted in the above quote was himself a pioneer when he released The Wine Advocate in 1978. His purpose was to evaluate the wines as they are, with no respect to what name was on the front label. Gone were the days when Lafite could throw their label on the bottle and call it a day. They had to answer to the people now, and the people had a newsletter with a 100-point scoring scale on it. It sounds familiar except now the people have blogs and You Tube. Everyone has a voice, and it is really loud in here.

Now, the trailblazer has gone from reporting on something to influencing it. This happened in the 1980′s with my beloved baseball cards (smell the gum!) when Beckett Baseball Monthly reported prices, then quietly moved to setting prices instead. The Tony Gwynn rookie wasn’t $25 because that’s what people were selling it for, it was $25 because Beckett said so. There was no Gary V. for baseball cards to come save us, just a worthless pile of cardboard when the whole thing came down.

In short, Parker as the vanguard pioneer of change has moved into the mainstream and now there’s another group at the gates pushing for change.  So, to the future! In twenty years, Joe Winedrinker will rally the troops against Gary Vaynerchuk, saying that his influence is no longer felt and that Generation Z must decide for themselves. Joe Winedrinker will give a speech to the Wine 3.0 symposium in Fairfax, Virginia and wag his finger at Linden and Chrysalis telling them that $50 Cab Francs just won’t cut it. “See what happened to Napa?” Joe Winedrinker will say, “They couldn’t sell a drop of their Napa Cabernet before that earthquake dropped them into the Pacific.”

The cycle will continue. Enjoy the wine.

Rapper Lil’ Jon has launched a winery, Little Jonathan Winery, and bottles of his Cab, Merlot, and Chard will be hitting shelves in California in one or two months. Yes, that Lil’ Jon. The one with the goblet.

But while Crunk!!! is “bold pride, ridiculous parties and endless energy,” according to the beverage’s website, Little Jonathan Winery is “not no ghetto Boone’s Farm,” Jon said.

“This is real wine.”

Really, Jonathan? Real wine? Well I’d like to be the first to thank you. I’ve never heard James Suckling use “WHAT?” in a wine review, and now it’s a virtual lock that I will.

Supple and appealing in texture, the 2005 Leoville Poyferre is a monumental effort. Aromas of plum and blackberry hiding under a lot of spicy character. Lingers on the palate with soft, mid-balanced tannins that make you say WHAT? 94.

Middle-aged women at stuffy wine-tastings in the SOMA district are going to swirl their Cabernet around a few times, take a big whiff, sip, savor, and say “YEAH!” The skit pretty much writes itself.

You know what, I’m back on the other side of the fence. No way this is true.

Is it?

Link to quoted story. Link to “winery website”

It is true that the halcyon days of sub-$10 wines that you’d consider “good” are ending. And, one cannot argue that many of the wines flaunted at the Virginia Wine Showcase, the reds especially, were averaging $18-$25 a pop with little variation. With regards to quality, I can see how one would make this assertion:

(A $20 Virginia Wine) < ($20 from any established wine region)

There are a few issues to dive into here.

First, regardless of pricing, wine falls into the luxury goods category in that a $20 wine is perceived by the consumer as “better” than a $10 wine. We’re not talking tasting, we’re talking about purely shelf prices when shopping at the store. Selling your wine for $10 is almost an admission of inferiority. I would bet that a $20 Cabernet Sauvignon from Wherever Winery would sell faster than the exact same wine in the exact same bottle priced at $10. Again, we’re dealing with perception by the giant sea that is the casual wine consumer and not the narrow focus group of wine dorks who snub their nose at such foolishness.

Second, market forces are at work here. Some winery raised the price of their Cab Franc to $19 and they sold out of it. So, the winery next door ran their Cab Franc up to $22 and they sold out of it too. The pricing will go as high as the consumer will stand, quality of product be damned. The wine industry is booming and demand is increasing. Unless production suddenly skyrockets (who’d be dumb enough to do that?) then prices will rise.

Finally, I’ve been guilty of doing this test where you say “I have $15 dollars, which wine region will likely provide me with the best wine for my buck?” Virginia is pretty far down on that list. Maryland, even farther. If you go to the register with some Burgundy Villages or Italian Rosso, you’re in pretty good shape, even for $15.

But, this is unfair because, for starters, Europe has about a 1000 year head start on us in terms of wine making. The sheer volume that they turn out almost guarantees that, for $15, something has to be good. And, because of that volume, something has to be awful too. The sample set is so large, so of course the number of good bottles is bigger. The number of plonky bottles is bigger too.

So, to belabor a point here, I don’t pick up a $20 Virginia wine because Virginia wines stand toe-to-toe with Central Coast Syrahs in terms of quality. I pick up the wines because it’s fun exploring new regions. It’s fun dissecting why wines work with foods, where the wayward bottle went wrong, and seeing if Virginia Cabs smell different than the gorillas from Napa (they do). Last, when you do come across that $20 gem that you can’t wait to tell your friends about (or blog about, Ye Gods) that makes it all worth it.