Winemega.com

I just found Winemega.com. It's a great resource, especially for ratings, and is a nice compliment to my favorite winewebapp, CellarTracker. Check it out. (Tip to Vivi.)

Wine Madness

EVERY FEW YEARS Kate and I have a "Wine Madness" party on the first Saturday of the NCAA basketball tournament. It's a wine tasting with two rules: (1) Each attendee brings a wine from a different part of the world (or if it's CA or France, appellation); (2) The wine must not cost more than $15 (and sale prices count). We supply our own bottles, cheese, meats, crackers, etc., we watch the games, and we rate the wines as we go.

It's a lot of fun, and I thought I'd put the tools we use online. First is the wine menu I print for our guests. Here it is as a MS Word document; I simply do a quick Google search on the wines as people arrive, copy the tasting note I find online, and paste it in. Second is a wine evaluation chart and aroma wheel. It has space for rating eight wines on appearance, aroma / bouquet, taste / texture, aftertaste, overall impression, and total score. The aroma wheel in particular is fun.

The most popular wines of the night? The 2004 Pine Ridge Chenin Blanc Viognier and  the 1999 Louis Latour Beaune Rouge. We also drank a Hungarian Tokaji that was wonderful.

Tags: wine tasting

CellarTracker!

HERE'S SOMETHING TO GO SEE: CellarTracker! -- an online wine cellar management program. There are several such services out there, but I've been using CT for around six months now and it's by far the best in its power and flexibility. What's more, because it's on the web an not your PC, you're able to access your list of wines from any computer with an Internet connection or web-enabled phone (very handy when you're at the wine shop wondering how to best surprise your wife with your lack of self control).

One of the great things about CT is that it's a community-based model. Unless you mark your holdings as private, you're able to see other users' cellars, and they yours. This is very useful: Say you find a wine you like and enter it into your database. CT then shows you all the other users who also hold that wine; browse their holdings for a while, read their tasting notes, and you can very quickly find other wines you're likely to enjoy trying. The community model also makes data entry VERY easy: Every wine entered by every user (and there are 12,000 users and 2 million bottles in the system) is in the shared database; for most wines, entry involves typing in the UPC code, and the software automatically pulls the rest of the information -- maker, vintage, appellation, year ... all of it.

Lots of other features (pasted from the CT home page, and you can click the picture above to see a full-sized version of my CT home page):

Cellar Inventory Management

• Report and search by producer, vintage, varietal, drinkability, etc.
• Purchase price and valuation data (locale settable)
• Consumption history
• Barcode support
• Restaurant-quality printed wine lists
• Per-bottle location & bin tracking
• Personal tasting notes
• Uploadable label images
• Wish lists and shopping lists
• Track pending deliveries (a.k.a futures)
• NEW! Automatic valuation of your cellar (read more)
• NEW! Express import tools for existing spreadsheets (read more)

Tasting Notes

• Record your own notes
• Group a series of notes into tasting events
• Read community tasting notes
• See what others say about wine in your cellar
• Automated integration with Stephen Tanzer's IWC (for co-subscribers)
• Store other professional reviews and scores (in compliance with copyright)
• Community bulletin board

The report features are especially useful. You're able to add and consume bottles with a click, so rather than poking through your inventory to find what you still have and what's worth drinking, you can go to CT, run a drinkability report for, say, reds, and instantly see what's ready to pull. It's really very slick. And while it's free, donations are encouraged, and franlky, deserved: I made a donation within several hours of finding CT, and use it to manage all the bottles in our modest collection. Check it out.

Update: While pulling the Technorati tag code for this post I found this interview with CT founder Eric LeVine. I was impressed with his bio when I found CT. Short story: In software early; Lotus, then Microsoft; fateful trip to Italy where he discovers a passion for wine; writes a software program to manage his cellar; makes it web based and collaborative so his friends can use it; retires young and makes CT his full-time job; rides into the sunset. Great story and an interesting guy.

Tags: cellartracker, eric levine

Schramsberg Blanc de Blancs

THIS PAST WEEKEND Kate, my in-laws, and I toasted the season with a bottle of Schramsberg Blanc de Blancs. Schramsberg is a wonderful story -- one of the very early wineries in Napa (1862!), the place fell on hard times until Jack and Jamie Davies started making sparkling wine there in  1965. They follow the methode champenoise, riddlers turn every bottle, and their wines have been the sparkling of choice at the White House since the Nixon administration.

We spent an afternoon at Schramsberg this past Summer and fell in love with the people, their style, and the wine (there's a snap I took in their caves, which were carved in the 1800's -- over a million bottles of wine in those caves)-- so much so that it's replaced Veuve as our sparkling for special events. Not many people have heard of Schramsberg, but you should. Treat yourself to a bottle in the spirit of the season.

Interactive Napa Map

THIS IS WONDERFUL: An interactive map of ALL Napa Valley wineries. Found this while browsing the popular wine tag posts at del.icio.us.

Luna 2001

LUNA'S SANGIOVESE 2001: It's not sophisticated. It's not fancy. But it's a nice little Napa sangiovese that has some rich tannins and a tasty finish, that gets better the longer it's open and seems to leave you feeling just fine thank you as you tilt the bottle to vertical. We've been enjoying a case as our wine for December, and I think you would, too.

Thief!

THIS POST ABOUT THIEVING A FEW ROADSIDE CABERNET GRAPES from Opus One[1] gave me a smile this morning. Might do the same for you, too.

1. Oh, and I was going to link to Opus One's web site, but it's such a horrible display of overdone Flash design that I decided not to waste your time. As Edward Tufte said, the greatest symbols of bad user design are the words "skip intro."

Vintage Chart

IF YOU'VE LOOKED for an on-line wine vintage chart, Wine Enthusiast has a nice example here.

Foxen Foothills Reserve

THIS PAST SATURDAY Kate and I opened a number of wines we'd been waiting to try and had some friends over for a late afternoon tasting on our deck. (One thing led to another, and by night's end tasting had turned into delivery pizza dinner party, served at the dining room table under candlelight with the good glassware. Good friends are like that.)

One of the wines we opened was Foxen's 2001 Foothills Reserve, a Bordeaux-style blend of Merlot and Cab Franc. Parker of Wine Advocate gave it 91 points and had this to say:

European-style red offering a dense, ruby/purple color as well as a big, sweet nose of white chocolate, blackcherries, currants, cedar and high class French oak. A rich, multidimensional, well-textured, medium to full bodied, long red with supple tannin, it should drink well for 7-8 years. A superlative effort.

Here's what I noted in my logs the next day:

Wow. Wonderful. Bordeaux style comes through; earthy right out of the bottle, and more fruit as it opened up. Decant it. It will get even better as it ages over the next 10 years. We may buy another case today.

It really is a wonderful wine, and very reminiscent of Bordeaux. We will buy another case to enjoy for the next decade.

Great wine. Buy it if you can find it; order it if you can't.

SMARTMONEY HAS ADVICE ON BUYING WINE ONLINE. Turns out finding a deal is harder than you might think, but there are plenty of deals to find.

THREE WINES we've recently enjoyed (two inexpensive, one not so much):

• Solaris Reserve 2000 Cab: Luscious, with the complexity of an even more pricey wine. We enjoyed it on the back deck with a good friend and grilled steaks, and it made the entire evening better. What's more, it made our friend's fabulously-marketed bottle of French red taste like wet swimming pool cement. (Honest to God: that's the tasting note that first came to mind as I took in the aroma of that name-forgotten French wine).
• J. Lohr 2003 Arroyo Seco Chard: Seriously -- how much did this wine cost, $12 in our local PA store? First sip and we both said "wow!" Not spectacular, mind you, but, well, delightful is the word that comes to mind. We drank it without food and with, and it was delicious both ways.
• Frog's Leap Leapfrogmilch: We love this wine. A 67% Riesling / 33% Chard mix here, in a Gewurtz-styled bottle. Among the faux German on the label is this line: "Zeit ist pass wenn du Fliegen hast." Translation (roughly): "Time flies when you have flies." The first word out of my  mouth on tasting: "bright." From the winemaker's notes:

The making of this wine requires a light hand that allows its natural freshness and delicacy to emerge. Leapfrögmilch is low in alcohol, high in acidity, and balanced by a dab of residual sugar. A glass begins with high-note aromas of white flowers and apricot, while across the palate the wine reveals a variety of fruit flavors from grapefruit and citrus to apple and pear. A touch of wet stone - punctuated by the wine’s acidity - drives the long, clean finish. With its bright and lively mouth-feel and touch of sweetness, this wine is the perfect foil for take-out Chinese. Yes, even Kung Pao.

We enjoyed it with Mushu Vegetables, but the point's the same: great with just about anything spicy or strong, and damn good alone on a hot Saturday evening.

10 NICE WINES UNDER $10, courtesy LifeHacker. The list:

• Steenberg South Africa Sauvignon Blanc 2004,$8
• Veramonte Casablanca Valley, Chile Sauvignon Blanc 2004, $7
• Domaine Duffour Vin de Pays des Côtes de Gascogne 2003, $7.40
• Bodegas Salentein Mendoza, Argentina Sauvignon Blanc Finca el Portillo 2004, $9
• Bolla Venezie I.G.T Pinot Grigio 2002,  $10
• J. Vidal-Fleury Côtes-du-Rhône   2001, $8
• Domaine Lafond Lirac Roc-Épine 2002,$8
• Bonny Doon California Ca'del Solo Big House Red 2003, $10
• Sumarroca Penedès  Tempranillo Barrel-Aged 2002, $10
• Bogle California Old Vine Zinfandel 2003,  $9

Winecast

Tim Elliott has a great podcast on wine (called "Winecast"). Runs about 12 minutes and is well worth the subscription (which is free). Also, iTunes now helps you manage podcast subscriptions, and it's really quite handy.

The Tay Wah Is Half The Fun

Steve at Vinography has a nice post on terroir (long, interesting, and worth the full read). He notes:

The terroir, for better or worse, is in the grapes; the winemaking is the way we dance with the terroir, and it requires all our attention; indeed it requires devotion.

I've never much understood the argument over terroir. Yes, the winemaker has discretion to shape the wine (she is, after all, a craftsman, and we can't begrudge her for exercising her craft). But it also seems reasonable that the land shapes the grapes without discretion. Together, they work to create the juice in our glass.

Indeed, for me the land is much of the fun of the thing: to know that those grapes, under that sun, on that hillside, with those breezes and ensconced in that morning fog -- that "somewhereness" produces in those grapes (and the wind) a unique signature (winemaker or none), a singular palette of colors from which the winemaker will paint. Tasting the land, seeing it in your mind's eye -- that's part of what makes wine wonderful. So I'll leave the argument to others: I have places to taste.