Another look at the Gamay Noir grape, this time focusing mostly on New World examples from Napa Valley and Oregon. I interview Drew Dickson from the Andrew Lane Winery and announce my raffle prize in the Menu For Hope III Campaign.

Show Notes:

00:21 - Introduction and show theme
00:39 - Gamay Noir background
01:20 - Interview with Drew Dickson from Andrew Lane
08:22 - Tasting Notes
08:53 - Andrew Lane, Gamay Noir, Napa Valley 2004 ($18/sample)
09:15 - Amity Vineyards, Gamay Noir, “Anden Vineyards” 2004 ($17) *
10:07 - Laboure-Roi, Beaujolais-Villages, Saint-Armand 2004 ($11)+
11:17 - Best of Tasting *
11:22 - Best Value +
11:29 - Menu for Hope III Campaign
13:23 - Contact Details
13:40 - Next Show Theme

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Copyright 2006 Acan Media, Inc. Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

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I’m proud to be involved in A Menu for Hope III this year which will benefit the UN World Food Programme. This charitable fundraiser is led by food blogger Pim from Chez Pim and was first organized to provide support for the survivors of the Tsunami of 2004. Last year more than $17,000 was raised for UNICEF to benefit the victims of the Kashmir earthquake.

Wine blogger extraordinaire Alder Yarrow of Vinography is hosting all the participating wine bloggers this year. You can check out all the great prizes offered at his site. Also be sure to check out the prizes offered by food bloggers, as well, over at Chez Pim. The campaign is open now and will close at midnight PST on December 22, 2006 with prize winners announced on January 15, 2007.

I pondered what the best prize from me might be, and considered wine books or accessories, but finally settled on a more personal prize, customized to the winner’s wishes…

Winecast Prize: Personal Wine Blog Feed

The winner of this raffle will receive their own personal blog (RSS) feed written by me each week for a year. There will be at least one post each week on the winner’s wine related subject(s) of choice. Also included is a phone call, instant messaging session or email exchange to better understand the winner’s interests in wine before starting. These posts can be read online, via an RSS reader such as Google Reader or Bloglines or via an email subscription. You can also share this feed with friends and family, if you choose.

Examples of posts are personalized wine recommendations, food matching tips, wine events of interest, wine education subjects and perhaps a podcast or two. It will really depend upon what the winner would like to learn more about.

Want to know more about Rhone wines? The best restaurants in Napa and Sonoma valleys? What wines will age well for your child’s (or grandchild’s) 21st birthday? What red wines are best with eel? Whatever you would like that is wine related is fair-game.

So if you’ve always wanted to be my part-time editor here at Winecast, now is the time to act. This is also a great gift idea for the wine lover who has everything (I know, you could always get them more wine, but you get the idea

HOW TO PARTICIPATE:

Make your donation today by clicking here and indicate you would like prize “WB08” in the comments field. Each $10 donation will give you one chance to win.

I hope the Winecast community will be generous this holiday season and support this worthy cause. I’ll keep you posted on the status of the campaign as it goes along.

Peace.

I’ve spent a bit of time talking about several Wine 2.0 sites here but really haven’t covered what might make for the most successful business model: the wine club. There are some wine social networking sites that include online stores but there is nothing like WineQ, which launches their public beta today.

I’ve been using the site for about a week while it was in private beta and am impressed by it’s performance and ease of use. A familiar tabbed user interface makes it easy to navigate the site to find wines and share them with friends, but it’s the Queue that is really their unique proposition to wine lovers. Just like Netflix revolutionized the DVD rental business with with a personal movie queue, WineQ does this for wine clubs. But they take this concept one step further by giving users the ability to choose their own mix of wines for regular shipment. This might appear on the surface to be a minor point but this has been a deal breaker for me after joining some wine clubs and not being 100% satisfied with the selection mailed to me.

Other interesting features include filtering selections by states so I don’t put wines in my queue that can’t be legally shipped to me and a wine recommendation engine that promises to be somewhat like a similar feature in both Netflix and Amazon. These recommendations will improve once more people buy and rate the wines they receive. But it’s the queue that is really where the most benefits are found. Not only can I determine when the shipments are sent (always on Monday, so I get the wines by the end of the week), how many bottles are sent in each shipment and the order of wines selected. That last feature is implemented in Ajax which provides an easy to use drag and drop interface.

WineQ’s business model is based upon a $9.95 monthly service fee (or $99.95 annually) that entitles the customer to free shipping on orders over $35. This is a huge benefit, as many times shipping 2 or 3 bottles will cost you over $20; I’d rather pay for more wine than shipping any day. I know why the folks at WineQ have chosen this monthly fee model, from my previous experience at a dot-com start-up a few years back, but as a customer I’d rather have it be a free membership and perhaps a slightly higher minimum order for free shipping, but this is not a deal-breaker by any means. Should you not reach that $35 order size, you will be charged a very reasonable $5 per shipment.

Currently, there are only nine wineries in their portfolio with each offering an average of 2 or 3 wines (the exception being Peterson Winery with 5 wines but not my personal favorite Bradford Mountain Syrah). I’m sure this selection will continue to grow as time goes on. All the current wineries are limited production, artisan producers that are somewhat difficult to find outside of California, another benefit for those of us living out of state.

I’m really glad to see WineQ startup and hope they carve out a successful niche in the Wine 2.0 community. As part of their launch, they have offered a special coupon code for Winecast readers and listeners good for $10 off your first order. Just enter the coupon code “WINECAST” when you sign up. Think of it as a one month risk-free trial of this unique service.

I’ll blog some more after receiving my first shipment later this month. Check it out here.

We’ll be getting together for another online discussion regarding Wine 2.0 on December 19th at 9pm EST/6pm PST/2am (Wed.) GMT/1:00 pm (Wed.) AEST. This time we will hold the session in the more traditional chat room format in Lingr. Our Wine 2.0 room is here.

We’ll start with a round of introductions followed by a business model chat and cap the evening off with a more geeky technical discussion (go here to get a taste of what I mean). Please post any other agenda items to the comments here and I will add them to the final agenda posted closer to the event. This meeting is open to anyone interested and there is no limit to the amount of participants. To keep some sort of order (if we need it), I’ll act as the moderator.

Since it was fun to have a wine to go along with the conversation last time, I propose we drink Tempranillo this time (Rioja Spain, Portugal or Calaveras Co., CA; your choice). Hope to see you there.

When I started this blog and podcast, almost 2 years ago, I set-up on a super cheap hosting account thinking I’d only have a few hundred hits. That was a bad assumption and I ran out of bandwidth within my first two weeks. In January of 2005 I moved to a larger account at Bluehost and it has served me well until the past couple of weeks when the amount of traffic has been too much for my shared hosting account. Therefore, I will have to move to a dedicated server plan in the next few days to avoid the CPU quota errors you might have noticed from time to time.

It’s not a problem at all; I knew it would come to this someday. If you know of any hosts for me to check out with dedicated plans, post them to the comments.

When I first got into wine, there were television commercials like these creating awareness and demand:

Today, I can’t imagine an actor like Anthony Hopkins plugging Mondavi or Gallo wines on TV. How far we have come in the marketing of wine…

Looking at these spots takes me back to my wine roots, drinking a bit of Paul Masson Burgundy and Emerald Dry. Most days, however, I drank Gallo Hearty Burgundy or Chablis Blanc from huge 3 liter jugs. Haven’t had those wines in years; I wonder if they are still as tasty as I remember them? Perhaps a trip down the jug aisle is in order.

What were your “roots wines”?

Beau over at Basic Juice has posed an interesting challenge today; if you blogged today last year, “…what did you write about? Are you proud/embarrassed of your post?”

This time last year was another Wine Blogging Wednesday and, as was my custom then, I both blogged and podcast the monthly theme that was, “Judge a Bottle By Its Cover.” I think I had an entertaining post and podcast featuring the 2005 Norma Jeane Merlot and Lavradores de Feitoria, “Tres Bagosâ€Â? 2002. My only embarrassment is that was Winecast 48 and I’m only up to 69 right now; how could I have only done 21 shows in the past year? Pathetic.

Thanks, Beau; I think I need to record something right now…

Mark over at Uncorked posted an interesting piece today on a growing scandal in New Zealand. Basically, Wither Hills entered a Sauvignon Blanc into the New Zealand International Wine Show that proved to be different than the released wine (if you have the 2006 already, this is the wine in question). The competition awarded a gold metal to this wine that was stripped once Cuisine magazine tasted a similar sample blind with another purchased at retail and determined them not to be the same. The wine samples then made their way to the Institute of Environmental Science and Research who ran tests to prove both wines were different in alcohol content, acidity and sugar levels.

There is a popular meme in California wine country about “Parker barrels�; special blends or samples specially prepared for critics like Robert Parker. While I can believe there might be some unscrupulous vintners who might be tempted to try this, it is my understanding that Mr. Parker goes nuclear on any winery he discovers practicing such tactics. In a web connected world, I can’t imagine any rational winemaker or winery owner taking such a gamble, which makes the situation with Wither Hills so perplexing.

In an email Mark sent out today he postulated if this episode would, “…sabotage the very foundation of Parker and Spectator-type wine ratings and wine competitions?� I think not as such practices are likely to be exposed and the consequences to wine brands dire in such a competitive marketplace. In my view, this just is an isolated incident that few will repeat once they see what happens here.

Update: I noticed that Wither Hills winemaker Brent Marris has posted an open letter on the situation with his side of the story.  Kudos for the transparency, Mr. Marris.  Given Josh’s comments yesterday, I’ll accept that this was just a result of differing bottling runs and not an attempt at pulling a fast one on critics.

We read about all sorts of positive stories about the benefits of wine consumption, but this post over at TechCrunch had me scratching my head a bit. After clicking over to the new statistics site Swivel, I had to smile at what appears to be a positive correlation between the lowering of violent crime and the increase in wine consumption. Of course, these are most likely not related, so it’s best to check out a comparison that makes more sense like comparing wine to beer. I like the trends here

Katie from AOL Food just tipped me off to an interesting “Top…” list they posted: Top 5 Wines at $5.99 (or less). Their brave tasting panel collected 34 wines for evaluation and recommend five. Not surprisingly, for me anyway, many of the wines are found on the shelves of Trader Joe’s markets here in the U.S. and the top wine chosen is Trader Joe’s Coastal Cabernet (what, no Napa River?). Interestingly, I have not tasted any of these wines myself, so I can’t vouch for the results, but it is a fun read none the less and might be welcome news to those planning holiday parties.

Check it out for yourself.