Merry Christmas from your Wine Peeps

?But the angel said to them, ?Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby [...]

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WBW 74 Wrap-up: 39 Sparkling Values

This is my fifth time hosting Wine Blogging Wednesday, our monthly virtual tasting event, but my enthusiasm has not diminished with the passage of time. In fact, since bringing back the event from hiatus it looks like the idea might be picking up some steam judging from the entires this month. While many of the [...]

WBW 74 Wrap-up: 39 Sparkling Values originally appeared on Winecast. Licensed under Creative Commons.

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3 Sub-$10 Spanish Monastrell that offer Silly Value

At The Capital Grille's Generous Pour event last year, I discovered a Monastrell that sent me off on a value hunt. The category has had an exceptional batting average for me since so I'm pleased to present three particularly outstanding, mind-bending values for your consideration. But first, here's The Capital Grille's Master Sommelier George Miliotes' thoughts on Monastrell:

Wellesley Wine Press: You have a knack for finding wines that appeal to wine enthusiasts interested in discovering delicious new wines without stretching too far out of their comfort zone. In a nutshell, what?s your philosophy for choosing wines by the glass for The Capital Grille or for events like this one?

George Milotes: "For me, it is all about wines that are well-made and taste good. As solid winemaking practices have spread around the globe, there is a greater pool of diverse and tasty wines to choose from. We love to find areas or wines that are overlooked or underappreciated. Hence, the Tarima Hill Monastrell is part of The Generous Pour Wine Event this year. Monastrell is the greatest underappreciated red in the world today from a growing area (Alicante) that is barely known in Spain, let alone here in the US. We feel privileged to introduce the wine to the U.S. while showing our guests something new and delicious.

Here are three winners I've enjoyed. The price points are unreal and the wines are outstanding.


  • 2011 Bodegas Castaņo Monastrell Yecla - Spain, Murcia, Yecla (11/7/2012)

  • Medium bodied visually, this wine is ready to go as soon as its screw cap is opened. Quite nice on the nose with flinty raspberries wrapped around an herbal and floral infused rope. Light on its feet but utterly satisfying with chalky tannins and desirable flavors that convey on the finish. (91 points)

    $7.99 at The Wine Cellar of Stoneham (or 4 for $25 - $6.25/btl)

    Bonus: Rated 90 points by Steve Tanzer's IWC (Josh Raynolds)


  • 2010 Bodegas Juan Gil Jumilla Wrongo Dongo - Spain, Murcia, Jumilla (1/14/2012)

  • A tremendous eye opening wine that'll have me hunting more Monastrell from Spain. It's all here and I can't believe the price point. Paid $8.99 in MA without any case discount. Ample clean fruit, some earth, tremendous balance. Wow. Fire up the QPR alert! (90 points)

    $8.99 (before case discount) at Burlington Wine & Spirits


  • 2009 Bodegas Volver Monastrell Tarima Hill - Spain, Valencia, Alicante (4/26/2012)

  • A blockbuster of a wine offering a tremendous amount of tasty fruit and earthy supporting components. Gets a little fakey grapey at times, and the 15% abv shows itself at points. But my goodness - can you complain in the $8-$9 range? Silly value here. Silly. (89 points)

    Purchased from The Spirit Shoppe

    Posted from CellarTracker


    Related:
    • The Capital Grille has redesigned their website. Have a look if you haven't visited recently.
    • Scoop the Spectator ends Friday! Get your entry in if you haven't already.
    Question of the Day: What are some of your favorite Monastrell?

    Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WellesleyWinePress/~3/1w0s_EdDKh4/3-sub-10-spanish-monastrell-that-offer.html

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    2012 Wine Industry Innovation of the Year: WineNabber

    "The best deals for wine are in email offers from online wine stores?"

    A few months ago I discovered WineNabber - a service which helps wine enthusiasts efficiently discover high quality wine deals customized to their interests. After spending time getting to know the service and the guys who created it I think it's the wine industry innovation of the year.

    I've also noticed two things:

    1. The best ideas are often easily explained
    2. Things created by people immersed in a field tend to align well with user expectations
    Over the past few years I've spent a lot of time exploring ways to find the best deals on wine. Although wine has relatively low gross margins -- a bottle a retailer sells for $15 before case discounts costs them roughly $10 -- the price disparity for a specific bottle of wine varies wildly across the country.

    I've seen wines sell for $120/bottle in Massachusetts (at full retail) that can be had for $39.99 on a flash sale in another state. With 3x price variability like this it pays to pay attention to wine deals, especially if you're an enthusiast who spends a substantial amount of money on wine each year.

    But with 33% margins, how is it that prices can vary this much? It happens because different distributors in different states sell wines for different prices. They sell at different prices because they buy at different prices -or- because they want to close out a vintage to make way for a new one. For example, if a distributor in New York or New Jersey can strike a deal with the winery or importer to move a lot of wine at a lower price the wine will appear for much lower prices in these states than in others.

    As you can imagine, distributors and retailers in other states are often annoyed by this because it makes their prices appear high. And wineries and importers don't like to see their brand tarnished by being sold at a low price. These comparisons have become glaringly apparent with the rise of Wine-Searcher.com - a service that compares the prices of specific bottles of wine across retailers across the world.

    Retailers have taken to using email offers to fly under the radar screen. These offers never appear on search engines and, if the retailer has a large enough customer base, are only available for a few hours or days.

    So savvy consumers, understanding the situation, subscribe to more and more wine retailer email lists. After a while they find themselves manually sifting through dozens or more emails a day hoping to find the very best wine deals. Some retailers have a better batting average than others but the fear of missing out causes us to tolerate the low performing retailer who occasionally offers an amazing offer. So the inbox gets pounded, consumers get overwhelmed, and after a while we stop paying close attention.

    Enter WineNabber

    WineNabber founders Peter Rothschild and Sev Onyshkevych found themselves in exactly this predicament a few years ago. But unlike many of us, who just slog through it and unsubscribe from the retailers with the least compelling offers, they came up with an innovative solution. They subscribed to every wine retailer email they could find, wrote a computer program to parse the data, and applied filters which enabled them to separate the wheat from the chaff.

    To understand what WineNabber is like, it helps to understand how Peter and Sev operate. When Sev was a freshman at Princeton back in the late '70s he was writing custom software to help businesses keep track of data. He found he could reuse his efforts more effectively if he created a spreadsheet of sorts so he wrote one of the first spreadsheet applications for an Apple computer. He sold it as a custom software package, bundled with an Apple II for $100,000 a piece. After selling 400 of these packages he had enough to buy a Ferrari - before he had a driver's license. It sat out in front of his dorm and he'd have his older friends drive him around in it.

    But Sev's innovative ways didn't stop there. He wrote a program that converted stenography from court reporters to a digital format. Then he met Peter and they developed a solution for more accurately estimating clothing sizes to reduce high return rates for online clothing retailers which was eventually acquired by Lands End. The recurring theme of cross-discipline problem solving and, even more interestingly for me, having an eye for solutions that have a business model behind them convey across each problem he's tackled.

    Peter is the business brains behind the operation and a true wine enthusiast with an eye for deals. He lives in a part of Vermont underserved by fine wine merchants so online offers were particularly interesting to him.

    Anatomy of a WineNabber Offer


    A WineNabber offer includes the following:
    • An overall "rating" of the offer on a 5 star scale
    • The wine being offered
    • The region/subregion the wine is from
    • The price
    • Shipping costs
    • Comparable prices
    • Ratings from major publications
    • The vendor
    • A description of the wine 
    The idea is to present consumers with everything they need to make an informed decision about whether to purchase the wine.

    Consumers can adjust their preferences according to:

    • Which state(s) they can receive shipments to (since retailers have varying policies about which states they can ship to)
    • Price
    • Ratings
    • Region
    • Type/Varietal
    The idea is to provide consumers with just the offers they'd actually consider buying.

    In total, a WineNabber offer provides a consolidated view of an actionable buying opportunity with independently validated ratings and comparable pricing. Pretty cool, right?

    How Well Does It Work?

    How well WineNabber works for you depends on a number of factors. First, you have to live in or have a convenient shipping situation to a state with favorable shipping laws. Second, I think you have to be willing to spend $15/bottle or more on wine. South of this, it's tough to bury shipping costs in the transaction. Occasionally you'll find deals on $10 bottles that include free shipping but it's not where the best action is. That said, I'd rather drink $30 wine I paid $15 for than a $15 wine at full markup.

    Once you're comfortable buying wine online you've probably naturally built up a list of preferred retailers. When you subscribe to WineNabber you'll probably find that you get an email blast from the retailer and then that same offer from WineNabber. At first this can be annoying but either the retailer's offers are so good you'll forgive the duplicate notification -or- you'll unsubscribe from the retailer's list and just catch them from WineNabber.

    One scenario I've noticed multiple times is when a retailer offers more than one wine in an email blast and I didn't scan the offer carefully enough. I notice later, thanks to WineNabber, that I missed a wine which meets my criteria.

    Discussion


    When I first heard of WineNabber, I wondered whether retailers were happy with their email offers being rebroadcast like this. You'd be surprised how some retailers actually don't want their offers to get publicity for the reasons outlined above. But the offers WineNabber work with are from retailers who have agreed to work with WineNabber. In fact, they pay WineNabber for sending traffic/purchases their way in a variety of per-click/per-transaction affiliate arrangements.

    WineNabber has done an impressive job signing up retailers (here's a list of some they work with). If you peruse the list I think you'll agree many of the heavy hitters/usual suspects are represented.

    The only thing that's missing is the "list behind the list". The preferred client list that retailers populate with email addresses of their best customers where the really good deals are. This practice is illegal in Massachusetts (retailers ought not offer wine to one person and not to another and cannot offer wine to different people at different prices) but this practice seems to be quite popular in other states. It's sort of the wine deal equivalent to hyper miling - not for the amateur or casually interested.

    For Consumers


    For friends just getting interested in online wine deals, I think WineNabber is a great place to start. Tired of paying $12.99 for Estancia, Clos du Bois, Rodney Strong and similar at the grocery store/warehouse club? I think WineNabber could efficiently open up awareness to great wine deals online.

    For the hardcore wine deal enthusiast WineNabber is definitely something to check out. You'll likely discover some new retailers that weren't on your radar screen and you'll likely be able to relieve some inbox fatigue by unsubscribing to retailers with a low batting average for your preferences.

    For Retailers

    I think WineNabber is a particularly good fit for wine retailers looking to amplify their email offers. It's hard to build up a list of wine enthusiasts ready to buy online, and for retailers with ready access to good wine they can offer on thin margins or compelling price points WineNabber provides immediate access.

    One of the interesting things about email-based wine retail is how lightweight it can be. I've seen retailers do millions of dollars (literally) in annual wine sales without an e-commerce site. They do, however, take the time to curate and present compelling offers and create a more personal connection with their clients. Email offers aren't for every retailer's specialty, but I think most all retailers would benefit from some amount of regular email communication with their customers and what better way to say hello than with a deal?

    Conclusion and Recommendations


    Folks in the wine industry often lament how online wine commerce is behind the times. In some instances that's true, but there are some very useful innovations going on - and WineNabber is one of them.

    Since discovering WineNabber I've been wondering: Am I leaving money on the table when purchasing other things online? Things like musical instruments, shoes, mattresses, vacations... Some of the best deals aren't online as I wrote in this blog post a while back.

    If I purchased things in other categories more frequently would I be more savvy in navigating the space and finding the best deals? Although wine is unique in many ways, each industry has unique pricing pressures and dynamics that make them targets for disruptive innovation. Yipit does this in the daily deals space. WineNabber brings a unique spin on this for wine email offers.

    Simply put, it's the most notable wine industry innovation I discovered in 2012.

    To check it out and create an account visit:
    WineNabber.com

    Questions of the Day: Have you tried WineNabber? If so, what do you think? What notable wine industry innovations have you discovered lately?

    Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WellesleyWinePress/~3/IV9HTPO-fQk/2012-wine-industry-innovation-of-year.html

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    Old World vs. New World in More Ways than just the Wine

    In the increasingly close quarters of our global village, Europe is responsible for bringing at least three different substantive and prodigious professional wine journals to market over the last several years.  Each is written by a ‘Who’s Who’ of wine experts.  Meanwhile, stateside, the U.S. has experienced an explosion of pithiness with amateur wine writers writing online.

    This juxtaposition becomes relevant after reading a recent post titled, “Are wine blogs going tabloid” by professional wine critic and writer Steve Heimoff.  In his brief post, with a decidedly American point of view, Heimoff summarizes his thoughts with the rhetorical query, “Why do certain bloggers revert to sensationalist stories that don’t, in the long run, matter?”

    Good question.  The easy conclusion suggests that controversy and hyperbolically bombastic articles lead to attention and traffic. 

    Certainly, two recent books that I’ve been reading bear out this discouraging notion:  Newsjacking:  How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage and Celebrity, Inc.

    image

    Both books cover similar ground in examining how brands can subvert the 24-hour news cycle for business benefit and how the 24-hour news cycle has been subverted by celebrities using easy technology while leading our news culture into tabloidesque territory.

    When considered with Heimoff’s point, it is an easy deduction to suggest that 1 + 1 does in fact equal 2 – the sensational does sell and, by proxy, online amateur wine writers are a reflection of our larger media culture.

    However, in suggesting this, there is at least one bigger contextual point being missed as well as a caveat.  First, it’s an exclusive view that doesn’t take in the totality of the global wine media village and second, while sensationalism may sell, the lascivious isn’t always what’s shared.

    No, it seems our schadenfreude and more primal instincts are kept private, while our shock and awe comes to the fore, at least according to one study.

    The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania recently examined the most emailed articles on the New York Times web site in March of this year (link initiates a PDF download), looking for the triggers for what causes somebody to share an article, what makes one thing more viral than another?

    Their conclusion?  Positive content is more viral than negative content, but both, in general, are driven by “activation” – the notion that high arousal (emotive pleasure or outrage) drives shareable content.  According to the research abstract:

    Content that evokes either positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions characterized by activation (i.e. high arousal) is more viral.  Content that evokes deactivating emotion (sadness) is less viral.  These results hold (dominance) for how surprising, interesting, or practically useful content is, as well as external drivers of attention.

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    This brings us back to my earlier mention regarding the European wine journals that have come to market in recent years.  Simply, they’re an antidote to the U.S. proclivity for the vapid.

    The World of Fine Wine, the family of Fine Wine magazines based in Helsinki and Tong based in Belgium all represent an Old World counterpoint to what can be deemed as the extemporaneous and superfluous coming from the New World.

    As Tong publisher Filip Verheyden notes in the Tong manifesto (link initiates a PDF download) :

    We live in times of “instant” gratification.  If we want to talk to someone, we pick up our mobile phone wherever we happen to be.  If we want to know something, we click an internet button.  We’re going at 200 km per hour. 

    What we seem to forget in this race against time is the trustworthiness of this quickly-acquired knowledge, and that is something we have to find out for ourselves.  But who takes the time to do it? 

    …The articles that appear in Tong demand the reader’s attention.  You can’t read them fast and put them away; you have to take the time to understand.  I’d say it takes an evening to read and think about each article.  These are not issues to put in the recycling bin.  Even after five years or more, each will continue to convey the essence of its theme…

    The World of Fine Wine and Fine Wine magazine are both similarly endowed with length and verve.

    My takeaway based on the Wharton research and the stunning dichotomy between what we’re seeing in the U.S. vs. European wine content is two-fold:

    1)  The sometimes sensational aspect of online wine writers, especially domestically, should heed the research and focus their pot-stirring ways on matters that provoke an emotional response from readers, ideally with a positive consequence – like HR 1161 for example instead of tired, lame attempted zingers aimed at Robert Parker.

    2)  In addition to a legacy sensibility about the nature and style of wine, the Old World is also drawing a culturally defining line in the sand in how they view and report on wine – it’s with substance, permanence and integrity.

    The conclusion is anything but.  However, as the world becomes a smaller place and the U.S. and our wine media becomes a part of the world chorus, losing lead vocal, I would hate for our place in the gallery to be rendered completely voiceless based on a lack of substance which is the seeming trajectory that we’re on. 

    It’s just a thought…

    If you’re interested in seeing an example of Tong’s long-form think pieces, you can see examples here, here and here.

    Source: http://goodgrape.com/index.php/site/old_world_vs._new_world_in_more_ways_than_just_the_wine/

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    Shut the Front Door: A Vinsane, Pay-it-Forward, Drinks 4X the Price Wine Recommendation

    The problem with sleuthing out good wine under $10 is the recommendations usually come with provisos like, “This is pretty good for the price,” or “This isn’t bad for the style of wine.”  Rare is the time that a wine recommendation for vino under $10 is just, “This is a fantastic wine.”

    Who can blame the wine recommender for their caveats and written sleights of hand when they’re left to tout the middling amongst the insipid; the redemptive within the felonious?  It’s like the back-handed compliment from the parents of an axe murderer who note plaintively from the front stoop, “He has a good heart.”

    Adding insult to this injury, it seems like nearly all domestic wines under $10 are manipulated to appeal to a demographic.  Far too often, they are oak chipped to a formula, softened, vortexed and plumped back up into a wine beverage complete with a label that screams, “Benignly vague and blandly appealing.  I am inoffensive to a large group of people.”

    And, forget about pairing under $10 bottles of vino with food.  Do so only if your idea of wine pairing centers on condiments with artificial coloring and HFCS, so duotone are the wine flavor profiles.

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    When it comes to what should be reliable international value wines, forget about it – most of them aren’t even has-beens, they never were.  France and Italy – I’m talking to you.  For a sawbuck, these are sad, middling, barely potable wines evocative of an athlete whose entire identity is wrapped up in jockdom, but for whom life’s fate never provided him acclaim beyond the local playground. The fact that these wines often taste like a sweaty gym sock may, in fact, be no small coincidence.

    Harrumph. 

    What I want is what most wine consumers want: A non-spoofulated wine with quality that stands on its own—a good wine at $9.99 that is a good wine, period.  No half-hearted caveats associated with it.  If the wine pairs with dinner, instead of being a digestif, all the better.  Tie me up, spank me and call me Shirley if this mystical and elusive under $10 wine also has any of the following characteristics: Organic, old vines, unfiltered, native yeast, judicious oak, and complexity whilst being food-friendly.

    I’m pretty sure I won’t have to have any dalliances in the wine S&M dungeon save for one emerging country.

    Recently, I started to see glimpses of where quality, inexpensive wines might be coming from in the future when I tasted through a sampling of wines from the Navarra region of Spain. One $5 bottle of wine was so screamingly good it defied the law of reason. 

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    And, then, I received a recommendation for Masia de Bielsa’s 2009 Garnacha, a Spanish wine from the Campo de Borja area in the Aragon region of Spain, southeast of Navarre and La Rioja.  Adam Japko, a wino friend and author of Wine-Zag, and I did some horse-trading on bottles and he threw in a bottle of wine in a wine shipment to me and noted, “Curious what you think of this…”

    What do I think?  I think I owe you favors to last a month of Sundays for turning me onto a beauty.

    Of course, wine recommendations don’t happen in a vacuum and the Masia de Bielsa 2009 Garnacha is no different even if it follows a certain circuitous Internet-borne dynamic that seems unusual even in this day and age of “brand vs. land, there are no secret wine values anymore…” online battle.

    Jose Pastor is a wunderkind (30 years old) wine importer with a fast growing reputation amongst wine insiders for his portfolio of Spanish wines that are typically natural in style – producers who farm organically when possible, emphasize terroir, use ambient yeasts, filter sparingly and use minimal oak.  In other words, his wines, and especially his inexpensive wine selections, are the anti-brand.  Or, should I say, “They’re the antidote to brand wines.”  The good stuff. 

    image

    Jose’s wines won’t have an end-cap in stores with promotional materials, nor will they follow you on Twitter or ply you with faux-flattery for a “Like” on Facebook. Ditto that for Pastor playing the points scoring game.  He doesn’t do it. The wines and wineries in his portfolio simply represent something good and honest and rely on smart trade buyers who know good juice when they taste it and are interested in paying that forward to consumer’s one bottle at a time.

    This formula isn’t a recipe for getting rich, but it is a recipe for long-term, slow-burning growth based on a purity of vision.

    When Richard Schnitzlein, a longtime wine buyer in the greater Boston area, took over the wine section at Ferns Country store in Carlisle, MA in early 2011, he started to remake the selection of wines on offer and that meant much more diversity, spreading the selection from two distributors to 14 over a seven month period.

    A part of that remaking was to engage Genuine Wine Selections, a wine distributor in Massachusetts, who carries the Jose Pastor portfolio.

    When Genuine Wine Selections partner Dennis Quinn showed up at Ferns in the spring with samples to taste, the ’09 Bielsa was a part of the mix.

    Enamored, Schnitzlein started stocking the wine.  “Initially (the Bielsa) was a hand sell, but (it) soon became a wine that people were asking for,” he noted.

    Japko was turned onto the Bielsa from Schnitzlein and mentioned the Bielsa on his site in June.  A September Ferns promotion dropped the price on the Bielsa from $11.99 to 9.95 and that yielded 15 cases of the Bielsa moving through the door for Ferns including a stock-up from Japko.

    Within a week of receiving my bottle from Japko, I had taken to the Internet to find this wine and I bought a ½ case online from Marketview Liquor in New York state who sells it for $7.99 a bottle.

    I’ve gifted a bottle to a friend at work, and, well, I’m writing extensively about this vino, too – my own pay-it-forward juju for having been tipped off to this wine.

    The moral of this story?  Finding a gem of a wine for $10 or under isn’t a hopeless process, but you do have to sift a lot of muck to find the gold nugget.  In my opinion, you’re more likely to find a gem by keeping your ears open for word of mouth recommendations from wine-inclined friends or a local wine shop then to take to the wine aisles of your supermarket wine section playing brand roulette.  Here, the internet and Wine-searcher.com is your friend, as well.  In addition, Spain is a country that is producing some excellent wines across all price tiers, and my very recent and very anecdotal track record at the lower-end has been very good.  And, finally, it pays to know people.  It pays to know what Jose Pastor is all about, and it pays to know the Richard Schnitzlein’s and Adam Japko’s of the world who freely share where to find the good stuff, even if finding the good stuff requires an Importer in California, a wine buyer in Massachusetts, a generous friend and internet ecommerce.

    2009 Bielsa Vinas Viejas Garnacha

    Huge, pure nose with mulberry juice, black cherry, orange peel, earth and a meaty savory quality that gives way to an expressive palate with plum, black cherry, spice and fresh squeezed orange juice.  The finish lingers with plum, pepper and earthiness.  This is a varietally correct, gorgeous, natural, unfiltered wine that screams for food and would be a bargain at 4X the price.  Highly recommended.  At under $10 a bottle, you’d be foolhardy not to find this wine.

    Source: http://goodgrape.com/index.php/site/shut_the_front_door_a_vinsane_pay-it-forward_drinks_4x_the_price_wine_recom/

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    SEO Services

    It’s hard to find reliable SEO Services these days. Heck make a single seo related post on Twitter and you’ll magically find yourself with 25+ new followers all trying to sell you their seo services. Get yourself on the first or second page of Google and you’ll start getting phone calls. It’s annoying because if [...]

    Source: http://winewithmark.info/archives/676

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