Wine: Domaine de la Sauveuse Provence 2001, Crystal Valley Cellars Ol’ Red
It’s perhaps the biggest argument in wine today… the enthusiasts for the subtle complexity of Old World wines against the lovers of the big bold fruit-forward high alcohol New World wines. There are plenty of proponents on both sides of the fence, from the wine guy at my local gourmet market who swears by big Zins and South American wines to Eric Asimov from the New York Times who calls them “too jammy, too much flavor, too plush.” It’s not just old vs new, since there are plenty of exceptions… subtle California Pinot Noirs, Primitivo - the Zinfandel cousin in South Italy, and the meaty wines of Spain and Portugal. It is merely an argument of style, “less is more” vs “the more the better”.
I have been on the side of New World wines for a while now, and why wouldn’t I be. I’m young, getting introduced to the world of wine, and French wine has a steep learning curve and high cost of entry. It also doesn’t hurt that I spent my honeymoon in Napa Valley, getting accustomed to what $30 bottles of quality Californian wines taste like. But I’ve been trying to prep for my husband and I’s trip to France and Italy this fall, so Old World wines have been entering into our rotation. At first it was a shock, Old World wines can have the tendency to seem sour and dull, but lately there has been a change in my perception. Here are two red blends in the same price range that we had last week:
Crystal Valley Cellars Ol’ Red
Everything but the kitchen sink: Pinot Noir, Syrah, Carignane, Zinfandel, Merlot, Sangiovese, Mouvedre, Petite Sirah and a few other things. The first sip was fireworks going off in my mouth, information overload. It is a shock to the system that has you wanting more. It’s fruit, smoke, oak, spice, banging off like pop rocks. The next few sips warm your tongue and taste of dark fruit and rich jam, the feel is thick and round. Half way through your first glass, the magic wears off. You are left with an inky pleasant taste that is smooth, not sour in the slightest, but it’s kool-aid, no complexity.
Domaine de la Sauveuse Provence 2001
Hearty blend of Syrah, Grenache, Cabernet and Mouvedre. First sip is nothing special. Luckily, it’s not notably sour, but it is also not notably fruity even after an hour worth of decanting. It’s pleasant to drink. After your taste buds begin to warm up a little bit, new flavors start to peak out. It’s still all light, but if you sip it just right it will dance on your tongue as your taste buds search to identify the flavors. Definately a sipper, not a gulper that can be had with or without food.
Both of these wines were enjoyable, but I’d buy the French over the Californian. Nothing in the French could compare to that first sip of the Ol’ Red, but after the fireworks went off, there was nothing left to get excited about. But the world of under $20 wines of the Old World are a more treacherous territory filled with loads of sour grapes. The mark up from importing and reputation mixed with the France’s imperfect rating system makes it hard to find the gems. It’s safer to grab a bottle from the Californian shelves. Even if it is kool-aid, it is still more drinkable than a mouth puckering wine.
What is the future of this wine argument? For me, going to France and Italy and experiencing cheap but amazing Old World wine will probably change my whole viewpoint. But for the rest of the Vinenials… will their preference for kool-aid change the landscape of popular wine or will they burn out on it? Will Old World winemakers start selling to the needs of a growing audience?
technorati tags: judgement of paris, french wine, californian wine
Wine: La Vieille Ferme Rosé 2005, Trentadue Sonoma County Cabernet Sauvignon 2004
Both of these wines were two nighters (sipped one night, finished the other), and both insulted me the first night, and then improved but yet failed to wow me the second night.
Let’s start with the rosé. Highly rated by Wine Specator, described as a “fruit bomb“, cheap and easy to find… I was excited. Beautiful delicious pink color. The color was so candy-enticing that I imagined the first sip would be like a sugary bubblegum slushie. Perhaps that influenced my taste a little, because I swear I detected a hint of bubblegum, but mostly a whole lot of mineral and metal. The second night with the tilapia, it seemed to fair better, but still my overall consensus was bland bland bland. I’d occasionally get a mouthful that would resonate with a light cherry aftertaste that warmed my tongue. However, it was infrequently and nearly impossible to replicate. Sad for my first true rosé. I really wanted to be wowed. For $7, not bad, but I won’t be buying again.
Next is the far more expensive Cabernet Sauvignon. Complete opposite color… an intimidatingly evil black ooze that will only bear its dark cherry color when placed up to the light. I tasted it at Wine Styles and experienced a berry explosion in my mouth that I never once replicated upon taking home. The first night it tasted so sour, stinging, and desertly dry that I suspected a tainted wine. I let it open for a few hours, and then corked it for the night. The second night it was surprisingly better, smooth, rich, but still a little odd. We drank it with a steak which worked in its favor. However, for every deceptively rich swallow there was a just as frequent dry as a desert sip. Sometimes as delicious as a Karly Buck’s 10 Point Zin, sometimes crappier than Shaw… overall too dangerous a crap shoot for a $20 wine.
Tom and I bought our most expensive wine this weekend. A $55 Burgundy from 1997: Aloxe Corton Tollot-Beaut. Let’s hope it much more impressive than these two disappointments.
technorati tags: rosé, french wine, cabernet sauvignon
web concept: Web 3.0
I was planning to write today about my dream wine site, for the growing population of wine loving Millenials (let’s call them Vinenials). Then I discover a fascinating article that takes a shot at defining the much hated term “Web 3.0″ in a way that has made it tangible for me and digestible for the first time. I had a revelation that the site I was dreaming of was not a wine 2.0 site at all, but is within the realm of Sramana Mitra’s web 3.0 equation. And thus I have been filled with a new love of the previously meaningless term, and now I will share my love.
The components of my ideal wine site would collect all the functions I now do separately and put them in one useful place. Instead of going to Wine Spectator for expert reviews, Cork’d for community reviews, winery web sites for wine labels and pairing suggestions, using Excel to build shopping lists and catalog purchases… I want it all to be centralized, and most of all, I want it make my life more efficient. It needs to help me out in all 4 key behavior categories:
Browsing
Rather than having to find time to read numerous wine magazines, online articles, blogs, vlogs, etc, I would want my site to slurp up RSS content from any useful source, and spit it back out at me in a way I find relevant. New and highly rated content should bubble up to the top based on preferences that I set. This could be manual, like say I know I want to start learning about Montepulciano for my upcoming trip to Tuscany. Or it could be tuned into my previous browsing and purchasing behavior, like (formerly known as) The Page You Made on Amazon.com. Or ideally, a combination of both.
I want useful color coding for content buckets (video, articles, ratings, user comments) and the ability to tag content as interesting. There should be landing pages for wineries, varietals, and wine rages with top user voted and top rated wines pushed to the top, with fun related content and images. And even better, why not an Etsy-type whimsical search experience, a swirling spiral of wine flavor profiles (butter, strawberry, grapefruit), or wine label art.
Hunting/Gathering
Search should be highly usable and customizable. This utility should allow the user to determine what attributes (i.e. price, region, fermentation period, featured on my favorite wine vlog) they want to be included in the results page. The user should control all rows, columns, filters, sorting, etc in an intuitive ajax-y fun way that allows them to easily find the wines they are looking for and then repurpose the information. Many sites stop at finding the information, with no thought as to how to get the user to their ultimate goal. Users should be able to “flag” content as interesting, and go back later to read more.
Individual wine pages should draw in from traditional variables (varietal, price, wine region, vintage) as well as not traditional variables such as flavor profile tags, food pairing suggestions (with links to highlighted recipes on allrecipes.com). But more importantly, the wines should pull a variety of ratings from magazines, online databases, user ratings, etc. and create a combined rating and consensus description (a la Rotten Tomatoes). When the user is ready to move into “gathering” mode, they should be able to export or print out the wines they are looking for, which will be conveniently organized by wine region and varietal to make the physical shopping experience easier (Allrecipes does this when creating a grocery list).
Consuming
Once the user has purchased the wines, either via a physical store (zip lookup) or online for the fortunate states, they should have an easy way to identify wines as being part of “my cellar”. My Cellar should integrate with commonly used tools such as CellarTracker. The results of the cellar should be sortable by food pairing matches to make it easy for users to pick out a wine for their nightly meal. It should be easy for users (and encourage) to add notes and ratings about drank wines back into the system. And finally, to make things all the more targeted towards the Vinenials, the users should be able to identify or scan in labels of their bottles and then create a slideshow/thumbnail widget to post on their blogs, MySpace pages, etc.
Recalling
Final stage, users should be able to pull up anything they have drank in the past with the help of the sites usable search tool. They should be able to skim through their notes, and select “favorite” wines that will be utilized to recommend wines that “users who liked this wine also liked this” and set up an alert system that will tell the user when their favorite wines have been written or if the wine is on sale. All users inputed content (reviews, ratings) and behavior (liked these wines, researched these wines, didn’t like these wines) should be pushed back into the environment to make a smarter browser experience for future web users. The site (on an opt-in basis) should offer smart suggestions, suggestions that stay within a comfortable wine zone (price threshold, don’t like sweet wines, etc), but help you to experience new things. Users should be able to socialize with other users within the community, and invite their friends in. Similar to Netflix, users can send each other “wine notes” about wines they thing their friends would like, see how their taste compares to their friends, and see their friends or “trusted users” ratings float to the top of all other user generated wine ratings.
So how does this compare to the Web 3.0 formula:
3C = Content, Commerce, Community | 4th C = Context | P = Personalization | VS = Vertical Search
Check on all 6 counts. So what was the point of this exercise? To make everyone dream with me for a moment, of how beautiful this evolving web landscape really can be. Oh the fun, oh the efficiency. Peter Morville told me when he found out I was writing this article:
Just to play devil’s advocate, audience and topic verticals have been the future of the Web since the beginning of the Web…it’s tough to define the topic/audience just right and to change those definitions as people’s interests/behaviors evolve…and to keep up with new technologies and platforms…which is why I would go to Amazon to buy a book about wine rather than a wine 2.0 or 3.0 site…verticals/communities are great but have their limits.
But I read the books and the magazines and the websites, and I say if you make the tools smart enough and useful enough, they will evolve with their audience rather than have their audience grow out of them. So a toast to web 3.0, and the boys at Cork’d and Wine Library TV. Please make my dream a reality.
technorati tags: Web 3.0, Wine Library TV, Gary Vaynerchuk, Millenials
websites: http://winespectator.com, http://corkd.com
As I began to draft this article out, an amazing announcement came that Gary Vaynerchuk, famous wine vlogger at Wine Library TV, acquired Cork’d, a web 2.0 community site for reviewing wine. This could mean great things for a continually growing online community of the knowledge hungry wine youths. Since 2005, wine has overtaken beer as America’s drink of choice, and the marketers have targeted in on the Millenials and with good reason. The wine market has an intimidating learning curve to a beginner, and simple things like unique packaging, flashy labels, or quirky names, can set a wine out amongst the sea of indecipherable foreign labels with chateaus and medieval fonts. Millenials are drinkers not collectors, drinkers that can easily become brand enthusiasts, loving to share the knowledge they have with peers, which is why Cork’d exploded ever since its launch last year.
So with a web-savvy, info hungry audience looking for a helpful guide into this sometimes gated community of wine appreciation, it would make sense that Wine Spectator Online would be a safe haven, perhaps not on the cutting edge of social web technology, but at least a highly useful online Encyclopedia Brittanica of all things wine. Oh… but no, so far from it, so very far from it. I cannot fathom how the slick oversized glossy pages (makes the in some ways more friendly, approachable Food & Wine pathetic in comparison) could be translated so poorly into this uninspired chaotic design:
I could go own for pages about what drives me nuts about Wine Spectator Online. The biggest crime to its name is that it actually has a wealth of content, useful industry respected content. It’s just so unnecessarily hard to find. In the sea of dull grey and blue that is the boring WS homepage, it took me nearly a full year’s paid subscription to even realize there was blogs, forums, travel information, etc. Wine Spectator the print version is packed full of content already, to aimlessly pile more content creates a disorienting browsing experience. There are no individual RSS feeds for the blogs, or an easy way to distinguish one from the other, or from the exclusive WS online articles for that matter. Wine Videos… is this like a wine vlog or educational videos, I’m not sure and WS isn’t helping. They direct me to view from various different channels with no definitions of what is what, no helpful tags to cross channels, and its certainly not exporting any sort of XML making the video content searchable. Everything just seems to be throw in haphazardly and without proper thought. Ask Dr. Vinny, a wine expert column that isn’t integrated into the overall site search, no RSS, no categorization. It’s the everything but the kitchen sink policy to web design.
Well at least they got their primary site use functionality nailed, right? At least searching for wine reviews is easy. While a recent update has taken it from “disastrous” to “lacking”, the inability to customize the display of the returned list, especially when it is supposed to act as a shopping guide, is a major problem that makes me really wonder how far into the experience the creators of the site thought. It seems that all the paths get you as far as information retrieval without allowing the user to actual use the information they are being inundated with (and there certainly is a flood of it). Part II… where the world of online wine needs to go to get me truly excited.
technorati tags: Wine Spectator, Cork’d, wine
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