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My Wine Media Diet

itswinebyme

Just in case you’re wondering… 

My wine reading list is way too small, since I mainly use wine as a fun diversion from life, but these are a few of the publications (online and dead tree) that I regularly consume:

Wine Spectator.The glossy version is one of the few dead-tree publications I still read. It’s their profiles and features on wine regions or travel advice that I like. And while it’s fun to look over the long lists of wines they’ve rated to see if I recognize anything in there – I generally don’t pay attention to their scores. 

Terroirist, a blog that provides a great roundup of the daily wine news, and has some interesting features, including winemaker interviews. It mostly makes me jealous of the guy who runs it and all the access he has to winemakers and fabulous events.

Wine Berserkers message board forums. I’m mostly a fly on the wall here, but I’ll ask a question or post a comment every now and then. It’s been a great place to learn from folks who know more about wine in their pinky finger, than I’ll ever know. It’s a mix of winemakers, retailers, bloggers, billionaire collectors, and folks who are just plain passionate about wine. It can get really geeky at times, but it’s been a fun resource to discover new wines, or other web sites.

Wine Folly, a website and blog devoted to explaining wine. The author is a talented graphic designer and has some incredible infographics.

For everything else, I rely on my twitter feed, which bubbles up a little bit of everything.

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The photography alone looks like this will be worth a watch – but the talk about passion and chasing your dreams is what has me hooked.

An American Wine Story is a feature documentary that follows tales of risk and reinvention for those who are ‘born again’ into the wine industry.

Featuring Drew Bledsoe, Dick Erath, Pascal Brooks, Alan Baker, Katherine Cole, Jay Selman, Mike Officer and other winemakers and industry insiders from around the country, American Wine Story is an independent documentary feature.

There’s more here.

(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
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Throwback Tuesday (sorry, wishing it was Thursday already): Even in wintertime, wine country can be beautiful. This is from a December trip to Sonoma. A view of the Russian River Valley from Copain winery. I can only imagine how gorgeous this place must look during the spring and summer months.

Wine needs its Nate Silver: Can we quantify and more accurately describe how alcohol tastes?

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Robert Parker and that fancy sommelier might not know more than you. They might not even tell red wine from white

Over on Twitter, @TheAcademicWino posted this fascinating Salon piece (or rather an excerpt from a new book by Adam Rogers titled Proof: The Science of Booze ). The Salon headline immediately piqued my interest. Not because I’m a Nate Silver fan (nor am I not not a fan – apologies for the double/triple negatives here), but because his name implies data… which in turns screams exactness. And in the digital journalism world – which is currently abuzz with the * need * for more databases – coming up with an original idea for the wine world, that is both accurate and precise, has not been easy.

I’d love for the wine world to neatly fit into a box that we could wrap with a bow. Something we could present as an amazing app that novice and expert wine drinkers could use to discover delicious wines, or help pair the right vintage to a specific palate. A former colleague (and brilliant developer) is just as eager as I am to create such a thing.

Yet this study seems to confirm the impossibility of completing such a task. And rather than the science or preciseness in understanding how wine tastes – it’s rather  more about the language that sommelier’s and other wine experts have developed:

 The wine world is full of strange (and often delightful) labels and combinations. [Tim] Gaiser admits that those could fool anyone, even a master. For him, the trick is finding ways not to eliminate subjectivity in tasting, but to share that subjectivity. “My strongest belief about wine is that it’s not precise,” Gaiser says. “We do everything we can to give structure to the experience.” More likely, he’s filtering experience through memory and a trained vocabulary.

So the researchers conclude this:

“We tentatively suggest that the verbal skills, which are developed around wine, perhaps lead to a somewhat similar overestimation of confidence in expertise,” the researchers write. They’re hinting that knowing many words to describe wine makes people think they’re better at identifying it than they really are. 

And as much as I want to find a way to make my day job and my passion unite in a lovely little app, it’s the very reason I’m passionate about wine, which may prevent it: Wine is experiential. It’s about communication. It transcends data and science.

If we can’t quantify happiness, how can we ever quantify wine.

Wine needs its Nate Silver: Can we quantify and more accurately describe how alcohol tastes?

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From Saturday night: A slightly darker rosé than I’m used to, a bit sweet on the tip of the tongue, but finished dry. There was also a nice layered structure that presented itself after it warmed up a bit. Not my favorite, but I enjoyed it enough to put the second bottle in the fridge for the next time I’m in the mood for some rosé. It’s interesting to note that this blend included cab and cab franc, two grapes I’m generally not a fan of.

Web domain names like .vin and .wine raise hackles among vintners

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European wine producers, together with their Californian and Australian counterparts, are fighting a rear guard action to prevent the introduction of Internet domain names such as .vin and .wine.

This story both amuses and frustrates me at the same time. It’s an issue that I read about several weeks ago, but today it’s featured in the Wall Street Journal. After working at big news organizations for the past 20 years, I’m reminded of the old joke, that nothing is news until [INSERT BIG NEWS ORG] says it is. 

However, there is a news peg here: “The issue will be one of the topics this week in London at a public meeting hosted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which manages the technical functions that direct Web traffic to the correct servers and websites.”

So the cynical reader in me wonders, are WSJ editors late to this story? Or did they turn down this story until they had a news peg? Or did the reporter only just discover this angle of the story while looking into the upcoming meeting? A quick Google of the author (who I see focuses on technology and telecom and reports from Brussels), lends me to believe it’s the latter.

And there’s nothing wrong with that.

What makes wine-related stories of interest to the mainstream press? That’s a question I’d like to explore a bit more as I continue with this site. 

Web domain names like .vin and .wine raise hackles among vintners

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Shaking things up right away by posting a glass of Caos. It’s an Italian beer made with Malvasia grapes. A nice slightly sweet almost effervescent beer. It let me fit in with the beer crowd on a beautiful summer evening while letting me appreciate the nuances of a wine.

Experimenting

itswinebyme

This isn’t a blog. It’s not a branding mechanism (although I do tweet as @itswinebyme, too). Nor is this something that’s just for fun. It’s an experiment. I’m hoping by regularly posting either a photo, a tasting note or a rambling vent, that maybe something will evolve. What that something is, who knows. But very simply, wine makes me happy. If you want to follow me along for this journey, I’d love to have you. Cheers!