Demand has spiked and retailer’s phones have likely been ringing off the hook for the juice ever since the announcement (Something from Portugal that isn’t Port? I MUST drink it now!). Zachy’s has the 2005 Quinta do Crasto Reserva listed for $54.99, *on sale* from $59.99. Both of those numbers are a 50% premium over the retail average of $36.70. Quite a sale they’ve got going on up in New York.

To be fair, I’m sure Zachy’s distributor ran up prices on them so they, in turn, ran up prices. A market is a market and if you want the cool hip wine of the moment, then you’re going to pay for it. Zachy’s has the #2 2005 Rauzan Segla listed at a reasonable $149 a bottle.

The whites sound like they’re off to a good start.

White wines from 2008 will be very mineral driven (similar to 2006) with bright acidity, low to moderate alcohols, and botrytis influenced exotic aromas.

The reds… maybe some problems.

Early ripening varieties (Merlot) and sites took the biggest brunt of the September rains. Unfortunately I can taste the rain in these wines. They lack concentration.

You don’t see “rain” come up often enough on many wine reviewer’s tasting sheets.

Link to the full write up over at Anything Wine.

This box represents the last of my wines that I had in storage out on the west coast. Having wines in off site storage isn’t uncommon out west or in New York, but around here people look at you cross eyed when you say you have a bunch of wines in an underground climate-controlled basement in San Francisco.

The wine exodus has spanned several weeks following my decision to get all my wines into my own time zone. Each week, a new box came and from them I pulled out bottle after bottle that I had line items for in my storage account for some time, but had never actually seen in person. It is a strange, exciting experience. There’s something almost holy, like seeing something that you’ve read about for several years but never gotten out to actually do. The mystery and romanticism of wine is exceeded only by the adjectives people use to describe it.

Now off to start drinking it all…

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.

The Oasis Winery in Fauquier County, one of Virginia’s oldest, has been on the market since May 2007 and is now selling for $4.75 million. Such is the mystique of Oasis that basketball star Shaquille O’Neal, an apparent oenophile, and a group of investors were said to be on the verge of buying it last year.

Wait, what?

Shaquille O’Neal

Wow, check out Shaq expanding his interests to include wineries in Virginia. Nice job.

Aging shot-blockers aside, the article goes on to describe the trouble involved with selling Oasis winery. It boils down to a parent/son dispute over who gets what and for how much. The Son, 39 year old Tareq Salahi, wants to partner up with investors and purchase Oasis. The owners, Salahi’s parents, have filed a suit claiming that Salahi has interfered with prospective buyers.

We’ve all seen this movie before. It’s called The Mondavi Story and it was on Lifetime.

The interesting thing about wineries is that what is on the bottle is usually more important than what is in the bottle. Branding in the wine business is epic, and if your brand gains hold you can put tap water in your Chardonnay bottles and you’ll still sell out the vintage. This is why purchasers of wine empires, such as Constellation Brands when they purchased Mondavi, are more interested in the brand and the name than they are with the actual operations of the winery. Observe:

According to Tareq Salahi, O’Neal and his partners backed out of the deal with the elder Salahis after the investors learned they would not obtain the Oasis trademark or wine.

It’s sad to see family squabbles get in the way of life and prosperity, but the simple fact is that when there are millions of dollars at stake, someone is going to squabble over it. The American inheritance and estate laws, well-intentioned though they may be, also leave lots to squabble over.

Link to article
Link to Oasis Winery website

Vinfolio used to publish a twice-yearly volume called the Wine Price File, an encyclopedic-class book that contained all the auction results for the past several years sorted by wine and vintage. This being the Internet-age, Vinfolio decided to move all of that information online and make it free. This comprehensive data serves as the base for Wineprices.

On Wineprices.com you’ll find auction and retail values for a particular wine and year. The auction data is broken down by size, year, auction house, and presented in charts for five, three and one year time frames. You can also find stores that stock the wine and the prices that are advertised. The retail data is updated every two weeks, so the information isn’t as current as, say, Wine-searcher. It is, though, meant to provide a current picture of the retail market for a particular wine.

Go poke around and drop me a line in the comments to let me know what you think.

Local stars included foodandwineblog.com in twelfth and Virginia Wine Time in thirty-ninth. Be sure to tell them you heard about them on Vinotrip.com!

Lots of bloggers really hate when blogs are lumped into lists like this, see the comments on the list here. Actually, lists are fine, as long as there’s not a number to the left of each list item. This list wasn’t even generated by an actual human. Some multi-core machine in a basement in Palo Alto spit out a top 100 list and people are still bitter about it. Protest the machine!

Why get all ornery? There’s no Wine Blog BCS Champion to crown this January. The top five Wine Blogs did not receive lovely party gifts for their efforts. Just celebrate being fifty-sixth best and move along.

Link to Doug’s blog.

In the interview, Smith says the following. It’s long, sorry, but the context was necessary. I’ve bolded the parts you need to read.

Circa ‘94, when I came up, there was no such thing as an online critic. Sure, the folks who had the most primitive forms of dial-up could talk about movies on Dalnet or someplace, like that back then, but they weren’t being read outside their small community. So all I had to go by was the print critic. I mean, picture this: There was this NY Times ritual that John Pierson introduced me to that had us going down to the NY Times building at 2 in the morning the day of release to get the first copy of that day’s Times so we could read the review. Can you imagine that? Now, you click on the Times link the day before the flick comes out, and you can read what’s what. We’re talking about an era in which there were maybe 75 to 100 legitimate people who, in print, would tell you whether you rocked or sucked. That’s the world I came from, because that’s how it was done when I first got into the business.

Now, there are more like 7,500 to 10,000 people who’ll tell you whether you rocked or sucked (oftentimes before they even see the flick) and they’re all legitimate. And I gotta be honest: That’s better for any filmmaker. You get more bites at the apple. If those original 75 to 100 didn’t like your flick, you were fucked. Now, 500 critics can dislike your flick, and there’s still many more voices to be heard who might save you from a box-office disaster. The democratization of film criticism, thanks to the internet, has been a huge boon for filmmakers. It’s also been a huge bane, because now literally everybody’s a critic.

I always go on about how the wine technology revolution trails actual technology by 5 to 7 years. The world got ecommerce in the late 1990’s, but ordering wine online is just beginning to blossom. Bloggers were largely unheard of before 2000 but they have gained in legitimacy since. Wine bloggers, though, are still insecure, snarking amongst themselves for popularity, and kicking in the door for respect.

Kevin Smith summed it up with this quote though. The Internet made a film critic out of anyone who wanted to be one. Now, the Internet has made wine critics out of a lot of people who would never sniff a desk at Wine Spectator. Replace “filmmaker” with “winemaker” in Smith’s quote and you’re pretty much there.

Last week, The Wife and I walked down to Charles Street and into Juniors for their Chef’s Wine Tasting Dinner. These sorts of things, where you sit in a small group with the winemaker and have a multi-course meal pared with his wine, are somewhat unique to the area (If they aren’t unique, I certainly have not been notified of them). They’re a great chance to learn about wine and food because you usually have the chef showing off his best stuff and paring skills, and you have the winemaker there to tell you about the wines. Sometimes, like in this case, the distributor tags along to talk about production, availability, price, and to remind the Maryland patrons that they’ll have better luck flying to the moon than having the wine shipped to their door.

Sorry, had to get that in. I mat the importer, Steve Ward, and he was a very nice guy.

Onward!

Juniors got the chance to show off their new Executive Chef Anthony Marini. Co-owner Jeff Minderlei (the Junior in Junior’s) said that Marini is going to take advantage of a lot of freedom, switching up the offerings and changing the menu frequently. The courses at this wine dinner were very good and show the chef’s intent to take the restaurant to a higher level. The crowd favorites were the 15 hour braised pork belly with tomato compote and arugula, and the chocolate bread pudding with basil ice milk. The pork was cooked so that it just fell apart in your mouth, so tender. The bread pudding was off-the-map fantastic.

Winery owner Mario Pardini spoke about each wine as it came out with its accompanying course. He was gracious enough to answer questions and show pictures of the vineyards where the grapes were from. I haven’t been down to Mendoza yet, but it looks as picturesque as anywhere in the world.

My notes on the wines that were served:

2005 Atonietti Sparkling

Not bad. Not nearly as many bubbles as you’d find in a Champagne. Easy to drink, not bitter or tart.

2007 Ave Torrontes

Smelled explosive. Simply amazing aromas in the glass. One of the best floral bouquets of any wine I’ve ever had. Tasted almost glassy or slick, honeysuckle. Good acidity.

2008 Ave Malbec Rose

Rested on the skins for 24-36 hours only. Glowing candy red color, like a Jolly Rancher. Tasted pretty big for a Rose. This would dominate a Pinot.

Ave used actual fruit to make the Rose, not the must from other wines as some wineries will do. The Rose was good but the Jolly Rancher color is going to throw a lot of people. This is a serious Rose, not a blush or sweet wine. Wine being as cerebral as it is, though, a lot of people are going to see the wine and just think it tastes on the sweet side, even though it does not.

2006 Ave Malbec

Deep red. More floral aromas on the nose. Tastes of currant, blackberries, deep fruit. Paring with the risotto not quite perfect. This wine needs something bigger like some flank steak or a gigantic cheeseburger.

The wine was good, and when the distributor said it retailed at The Wine Market for $16, I made it a point to go out and get some. A really nice wine for $16.

2006 Ave Malbec Riserva

600 cases produced. Almost smelled overcooked on the nose, same aromas as its little brother. Very big in the mouth, lots of savor with a nice finish. The wine felt cumbersome, a little out of balance. It’ll be better in a few years.

As the night wore on, the diligent staff and the generous pours combined to make our table of sixteen more social and lively. Of course, it also led everyone to rave about the wines which were indeed praiseworthy even before our inebriation. The evening was well-planned and well-executed in every aspect. Hats off to Juniors for putting together such a fine evening at a very reasonable price. If you haven’t, join their email list to be notified of upcoming diner and get updates on their Winesdays specials.