Scoop the Spectator and Win a Kindle Fire

We're a little over a week away from Wine Spectator unveiling their 2011 Wine of the Year. As we have the past couple years, we're running a contest to see who can guess the top wine ahead of time.

This year we're playing for a Kindle Fire ($199 value!) sponsored by New York wine retailer Grapes the Wine Company.

Here are the Rules:

  1. Submit your guess as a comment on this blog post.
  2. One guess per person.
  3. The first person to guess a specific wine "owns" that wine as their entry.  Subsequent guesses of the same wine aren't useful so look at the previous comments before submitting your entry.
  4. If nobody guesses the 2011 Wine Spectator Wine of Year, the guess with the highest position on the list will win the prize.
  5. Not that they'd try, but Wine Spectator editors aren't allowed to enter. And if you have inside information please don't spoil the fun for others by entering. But if you do know please E-mail me and let me know. ;)
  6. Since the Kindle Fire is US-only at this point, a winning entry from outside the U.S. will receive a $199 Amazon.com gift card.
Wine Spectator describes their criteria as follows:
  • Quality (represented by score)
  • Value (reflected by release price)
  • Availability (measured by cases made or imported)
  • An X-factor we call excitement.
    But no equation determines the final selections: These choices reflect our editors? judgment and passion about the wines we tasted.
Last year's winner was the 98WS/$67 2007 Saxum James Berry Vineyard Paso Robles. With only 950 cases produced this wine was never in play for folks not on Saxum's mailing list which made the wine a surprising pick to me.

The year before, the 95WS/$27 2005 Columbia Crest Cabernet Sauvignon Columbia Valley Reserve was more in line with what I think makes Spectator's Wine of the Year interesting. The wine was widely available at warehouse clubs in the high $20s prior to the announcement and now sells for over $100 at auction.

To be successful, I think you need to have a sense for what category the publication would like to make a statement about. After the Saxum announcement heavy coverage came out about Paso Robles, and Saxum seemed to capture the essence of what's going on in the region. With the Columbia Crest Reserve the sentiment seemed to be value.

What will they choose this year? 2009 California Pinot Noir? (best vintage evar!) 2006 Brunello? Bordeaux (2005) and Chateauneuf (2007) seem to be in a lull until 2009/2010. Napa Cab hit a peak in 2007 and didn't make the cut last year. Is there a new region they might like to highlight?

The thing is - and sometimes this is forgotten when crunching the numbers - the wine needs to stand up to the scrutiny of all the Spectator editors. Not just the person covering the region. That's where I think there's some merit in tracking down wines in the Spectator Top 10. They tend to be pretty darn good wines if you can get your hands on them.

Interesting side note: Last year's winner went on to do some freelance writing for Wine Spectator. Demonstrate your savvy here and you could work your way into a wine writing job in the big leagues!

Ready, set, GO! Leave your entry below as a comment.

Drop me an email (wellesleywinepress@gmail.com) or hit me up on Twitter (@RobertDwyer) if you have any questions.

And let's let Grapes the Wine Company's Daniel Posner know we appreciate his making this contest more interesting by signing up for his mailing list (he offers some amazing deals) and/or giving him a shout-out on Twitter (@grapestwc). 

Contest closes Friday, November 11th at 11:59 pm Eastern.


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Ride Wine & Dine Event this Friday at The Boston Harbor Hotel

This Friday, September 9th, 2011 is the eighth annual Ride Wine & Dine Fund Raiser at the Boston Harbor Hotel. Proceeds benefit the Dana Farber Cancer Institute by way of the Pan Mass Challenge.

The event is sponsored by The Martignetti Companies (the wine and spirits distributor) and The Boston Harbor Hotel and includes food and wine from around the world along with a silent auction of wine and live entertainment. Here's the schedule:

6:30pm
Champagne Reception & Registration

7:00-9:00pm
International Wine & Food Tasting
Silent Auction Bidding

9:00pm
Close of Silent Auction
Begin Live Auction

9:30-11:00-pm
Music & Dancing


I attended the event last year so let me know if you have any questions on the format. The International Tasting consisted of about 6 different stations offering food and wine pairings from countries like France, Italy, etc.

The silent auction offers an opportunity to bid on an assortment of individual bottles and curated lots from around the world - all of which are available to take home that night. I noticed that famous brands tended to attract high bids while lesser known (but probably higher quality) wines could be had at attractive price points.

Towards the end of the silent auction I noticed fellow hard core wine geek deal hounds lurking around the table lording over the items they had their eye on. My bid $425 on this lot of Napa Cab was eclipsed at just the last moment but I did manage to score a signed magnum of 2007 O'Shaughnessy Cab for $150.

Over the last 7 years the event has raised more than $750,000 to fight cancer. Their goal is to raise more than $200,000 for the third year in a row.

Tickets cost $160 and are available online and at the door.
For more information visit: http://pmcwinebenefit.org


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Why Do Wine Blogs Need To Make Money?

The Connoisseurs’ Guide to California Wine has long been a resource for consumers looking to find great wines from my native state. Founded in 1974, the publication was among the first I purchased when I first got into wine almost 30 years ago. My old green CGCW guidebook has long since been replaced by other wine [...]

Why Do Wine Blogs Need To Make Money? originally appeared on Winecast. Licensed under Creative Commons.

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Field Notes from a Wine Life ? Power Structure Edition

Odds and ends from a life lived through the prism of the wine glass…

Naked Wine and Occupy Wall Street

It’s not hard to notice the parallels between the natural wine movement and Occupy Wall Street - both are valid causes sorely lacking coherence and a rallying point that would move them from fringe head-scratcher to mainstream momentum.

  Natural wine is about purity of wine expression—shepherding grapes grown without chemicals to the bottle with as little human manipulation as possible, representing the place where they came from in the process.


  Occupy Wall Street is about re-calibrating the world’s best economic system – capitalism—to preserve the middle-class, the labor force that has allowed the U.S. to create the most productive economy in the world.

Neither movement represents fringe radicalism as some would have you believe.  I look at both as being valid inflection points and, at their core, about keeping a balance between big and small, allowing every man and woman an equal opportunity at pursuing success around their particular truth.

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What reasonable person would deny the validity of either if not clouded by confusion?

One idea well-conceived and well-communicated can change the world, but, unfortunately, both the natural wine movement and Occupy Wall Street are prevaricating from their essential truth, rendering them both toothless and feckless.

No need to crib from Che Guevara, but appealing to base logic and the common denominator would do both movements some good.

Just one man’s opinion…

On the Aussies, Redux

A few weeks back, I noted how the Australian wine industry was poised for a rebound in public perception due in part to two things happening in concert – public backlash to Yellow Tail wine, what I call the, “Derision Decision,” and an unspoken coalition of influencers recognizing Australia’s artisanal wine production – the antithesis of Yellow Tail.  I cited recent sympathetic mentions from Jay McInerney in the Wall Street Journal and Dan Berger, wine writing’s current patriarch, as proof points.

You can add to the list of sympathetic mentions about artisanal Australia with recent mentions from Jancis Robinson and James Suckling.

Don’t sleep on Australia.  It’s making a comeback slowly, but surely in public perception.

Tim Mondavi and Wine Spectator

Thomas Matthews, the Executive Editor for Wine Spectator magazine (WS), has commented on my site a few times.  Each of these instances has been to protect or project Wine Spectator around its editorial goals.

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Good on Thomas for not being afraid to get in the ring.  Certainly, WS takes its fair share of shots from the wine chatterati, mostly with grace and aplomb.

Lest I cast myself as anything but objective, I should note that James Laube’s article on Tim Mondavi and Continuum in the current issue of WS (November 15th issue) is everything right about what mainstream wine media can offer wine consumers that online wine writing (mostly) doesn’t –long-form, depth, first-person access and an effort that takes weeks and not hours.

Laube’s piece is excellent - well-written and balanced; acknowledgement thereof is in order.

Besides the Wine

Jordan winery has two wines – a Cabernet and Chardonnay, but they really have a triumvirate in terms of things to buy.  Jordan focuses on food and wine as being partners at the table and, to that end, any purchase from Jordan should also include their olive oil.  Wow!

The Jordan olive oil makes Trader Joe’s EVOO seem like Two Buck Chuck, comparatively speaking.  A little whole wheat Barilla pasta, some homemade pesto using the Jordan olive oil and some artisan bread in five minutes a day and you’re assuredly living the good life.  The rub is I wouldn’t pour the round Jordan Chard with the pesto, probably a Sauvignon Blanc, but don’t let that dissuade you from picking up their olive oil – it’s good stuff.

Source: http://goodgrape.com/index.php/site/field_notes_from_a_wine_life_power_structure_edition/

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Rockin? at Wine & Cars

Everyone had a great time at Wine & Cars Under the Stars last weekend. Don’t believe me? Check out the video: The evening was a great success, netting nearly $50,000 for the foundations at Fairplex and their programs. If you missed Wine & Cars, you can taste the award-winning wines of the Los Angeles International [...]

Source: http://blogs.fairplex.com/blog/wine/?p=100

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The Perfect Wine ?App?

One of my favorite podcasts is NPR‘s Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me. Wait Wait is a weekly new’s quiz show, based out of Chicago, that invites various guests to answer a series of satirical questions. This past week, Ev Williams of Twitter was invited onto the show as a guest, and he echoed a comment I happened [...]

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