Greetings,
Hope you all survived the deep freeze.
We've been invited to Warren/Ruths for Beef Bourgognia (?).
Vin du jour is California.
I-94 to Cretin-Vandalia. Go south to Randolph, East to 2139.
Warren, Ruth Gregory 698-5337
2139 Randolph 55105
wrcgregory(a)qwest.net
Warren/Ruth Beef Brgnia
Bob Cheese
Lori
Betsy
Jim/Louise Breads
Karin ?
Cheers,
Jim
On Tue, Feb 21, 2006 at 03:08:35PM -0600, Warren Gregory wrote:
Hi Jim,
I don't know if you've talked to Bob yet but Warren and I offered to have
the wine group at our house on Thurs. Limit of 8 including us. We are
going to be making beef bourguignon. The wine theme is California reds. (I
have been less than impressed with the burgundy tastings of recent) The
dish will hold up under any red. I am looking for someone to bring,
bread,salad, and desert. Bob is bringing cheese. Hope to see you there.
Ruth
http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-wine22feb22,1,5801862,full.story…
WINE & SPIRITS
Swirl, sniff, sip, search and blog
In the glut of wine websites, there's the snooty, serious and silly. Here's a
guide to the best of them.
By Patrick Comiskey
Special to The Times
February 22, 2006
LET'S say that last night you had a fantastic Italian wine with your dinner at Il
Grano, and you want to find out more about it. So you boot up the computer and open the
Web portal and find the paper napkin you wrote the name on (never mind that Il Grano
doesn't use paper napkins . this is an Internet fantasy). Just for kicks you first
Google the word "wine" . and come back with about 150 million hits. Curious, you
type in beer: fewer than half that many. Whiskey: one-tenth. Coffee comes close, and only
water has more.
Fortunately your wine, a Barbera, is a little more obscure. So you type in a few keywords,
and soon you're swinging from link to link on a daisy chain of references, epic
histories of Italian wine, etymologies and origins of the grape itself. You find accounts
of supposedly better Barberas than the one you enjoyed (with buying options, of course) as
well as heated arguments to the contrary. You read about the region, the winery, the
winemaker, his children and what each of them thinks about the 2002 vintage.
The Internet provides a thousand ways of looking at this Barbera, and some won't be
of any use to you, but a few might end up being interesting in ways you didn't
expect. This is one of the Web's great virtues, with wine especially: information
that used to be the province of the few and the snooty is now, with a few clicks,
available to everyone. Of course, information in such an egalitarian domain can be spotty,
misleading or just discouragingly amateurish.
But good content does exist. Indeed, if you know where to look, the Web does offer
indispensable resources, fascinating opinions, provocative if occasionally annoying
discussions, and not least, several websites that poke holes in all that wine-induced
high-mindedness.
*
A domain of gurus
SEVERAL well-known wine critics have an online presence, including Robert Parker, whose
website is
eRobertParker.com, Stephen Tanzer, whose opinions can be accessed at
wineaccess.com and L.A.-based Allen Meadows, whose site is
burghound.com. All of these
paid-subscription sites supplement a print edition. For fans, having a searchable online
database of, say, Parker's influential opinions is probably invaluable, but it comes
at a price.
For my money, the site worth paying for is
jancisrobinson.com. Jancis Robinson, M.W., a
critic for London's Financial Times, is the preeminent English-language wine
journalist at the moment. Her breadth of knowledge is so vast she edited an encyclopedia
to contain it, the 850-page "Oxford Companion to Wine," the most dogeared wine
reference book on my shelf.
The website's homepage allows access to a few current articles, but the site's
"Purple Pages," available with a paid subscription of about $2 a week, give
access to an unfettered Jancis, with tasting notes on hundreds of wines (rated on a
20-point scale), wine essays, vintage reports, and not least, the entire "Oxford
Companion to Wine."
Robinson possesses what few who write for the Internet share: economy of language. She
says exactly what needs to be said and almost nothing more, except for the occasional
charming Anglicism, such as her withering description of a recently sampled Barbera:
"rather candified and short," she wrote. Quite.
If you don't want to shell out the quid, you might find your Barbera among the
tasting notes at
wine-pages.com, a free English site managed by wine writer and educator
Tom Cannavan.
For years Cannavan was a columnist at Harpers, one of England's premier wine
magazines, and his site is consistently entertaining, well-written and unpretentious.
The wine education pages, a series of cleareyed and instructional essays on winemaking,
wine history, choosing wines, reading labels, region overviews and the like, are useful
for novices and veterans alike. He even gives online quizzes, with instant results.
Beyond these features,
wine-pages.com is worth visiting just for guest columnist Tom
Stevenson's mind-jogging glossary of descriptive terms for wine's aromas and
flavors, arranged in categories such as fruits, flowers, herbs and spices.
Under "green apple" for instance, you'll find a list of grape varieties
that commonly display this quality and the name of the chemical that's responsible
(malic acid, in this case). Not since Dr. Anne Noble's Aroma Wheel, devised at UC
Davis in 1990, have I seen such a helpful tool for delineating wine's attributes.
*
Connoisseur chat rooms
IF you wanted to tell the world about your Barbera epiphany, the place to do it would be a
bulletin board.
Philadelphia lawyer Mark Squires manages the online bulletin board for Robert Parker, and
at 9,000 members, 77,000 threads and posts approaching 1 million, it is by far the most
far-flung and heavily trafficked wine bulletin board in the ether. So if you wanted
advance word on how the 2000 Burgundies are tasting, you can probably find a tasting note
or 50 here; or get a sense of how your stash of '94 Dominus is aging from notes based
on a vertical tasting a member conducted recently. You may or may not choose to voice your
opinion on the raging "Ugliest Wine Label" discussion along the way.
The best and worst thing about eBob is that everybody contributes: You'll find
winemakers, sommeliers and serious aficionados making regular posts; Parker posts a thread
from time to time. But there is often the feeling that you've just stumbled onto a
room full of men who haven't quite learned how to play well together: The posts can
be arrogant, peevish, sycophantic and hysterically passionate.
There are less-trafficked bulletin boards . the rather geeky
winetherapy.com, and the
regionally oriented
westcoastwine.net have far fewer signal-to-noise issues . but who can
resist watching a good tantrum now and then?
As you delve into wine blogs through a clearinghouse website such as
wineblogwatch.arrr.net, what will amaze you is the variety, intensity and occasionally the
hilarity of wine-world views on display. The ones I like to read are more curious about
wine than opinionated, more about wonder than authority.
Vinography.com, by San Franciscan Alder Yarrow, has spirited opinions on everything from
corkage to screw caps. Yarrow is exactly the kind of blogger who would write an opus on
your coveted Barbera . witness his recent tasting note on a wine from Rh�ne producer
Auguste Clape, a 1,000-word entry at once preposterously overlong and completely
absorbing.
Joe Dressner is a Manhattan wine importer who shares his fairly irascible opinions at
joedressner.com, where I recently read a stimulating discussion on the origin of the word
"spoofulation" (roughly, manipulating a wine to the point where it tastes
"fake"). I happen to really like reading Dressner for his umbrage . if he hates
something (such as spoofulation) he's not afraid to say it, noisily.
*
Tools of the trade
IF your Barbera was domestic,
winerelease.com might alert you as to when the winery plans
to release the next vintage.
Localwineevents.com, meanwhile, listing wine events for
dozens of North American cities, might give you a few occasions to enjoy it.
Travelenvoy.com has the best directory of American wineries, period. (Its Italian
directory is a work in progress).
Wine-searcher.com and
winezap.com are designed to help you find that Barbera and compare
prices and availability across the country. Type in its name and you'll get a
national list of participating retailers who carry that wine, with prices and
availability. In most cases, you're just a few clicks away from a purchase.
For more on the grape itself and where it's grown on this continent, check out
appellationamerica.com. This site has devoted itself to describing and mapping all of the
appellations in North America . that's the where of wine, that sense of place in a
bottle that fascinates all of the writers, critics, sommeliers of this world. It surveys
the whole continent, not just California, Oregon and Washington, including regions that
don't normally get much attention (such as Hermann, the Missouri AVA, home of Norton,
the grape which resembles Barbera).
But perhaps its most entertaining feature is its collection of "varietal
characters" . grapes personified in illustrations by Tyler Landry that would make
Maurice Sendak chuckle . accompanied by some appropriately purple prose.
*
All in good taste
FINALLY, what is the Internet if not diverting? One of its greatest virtues, after all, is
its unqualified egalitarianism; so for every puffed-up wine site, there's another
with a sharp object, ready to skewer the snobs.
Sean Thackrey is no snob. His wines, though, named for constellations such as Pleiades
(which has Barbera in the blend), made in the Marin County surf town of Bolinas, might
have been cult well before the term was invented. At his very thoughtful website,
wine-maker.net, you'll find something he calls "the Thackrey Library," a
beautifully designed, well-reproduced archive of early books and manuscripts relating to
the subject of winemaking and enjoyment.
For some help taking the hot air out of pretentious tasting notes, click on Greg
Sumner's random tasting note generator,
http://www.gmon.com/tech/stng.shtml .
Here's an example: "A mouthful of varnish, structured pork and second-rate
melted crayon. Drink now through eternity." Choose normal or extra silly.
Or to simply read some silly tasting notes with a poetic license all their own, have a
look at Lane Steinberg's marvelous website,
redwinehaiku.blogspot.com. You may not
agree that a certain Barbera's plump texture is "like a big round grandma/that
never lets go," but you'll be amused nevertheless.
Or better yet, grab that Barbera, a glass, a laptop and an hour of careful attention, and
see what you come up with on your own.
And be sure to share.
*
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
The best wine-soaked websites
appellationamerica.com. This site maps and chronicles North American appellations.
burghound.com. A paid site for all things Burgundian; includes incisive vintage reports
and tasting notes.
erobertparker.com. The influential critic's paid site, with a searchable database of
scores and tasting notes; location of
robertparker.com/bboard/boardintro.asp.
America's largest and most active wine bulletin board.
gmon.com/tech/stng.shtml. Never at a loss for words: a random tasting note generator.
jancisrobinson.com. A combination free/paid site from one of the world's most erudite
and entertaining critics.
joedressner.com. A blog as literate as it is opinionated, from an importer of French and
Italian wines.
localwineevents.com. A comprehensive national calendar of wine and food events.
redwinehaiku.blogspot.com. Often hilarious, sometimes even accurate, tasting notes as
poetry.
travelenvoy.com. The country's best winery directory, bar none.
vinography.com. Notes, raves and rants from a passionate Bay Area blogger.
westcoastwine.net. A San Francisco-based bulletin board frequented by a fair number of
winemakers, with an emphasis on the California scene.
wineaccess.com/expert/tanzer. A paid site linked to Stephen Tanzer's International
Wine Cellar (via
wineaccess.com, and shopping site). Tanzer's tasting notes are
no-nonsense and reliable.
wineblogwatch.arrr.net. A website that serves as a link to other wine blogs.
wine-maker.net. Sean Thackrey's winery website includes historical texts and sources.
wine-pages.com. From an English wine writer: extensive notes, award-winning columnists,
fine educational essays and quizzes.
winerelease.com. A calendar of release dates for many American and Canadian wines.
winetherapy.com. A bulletin board with a fairly high geek factor.
wine-searcher.com. Where to find and buy wines and what to pay for them; an especially
strong regional search engine.
winezap.com. Similar to wine-searcher, with more search options, including by grape
variety and food pairing.
. Patrick Comiskey