Consistent with my theme of Wines For Recessionary Times, I will be tasting two wines from Cameron Hughes, one of my favorite purveyors of extreme value wine.

I have selected Lot 92 2004 Margaret River Chardonnay and Lot 36 2005 Rutherford Cabernet for the tasting.

The Chardonnay is available for just $14 at the Cameron Hughes online store but Lot 36 is only available in Costco or Sam’s Club stores (I paid $12.88 today for Lot 36 at Sam’s).

So pick up one or both of these wines, friend me up on Twitter and taste along with me on November 15th. I’ll be posting a follow-up with the approximate time of the tasting next week and, of course, tweet about this too. I hope you will join me or at least follow along on Twitter Search using the hash tag #ttl.

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With that in mind, I’m launching a new feature I’m calling “Wines For Recessionary Times.”

That doesn’t always mean cheap wines but we will start there and explore the most extreme values in all price tiers. I’m talking about the $10 wines that give $25 wines a run for their money. Also those $30 wines that make you shake your head and wonder what they were thinking charging $75 a bottle for a similar wine. Or those auction finds that you want to keep to yourself so you can buy more before they are sold out. And wines you can buy for less than $50 A CASE.

So stay tuned as I look for wines that you would guess are 2 or 3 times more expensive than they actually are. This should be a fun project but let’s hope it’s short lived and not necessary this time next year.

What’s your favorite extreme value wine?

The answer is nearly impossible.

But it wasn’t for lack of trying. I setup Twitterfeed to retweet my Google Reader shared items and I also shared some wine news from Decanter magazine. I participated in the Twitter discussion of wine but didn’t go out of my way to create tweets for the sake of reaching my goals. I could have probably marginally improved my follower count by running a contest or two but I don’t think it would have made a signfianct difference in the final results.

So this blog post will be my 3,000th tweet — about a month behind my original schedule — but my follower count only modestly increased to 592 (+130 since my challenge began). This tells me a few things. First, there are a limited number of people now on Twitter interested in talking about wine. Gary has certainly crossed over into the mainstream and become an internet celebrity but it’s not because of his discussion of wine but how he uses Twitter to connect with his audience (which is several times larger than the Winecast audience). Second, the Wine Twitter group hangs as a fairly small pack and most of us are wine or winery bloggers. I think this might be another barrier for others to join the discussion.

So I’ve decided to open up the way I follow others on Twitter to include fans as well as those tweeting mostly about wine. I started out doing this to keep my Winecast feed easier to scan and I was also republishing the tweets here (later turned off due to technical issues). But I followed everyone back on my personal Twitter account to sort of abide by the norms of the service. This change will not raise my follower count but it will open up some interesting ways to use the service to connect with readers and listeners.

I’m hoping this change will encourage people to ask me more questions and ultimately lead to increasing my overall reach… and I’ll get some contests going, as well. Let’s see where I’m at on New Years Day with this new approach.

I’ve been reading Neal Rosenthal’s book “Reflections of a Wine Merchant” for the last few days and I’m starting to triangulate this, with recent events, to change the course of this blog and podcast. Around page 144 Mr. Rosenthal starts his attack on wine ratings and he makes a lot of sense to me although he would likely comment how much of an amateur I am here (or worse, as the owner of a San Francisco wine bar once did in email… but that’s another story).

Money quote:

“There is little journalism, which is to say fact findings and reporting, and virtually no effective prose; there is, however, a series of judgments backed by a sadly limited descriptive vocabulary and powered by precise scores.”

Therefore, from now forward, I will drop the 100-point rating scale in my reviews and use my proposed standard 5-star scale. That is, until I decide to drop that as well. I will endeavor to provide more investigative journalism and concentrate on my prose. A review of Neal Rosenthal’s prose is forthcoming.

That ends tonight.

From now until Labor Day (a “bank holiday” in the U.S. for UK readers), I will be striving to get to my goal of 3,000 tweets AND 3,000 followers. Since I only have a bit over 2,000, this will be somewhat of a challenge given the 34 days involved, but I will try to post enough to get to that goal. And not just be trivial about it.

But my goal of 3,000 followers is a ridiculous task unless there is something I don’t yet know or Gary takes a liking to me.

Whatever the case, I will try to reach both goals.

As I begin, my follower count is now 462… wish me luck on my quest. I’ll pull out every trick in the book but I will need a LOT of help to reach my goals.

So tell all your friends to follow me on Twitter. And watch me as I tweet 30 times a day

Note: This is a cross-post from a new multi-author blog devoted to the discussion of 89 point wines. An interesting idea that I hope will generate some more conversation on the subject.

Like many people who review wine, I use the 100 point scale. It’s not because I think this is the best system — and I’ve proposed alternatives — it’s just the current industry standard. When I was invited to write here, my first thought was to just get my latest review from my blog and cross-post with some additional detail on why I rated the wine 89 and not 90. But in looking back, I see that 89 has become a more popular score for me so I wanted to reflect on why for my first post here at The 89 Project.

Let’s look at my pair of Rieslings from Wine Blogging Wednesday 45. Both earned 89. Why? Because I liked them both about the same. They were tasted side-by-side over a couple days and I couldn’t pick one over the other. But why not 88 or 87?

To answer that, I have to go back to the mechanics of how I score wine. When I somewhat reluctantly adopted the 100-point scale a few years ago, I looked at how Robert Parker did his reviews. He helpfully posts this on his website. So I follow this same process with each element rated on it’s own, then a total score tallied afterward. In a large tasting, this final score does not get calculated until after all wines have been tasted. In the case of the Rieslings, both wines scored the same amount of total points but the individual elements were different.

So is this a precise science? No, but I do try to keep my scores as consistent as possible when tasting a group of wines. But what makes a wine a 90 and not 89 is probably a more interesting question. And the answer is, “something extra.”

Let’s face it, there are more very good wines on the market today than at any time in history. Between modern winemaking and viticulture techniques there has been an equalization in quality across the world. Great wines are coming from the old and new world at almost every price point so no country has a lock on wine quality (branding, however, is another story). So with that as the backdrop, I interpret “something extra” as going beyond just well made, varietally correct, nicely balanced wines. It is definitely a subjective judgement but you know it when it’s encountered.

So I guess this is a long way of saying that the difference between an 89 and a 90 is not an objective calculation but a subjective judgment. But you probably already knew that…

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