Fonte da Serrana, Alentejo, Portugal, 2004. $5.99 (find this wine)
Alentejo is a hot, dry part of Southern Portugal that, when it comes to wine, traditionally has been more known for making closures–corks–rather than what goes in the bottle. But this wine will make them consider planting more vines. The alluring nose of dried herbs precedes the all-berry attack the attack, which, in turn, is followed by a surprising degree of bright acidity and gentle tannins. A GREAT summer quaffer. And our new house burrito wine. Day two it was still going strong and poured at fridge temp, marvelously refreshing on the deck. The blend is mostly Aragonez (a.k.a Tempranillo) and the indigenous Trincadeira.

Hugues Beaulieu, Picpoul de Pinet, Coteaux de Languedoc, 2006. $7.37 (find this wine)
Picpoul de Pinet is a blast of summer freshness that comes from a stone’s throw away from the Mediterranean. With a citrus zip of tart acidity, a light saline quality, this wine, from a cooperative producer, is refreshing to pair with 95 degrees–as an aperitif or with seafood. It’s easy to understand why Picpoul is known as the Muscadet of the south both for flavor profile as well as wallet-friendliness. I got this bottle from a sale that is now, sadly, over (bringing the price up to $8.99) but I will definitely get more for the dog days of summer.

If I were there, I’d pop open some Moscato d’Asti. With aromas of peach, a gentle fizz, sweetness balanced by acidity, I think it’s the ultimate wine for poolside. I’ve had one from Elio Perrone before that would fit the bill nicely (find this wine).

SPIT: Adolescent binge drinking!
France will debut it’s first ever anti binge drinking campaign on Friday. According to Decanter, it will run on TV, radio and in in movie theaters and “feature adolescents enjoying a ‘paradise-like universe’, which turns into a nightmare after they drink too much.” Whoa! Send in a clip if you see it.

SIPPED and SPIT: The St. Emilion classification!
Sweeping victory from the jaws of defeat (or, more likely, the other way around), the classification of St. Emilion producers that updates every ten years was thrown out by a judge last week–only to be reinstated on a temporary basis for three years by another authority later in the week. [Decanter]

SIPPED: summer all year!
Rosé surpasses white wine as the most popular in France. [Times.co.uk]

This question arose during the Q&A after my talk at the Beard House last week. Funny, wine politics extends to parks!

It turned out that the woman who posed the question had, in fact, just sipped wine at a picnic in Prospect Park in Brooklyn–and all in her party were ticketed! At $25 a head, that ended up being a $150 wine experience that she and her friends would no doubt could have lived without. Or the most expensive rosé they had ever tasted.

For those of you who might wonder why they were issued a citation, city law bans open containers of alcohol in parks or beaches. Mayor Bloomberg did get in trouble in 2003 when some people were ticketed for drinking beer on a beach while he was photographed days later listening to the Philharmonic with people having wine near him.

Are these blue laws outdated and we should be able to uncork rose while in the park? Have your say in the latest poll!

Do Bianchi: The itinerant Jeremy Parzen seems to float between New York and San Diego but his wine home is clearly Italy. He has a PhD in Italian literature and worked for an Italian wine importer for a while in NYC. One posting among many interesting ones is how he came to appreciate new oak barrels (barriques) during a visit to Movia in Slovenia. Btw, the blog is pronounced “doh bee-an-kee,” which apparently means “gimme two cold ones” in Italy.

Grape Wall of China: Jim Boyce blogs from Beijing and does an excellent job showing us life through the lens of the wine glass in that exciting market. He seems to buttonhole every winemaker who comes through Beijing and has many interviews with notable wine personalities and even had a picture of himself with Robert Parker on the great wall! He also did a Q&A with some guy named Dr. Vino recently.

Blog Tablas Creek: Jason Haas is the general manager at Tablas Creek, a winery in California’s Central Coast winery specializing in wines from grape varieties from the Rhone. With good reason: the winery is a joint venture between Chateau Beaucastel’s Perrin family and the Haas family of the importer Vineyard Brands. Jason blogs about grapes, events, planting new vineyards, and also this excellent post about the hidden costs of direct shipping after the 2005 Supreme Court decision–wine politics!

On the Wine Trail in Italy Alfonoso Cevola keeps a quirky wine blog when he’s not tending to his daytime duties as Italian Wine Director at the distributor Glazer’s in Texas. He makes posting images look easy (it’s not, trust me) but he is good with words too, infusing his wine experiences in Texas. Since I’m a fan of off-beat wine pairings, check out which wine goes with searsucker.

Steve Heimoff, West Coast editor at Wine Enthusiast magazine and wine book author has turned his energy on blogging. He’s done a good job stirring the pot and, like us, he’s no fan of Styrofoam!

Wine sooth: Frequent commenter on this blog Arthur Przebinda started a blog just last month–so it has that new blog smell. He focuses on wines of Central Coast on his site but promises musings on other topics on his blog.

The image is a reduced size crop of an image that originally appeared in PC Magazine.

I generally prefer low alcohol wines. If the alcohol is over 14 percent, as happens all too often in this age of global warming, the number of glasses I can reasonably consume with dinner declines sharply. Since I enjoy drinking wine with food that makes me sad.

But drinking low alcohol wines can be expensive. The $16 for 750ml of five percent wine might make some drinkers switch to a microbrew that has more kick and costs less per ounce. There was a day in France when wine was sold from vats at the local market and people brought jugs to fill, paying more for a douze (12% abv) than for an onze (11%). So with many low-alcohol wines not pricing in such a discount today, if you pour only low-alcohol wines at a dinner party, you would wind up working through more bottles, thus raising the wine tab for the evening.

To dismiss low alcohol wines would mean never trying these types of wines, which is always too bad. Some types of wine, such as these three as well as Mosel Riesling, are simply low alcohol wines. I find low alcohol wines to work particularly well with spicy foods and warm weather. So they fill a definite void and do so well.

What do you think: would a low alcohol level stop you from buying a wine?

While we were just sitting here sipping our sauvignon, they have brought the fight to us wine geeks, touting their product as “wine,” and packaging it in 750 ml bottles with 13% alcohol. The audacity! And they continue that their measly mead is “a light and crisp dry white that is thoroughly wine-like, but unlike any wine you’ve had before.”

Oh yeah, which vintage is your honey from, Mister Meadery? Can you imagine, the meadery is exploiting the honey bees during their time of Colony Collapse Disorder! Drink real wine instead! There’s a global glut! Manhattan Meadery, you’re on notice!

I don’t particularly like soft serve but just thought it was a really good picture. If you have a wine suggestion, please note which flavor makes for the best pairing. And if you had a thought about whether making ice cream at home is worth the time and money, let us know that too!

What would be on your list of independent wines?

Also, check out this story from Bloomberg–who knew AVAs could be so fun! Regulatory columnist Cindy Skrzycki does a good job recounting the story that led the Feds to reject the petition for a Viticultural Area named Tulocay in Napa. Quotage from Dr. Vino.

July 9, noon-1 PM: Beard on Books: a talk, discussion and book signing at the James Beard House, NYC. Brown-bagging welcome; coffee and wine biscotti from Three Tarts bakery will be available. $20 donation to the JBF encouraged for non-students. If you’ve never gotten around to checking out the historic Beard house, now’s your chance! 167 W. 12th St. Details and reservations.

July 11: Book signing at Astor Wines (Lafayette @ 4th St), 6-8 PM. No talk here, just a signing; French wines also available for tasting.

July 22: Book signing at Powell’s Books, Cedar Hills Crossing (Beaverton, OR), 7PM. details and preorder a signed copy of the book

And one day (Saturday the 26th?) at IPNC, the International Pinot Noir Celebration.

I hope you can make one–or more! If you can’t, consider adding the book for your virtual shopping cart. Ponder this comparison: William Fevre, Chablis, 2006 a fine wine that goes for $19.95 a bottle. Or , available from Amazon for $18.15! The Chablis will bring you pleasure for one evening but the book will hold down your bookshelf forever! And unlike wine, available now for shipping to all 50 states!

Wait, surplus English wine? This isn’t France. I thought wine was a new thing in England and they were proud enough to serve it to world leaders? (In 2006 there were actually 365 English vineyards totaling 2,280 acres–not a lot, but more than I would have guessed.)

So just how fuel efficient is it for Prince Charles? I caught my carbon footprint research co-author, Pablo Paster, on chat and crunched the numbers. It turns out that the ethanol the Prince is putting in his car has three times the carbon dioxide emissions of regular fuel–not to mention that he’s soaking up a lot of English wine in the process! It takes about 500 liters of wine to distill into a tank of fuel.

But the exhaust must smell great–chardonnay with a whiff of irony!

As a prize, I sent her a signed copy of the hottest (only?) wine book to be released in July, my own, Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink. Thanks, Katie, and thanks, all, for your votes!

First wineries infiltrated Brooklyn, as Brooklyn Oenology and Bridge Urban Winery have done and Abe Schoener will do in Red Hook later this year. Next up: Manhattan. City Winery, a night club meets wine bar meets winery, will open at 143 Varick St in the fall.

Michael Dorf, owner of the nightclub the Knitting Factory among other pursuits, is heading the City Winery. Grapes will be trucked in from New York State, California and possibly beyond to be made into wine under the supervision of David Lecomte, a French trained winemaker who has made wine at Chapoutier and Herzog, the kosher winery in California. People can buy a barrel (approximately 250 bottles of finished wine) starting at $5,000 and track its progress. Crushpad, which pioneered this approach in San Francisco, will also open a facility in NYC in the fall.

While the winery space will be for members (aka “barrel owners”) only, the nightclub/wine bar will be open to the public with more than 50 wines by the glass and an event space for up to 400. Oh, and there’s a state-of-the-art sound system.

Read more about City Winery and the bureaucratic hoops they had to jump through including licensing and waste removal issues at Wines & Vines (they could send all that pomace to Delluva Day Spa instead!). The Village Voice also had a recent piece on the trend.

Tipster Steve points out that times have changed since 2000 when the “last” winery moved out of NYC as tax incentives and rising costs lured the kosher Kedem to Bayonne, NJ. The barrel always rolls…

A reader sent in this photo from his trip to the region in February. Where in the wine world was he? As a sort of hint, he said this vineyard was planted in a long-dormant volcano.

UPDATE: Adam is correct! This photo is from the Golan Heights where site reader Avi Hein said that he saw this vineyard of gewurztraminer! He wasn’t sure which winery it belonged to but I thought it was a cool picture to see this off-the-beaten path region. You can check out other photos from his time there on Flickr.

Hey Dr. Vino, I have what may be a real stumper – and one I’d love some help with. I’ve got two kids – 8 and 5 – and every Wednesday night at our house is “backward night” – we have breakfast for dinner. A very, very, very popular night with the kids. The menu is usually pancakes, which we whip up from scratch, and breakfast sausages. Added to that, we often put peanut butter AND syrup on the pancakes. All of this goes fine with milk, but, of course for me it’s evening, when my thoughts turn to wine. Sadly, I’ve not yet found a good pairing.

I really would love to know if there’s an actual wine that works. It would have to be something that goes with the nutty flavors of the pancakes (I tend to throw in some sunflower seeds or some toasted flax seeds — you know, sneak in a little healthy stuff when the kids aren’t looking!). Given that milk works so well, I’m tempted to think that a wine with some lactic acid might work — like a white that’s gone through some serious malolactic?

I guess with the sunflower seeds, it’s a safe bet Andy doesn’t serve pancakes and sausage on a stick!