I recently led a tasting and we were able to put this question to the test. I poured the Domaine Grand Veneur, Cotes du Rhone, reserve, 2007 from a bottle (retail: $14) and a three-liter box ($45) and served them blind. (search for this wine)

The assembled group couldn’t really discern between the two wines. While everyone agreed that the wine was a good value, some people preferred one over the other but the reasoning was all over the map. Although this sounds like a non-finding, it is interesting that neither format outpaced the other even though one format is decidedly less expensive per ounce/glass.

I look forward to trying this experiment again but it is difficult to find the exact same wine packaged in two different formats. Domaine des Estezargues, Cotes du Rhone 2007 and apparently there’s one from Washington State; hit the comments if you’ve done a tasting like this or know of other wines in both formats for our further experimentation.

Related: “Forget the saber: try opening champagne with champagne! [video]“

I stopped by SD26 on a recent weeknight and things were hopping. The restaurant, opened on Madison Square in September to the tune of $7 million, boasts a wine bar in the front. Tony May, who previously owned the traditional San Domenico, told the New York Times that with SD26 “We aim for the cutting edge.”

Thus behold the 24 bottles in Enomatic, self-service dispensers. And no matter where you are in the large space, the wine list only comes in one form and–paper-be-damned–it’s digital.

It awaits on the bar, propped up by a little kick stand in the back, beckoning you with “SD26″ on the screen. The hostess said that if there were a paper edition it would be “too big” given the amount of wines available. I couldn’t resist and picked up the 9×5 tablet and started tapping the touch screen. First fields: red, white or bubbly? Then drill down: glass, half bottle or bottle? Then drill down again: a list of producers, regions and vintages.

Drill, baby, drill! But this tablet system is a dry hole. When you eventually arrive on a page you want, there is the option to sort by price or alphabetically. Despite having interactive capability, the digitized wine list remains merely a list. There are no descriptions of the wines. No ability to sort by style. Few images. No suggestions for pairings with items on the menu. No interactions such as the ability to rate the wine that you had after you tried it and then coming up with a short list of popular picks or sorting by user-generated rankings. No internet access. So you’re pretty much left where you were with a paper list: talking with the sommelier for a suggestion.

Although the inventory could be instantly updated, the wines probably don’t change too often: the server I spoke with in the front said that the 24 wines in the Enomatic machines have been there since the opening and will likely be there through the new year.

So, really, the substance of the wine list doesn’t appear to benefit form the style of the tablet. It seems to have been done just for the tech of it.

On one page, entitled “Drugs are trouble,” wine, beer, marijuana and cigarettes are graphically depicted in a cage making cat calls at children. Wine, marijuana; they’re both drugs! On the flip side, at least they differentiate between wine and illegal drugs–all while introducing the topics of crack and cocaine!

I can see it now: “Sonny, come help daddy pick out a nice wine for tonight’s dinner. Should we have a ‘47 Cheval Blanc or a ‘61 Lafite? Look, there’s your birth year wine over there that we can drink together when you turn 21. Oh, watch out–don’t step on daddy’s crystal crack pipe!”

In all seriousness, for six-year-olds? Come on. The whole discussion is not only heavy-handed but also grossly premature. (Checking on the web site of the company that produced the educational materials, I see topics such as “fighting germs” and “following directions” for first graders; drugs and alcohol are saved for fifth grade so someone at the school may have been overzealous.) We’ll just keep on having wine with dinner and our son is welcome to smell it whenever he wants.

For the parents out there, what have you seen about in your children’s schooling? How has wine consumption been framed, if at all, for your kids outside of the home? And what do you do if it clashes with your worldview?

Related: “Should kids be banned from wineries?
“Maine prohibits children from observing wine tasting at stores

I contributed a short piece to Forbes.com about wines that could serve as “ringers” in a blind tasting. Have you ever organized a blind tasting at home (or professionally) and thrown in a “ringer”? Or if you haven’t, which wine would you put in which lineup as a ringer in a future tasting?

SIPPED: American wine
The White House continues pouring only American wines, so far from four states at official events. The first state dinner is coming up next month–stay tuned for what the Obamas pick for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh! [Obamafoodarama]

SPIT: American wine; SIPPED: generosity
While dining in lower Manhattan last weekend, Chief Justice John Roberts and his wife Jane sipped a bottle of Villa Mangiacane, a Chianti. When they finished their meal, they offered the rest of the wine to a neighboring table, specifically, Gay Talese who blogged about it for City Room.

SIPPED: wine service tips
A budding restaurateur offers his first 50 service tips for his staff, including several wine related ones including “For red wine, ask if the guests want to pour their own or prefer the waiter to pour.” [You're the Boss, NYT]

SPIT: old vines; SIPPED: apartment complex
Philip White, a wine writer in Australia, has a scathing critique of Constellation, one of the world’s largest wine makers and marketers, and their apparent plans to scale back in Australia. Particularly irksome to him was the uprooting of John Reynell’s 161-year-old vines at Reynella; 41 “tiny apartments” will replace the vines. [INDAILY]

Even though its themes were widely discussed in the wine world, audiences did not flock to see Nossiter’s 2004 documentary, Mondovino, which racked up only $200,000 in box office gross according to IMDB. (Sideways was north of $100 million, by contrast.) I found Mondovino to be shaky, not stirring.

The first review of Liquid Memory came in the NYT Book Review, written by Jim Holt (who is credited as “writing a book about the puzzle of existence”). He offered this warm beer as criticism: “Nossiter didn’t completely win me over.” Despite this, the book soared on Amazon’s sales rankings.

Now get a hold of Mike Steinberger’s review, just published on Slate.com. He writes that the ”solipsism, self-regard, and preening” on display in the book would make the subtitle “Why I Matter” more apt. He also catches Nossiter displaying faux populism both in Nossiter’s lexicon for talking about wine that (literature) as well as the high prices of the wines that Nossiter recommends (Roumier, Roulot, and Dominique Lafon). And he accuses Nossiter of fighting yesterday’s battles.

A great line line from the review summarizes Nossiter’s regrettable tendency to paint his villains with a partisan brush: “The wine world is certainly no Eden, but at least among the grape nuts I know, there seems to be a tacit understanding that politics should end at the rim of the glass—that arguments over wine are spirited enough without injecting politics into the discussion.”

As candy washes over the country these days in a giant, wrapper-encrusted wave, it seems only timely: which wine goes with Halloween candy? Or is it impossible?!?

Please make your candy suggestions as trashy as possible–no gourmet chocolates here, just Reese’s peanut butter cups, KitKats, Almond Joy, Butterfinger, Pop Rocks and/or Necco wafers.

For those of you who cannot fathom pairing candy and wine, then play sommelier for Paul Rudnick: as profiled in yesterday’s NYT, the 51 year old man weighs 150 pounds and subsist almost entirely on candy.

Site reader and distributor Damien Casten sent in an AP story (with no byline) yesterday entitled “Geologists debunk soil impact on wine at Ore. talk.” The Oregon event was a special session at the annual conference of the Geological Society of America.

At the meeting, Alex Maltman presented a paper with this to say about minerality: “The widely cited direct, literal connection between vineyard geology and wine taste seems scientifically impossible. Whatever “minerality” in wine is, it is not the taste of vineyard minerals.” He calls any perceived connection a “romantic myth.”

Fair enough, there may not be a transfer of minerals from substrate to the glass, but is terroir debunked? Not quite, argued Jonathan Swinchatt in a paper that cites the indirect influences of drainage, accessibility to water, microbiology, soil temperature, and trace element chemistry. He argued that unraveling these links is “devilishly” complex and thus “the connections between geology and wine will remain elusive for some time to come.”

Terroir: clear as mud!

After the jump, Greg Jones, a climatologist from Southern Oregon University (and son of the founder of Abacela Vineyards and Winery in Roseburg, OR) chimes in with his thoughts from the conference and the reporting of it.

Over the years of being in the media’s eyes on climate and wine, I have found that they get it right about 25-40% of the time. The rest of the time they capture what creates the story, not the truth.

Yes, I was at the meeting (a very good session in my opinion) and gave two talks. Even what I said was taken out of context in the AP story as was much of everything else. There was no ‘debunking’ only good debate about the relationships between climate, landscape, soil, and the vine. The take home was that it clearly is a non-linear issue that we know virtually nothing about, but that the use of terms like ‘minerality’ are over-done and have no connection or basis for being derived directly from some mineral aspect in the soil. It never stated that soil has no impact on wine, to the contrary the take home for me confirmed what I truly believe … that geology, landscape, and soil are important factors that mediate the interaction between climate and the vine, especially soil water supply and nutrition. But that climate is the most basic and most profound in terms of what can be grown where and how. For me this gets back to the sense of place or the importance of site being at the core of terroir!

In the original AP piece that I saw, they said “Jones found that more than half of existing vineyards are planted on land that is only marginally suitable for growing grapes. Nearly a third of the planted acreage is mismatched to climate: Cool-climate grapes such as pinot noir are growing where it’s too warm, and varieties requiring more heat are growing where it’s too cold.” My comments were simply that in many instances sites are not ideal for grapes more because they were owned and planted, instead of sought out for growing grapes. Therefore many sites are not ideal, but compromises … which further accentuates the importance of site selection! The 1/3 mis-matched varieties is correct. In smaller emerging areas this is always the case were growers are trying to find out what does best where … my modeling shows that climate can delineate this suitability with much less trial and error.

Written by NPR contributor Daniel Zwerdling back in 2004, the story starts at a tasting with Riedel stemware, which the attendees loved and bought $1,000 worth of the crystal afterward. Then the author reviews some scientific studies about taste and olfactory analysis of wine in different vessels, which clashed with the what he had seen at the Riedel demonstration. So the author put the question to Georg Riedel. Click through to see Riedel’s reply.

The article then turns to a fascinating and important discussion about perceptions and wine, much of which we have discussed since 2004 in various ways here and elsewhere. The now-available article is an oldie but a goodie and well worth the read if you haven’t already seen it.

Related: “Shattered Myths” [Gourmet]
“Varietal stemware: genius or hucksterism?”
“The Tongue Map: Tasteless Myth Debunked” [LiveScience]
“Wine’s Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head?” [NYT]

Instead, the logjam crushed Amazon (AMZN). Late Friday, winebusiness.com ran a story that Amazon was putting its wine retailing business on hold, citing correspondence between amazon and wineries. I contacted members of the AmazonWine team for comment and they were either away on vacation reply or said that they could not comment. The Wall Street Journal got through to a spokesman who confirmed the wine trial was over.

The intractable logjam was the interstate shipping laws that govern interstate wine shipping. You can get 200 pages or so on it in my book Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink. Or you can check out Tom Wark’s post for a more concise background on the logjam known as the three-tier system. Further, California law on unlicensed “third parties” may have affected the group’s plans.

I look forward to the final analysis of how exactly Amazon attempted to achieve a different structuring of interstate wine retail and why, sadly, it flopped. While AmazonWine kept program was kept under wraps, conventional wisdom is already blaming the bankruptcy of New Vine Logistics, which put the domestic wine component in jeopardy (imported wines were also to be available).

Given the economics of shipping wine, the company may have been targeting higher-priced bottles. In that regard, the economic backdrop didn’t help the plan as high-end wine sales have softened in the past year even though overall consumption of (lower-priced) wine is slightly higher.

In other news, Forbes.com ran a piece late Friday piece entitled, “Must-read wine blogs.” It’s a must-read itself and will give you some tips on some more blogs to add to your feed reader, if those good ones mentioned are not in yours already.

In New York on Wednesday, they poured their entry-level, Brut NV in both a classic flute as well as a white wine glass. The aromas in the wine glass were much richer in large part because you can actually stick your nose in a wine glass, which is not the case with a flute.

“The Champagnois have communicated around the bubbles, not the wine,” said a spokesman.

The flute accentuates the bubbles coming off the bottom because of a “poil mousse,” or a roughened “scratch point,” said Maxmilian Riedel, also on hand for the event. Regular wine glasses do not have a scratch point, thus any bead tends to be a bit willy nilly, if even present at all. (See the scintillating 15-second video above for comparison of the bubbles!)

The thrust of the presentation, however, was the unveiling of a “uniquely designed decanter” by Riedel for Charles Heidsieck. The “organic lyre ‘U’ shape” is handmade and mouth-blown and bears a striking resemblance to the “Amadeo” Riedel decanter with a Charles Heidsieck badge. A bottle of the Charles Heidsieck Blanc des Millenaires 1995, a lovely wine, comes with the decanter in a presentation box for $600.

“I think there’s nothing better than aged Champagne,” Riedel said. “And that’s what happens in the decanter. I decant to enrich the wine, not to lose the bubbles.”

Are you going to throw out your flutes and start serving your Champagne in white wine glasses? Or from a lyre-shaped decanter?

SPIT: Iron and SIPPED: tannins
Tannins have always gotten the bad rap for mucking up red wine pairings with fish. But it turns out that it’s actually the iron! Read Ray Isle’s funny take on the research.

SPIT: the frontal cortex
“we shouldn’t expect our poor olfactory cortex to be able to reliably assign an exact point score…” [Scienceblogs]

SIPPED: Spooky decorations
TheSnarkHunter points us to this seasonal wine shop display at Biondivino in San Francisco; if you know of other good ones, hit the comments!

Why? One wine director, Chris Deegan of the restaurant Nopa, says “I find myself drinking European wines most of the time and pairing European wines more successfully with the food.” Mark Ellenbogen, wine director of a top Vietnamese restaurant, says, ““At Slanted Door, you need low-alcohol, high acid wines with residual sugar, and they don’t come from the New World.”

Asimov continues the topic of the unwieldy pairings many American wines make with food over on The Pour. He writes, “the riper and riper styles of wine that have become popular in this country simply are not versatile with food, so restaurants look elsewhere.” He also notes some exceptions that he has found.

Wine style aside, I crunched some numbers for the piece based on my previous research on the carbon footprint of wine. Even though container shipping offers greater efficiency from a greenhouse gas perspective than trucking, a 9,500 mile sea journey still comes out higher than a 60 mile truck trip.

By way of an offset reminiscent of our bottle-for-bottle challenge, several restaurants in the Bay Area have discontinued serving water bottled in the Alps and now serve local, tap water, still or sparkling. And you can even try this at home.

He’s not a fan of the grape. Talking about the two top growing areas in the Loire, Chinon and Bourgueil, he writes, ironically: “Virtually all the people I know who rave about Chinon and Bourgueil are wine geeks, the kind of people who champion varieties nobody else does precisely because nobody else does. You can find many of these same people downloading unsigned artists to their iPods.”

Funny, I like great Chinon and Bourgueil but I’ve never downloaded an unsigned artist to my iPhone! I just like them for the low alcohol, high acidity for food friendliness, and the low prices–the “undiscovered” discount. Take the delicious but, yes, slightly herbaceous, Domaine Guion, Cuvee Prestige 2006, which I just bought for about $12.50 (with case discount)–a tasty bargain if there ever were one, but certainly not one for fruit bomb lovers.

I tweeted about the article at 8:56 AM today and the responses came flooding in; here is a selection. (Follow along on Twitter) If you haven’t weighed in, do you love or hate Cabernet Franc? Which actor is the most apt comparison?

gonzogastronomy @drvino ouch! I happen to love cab franc!
candidwines @drvino Your Cab Franc critic cites “cedar, tobacco + vanilla” in the CF he loves. My description of him: “Starts w/ J, rhymes w/ mackass”.
Randall Grahm @drvino There are truly 2 populations of wine drinkers, those who love and those who detest cab franc. One generally wishes to avoid latter
voxinferior RT @gonzogastronomy: @drvino ouch! I happen to love cab franc! (I like it too, but there’s some pretty legit. criticism in that piece)
James Molesworth @RandallGrahm @drvino Cab Franc is an acquired taste. Acquired at birth or never…
Howard Goldberg @RandallGrahm @drvino When I think of cabernet sauvignon, I think of Catherine Deneuve. And when I think of cabernet franc, Lauren Bacall.
candidwines @drvino @RandallGrahm Overcropped, machine harvested Cab Franc is to real CF as January tomatoes are to garden heirlooms: worlds apart.
theconcierge @drvino I think the ‘Globe and Mail’ statement on Cabernet Franc is harsh, there are bad wines made with any varietals
Randall Grahm @howardggoldberg @drvino Deneuve is Burgundy; Bruce Willis is Bordeaux. But I like the smoky, peppery Bacall association w/ cab franc
Randall Grahm @jmolesworth1 @drvino @howardggodberg What gets me is the absolute vehemence of cab franc’s detractors. But francly, I don’t give a damn
megmaker @RandallGrahm @howardggoldberg @drvino Agree Cab Franc is Bacall, or maybe K Hepburn: throaty, acerbic – but what a woman.
tallywineguy @drvino I think pinotage is more divisive than CF. RT There r 2 populations of wine drinkers, those who love & those who detest Cab F