From Dr Vino to Jorge

Today Dr. Vino's wine blog posted an open letter to Jorge Ordonez:

Dear Jorge Ordonez, importer of wine from Spain, Bring us a good bag-in-a-box. Robert Parker may have just sung your praises in his most recent newsletter. He may have lauded some of your top wines such as El Nido with 97 points. But you have many great value wines ranging from Tres Picos, to Naia, to Juan Gil. Borsao is great juice for $6 a bottle. You need to put it--or something like it--in a bag in a box. There's certainly no lack of old vine grenache in Spain that rolls in at value pricing. Tap that wine glut. Boxed wine sales are the fastest segment with 204 percent growth over the past three years according to this story in August's Wine Business Monthly. They eliminate the need for glass so can make a claim to being better for the environment. And they are certainly more convenient for consumers who just want to squeeze off a glass or two every night for a couple of weeks. While in France this summer, Mrs. Vino and I -- and practically anyone who walked within 100 yards of the fridge for that matter -- enjoyed glasses of wine from a 5L box of rose that we bought for 12 euros.

Dr. Vino's wine blog: An open letter to Jorge

HERE, HERE! The amount and variety of great wine available in bag-in-box in Europe is staggering. It's true, the growth of the 3L segment has taken a great leap in the last year, and we are seeing some excellent California wines, Pacific Northwest wines, and Australian wines in boxes, but scant availability from the Continent. There is still an amazing bias against the box, more prevailing among those who have not travelled overseas.

Dr. Vino, I hope Jorge gets your message!

technorati tags: boxed+wine, box+wine, wine+import, wine+Spain

Box Wine As Baseline

Interesting post on Mollishka blog about a wine tasting class:

The bulk of the class was dedicated to "component tasting." Did you ever do that thing in elementary school where you have to make a map of your tongue based on dipping cuetips into sugar water and salt water and bitter water and swabbing it in your mouth? It was like that, but with wine and no little kids going, ewwwwww. We were given a simple base wine (Almaden Mountain Chablis, a white box wine) which had been enhanced with six different flavors. The components were acidity (citric acid), sugar (sucrose), sweetness (glycerine), tannin (... grape tannin), oak (soaked oak chips in the wine), and simulated oxidation (adding dry Fino sherry). Most of the tastes were fairly subtle, but the tannin and the oak were quite strong. Apparently, by the way, if a wine smells like sherry (and thus not like "wine"), it is probably due to an overabundance of acetaldehyde, and means the wine has "gone bad."

{mollishka's title goes here}: AstroVino #1: Intro and Component Tasting

So the Chablis was the starting point for training the nose to identify the six "tweaks". I've heard about this, but have never done it. Fascinating; I'd like to find a class like that!

technorati tags: box+wine, boxed+wine, wine+tasting, Almaden+Chablis