Obama chose to present him with something he might never have had before, a gift of American wine! Specifically, a wine from the Vermentino grape grown in North Carolina’s Yadkin Valley made by Raffaldini Vineyards.

See the video below where Thomas Salley of Raffaldini explains how State Department officials requested samples of the wine from this Italian American family. And how the wine will be presented in a wooden case using old flooring from the Oval Office. Reduce, reuse, recycle!

Also note the transcript provided by FOX 8 in High Point NC, which hilariously misquotes Salley as saying, “The Vermentino grape is Sardinia variety so it’s native the the island of sardine.”

UPDATE: Whoops, Obama gave the wine to the Italian President, Giorgio Napolitano NOT Prime Minister Berluscsoni. Berlusconi will have to bum a sip from him.

The article suggests that “some of the newer operations [wineries] are using new marketing techniques to cope.” A case study:

Alpha Omega, a boutique winery in Rutherford, Calif., has begun using online services Facebook and Twitter to reach out to its customers. The winery three years ago began targeting consumers directly, and the strategy is now paying off; revenue is up 40% so far this year, compared with a year ago, in part because it doesn’t have to share many revenues with a distributor, says co-owner Robin Baggett.

Call me a skeptic, but I fail to see how the winery’s 296 friends on Facebook, 407 followers on Twitter and no blog can really help them move their wines (even if one of their tweets had a Palin-esque all caps consisting simply of “I love WINE.”) Their range of wines, crafted by winemakers Jean Hoefliger and Michel Rolland, starts with a $28 rosé and moves up to a $480 three-pack of reds in a wooden case. The WSJ article states that wines north of $25 are experiencing “a sharp falloff” so there must be some other secret sauce at Alpha Omega.

If it’s selling directly to consumers and bypassing distributors, then great. But I would imagine in this case that the 20% discount to club members speaks more loudly than their tweets.

Can social media really save the day for wineries? A story making the rounds these days is that the internet devalues everything it touches. But if both luxury and non-luxury wineries can somehow make social media work to increase their profitability while lowering prices to consumers, then that would be a heartwarming tale for all.

However, other fortified wines whose names conflicted with European place names have gotten new names. Heretofore, when ordering a glass of sherry style wine made Down Under, the proper term to use is Apera, which is a gentle riff on aperitif. And the wines formerly known as Tokay, a name that clashed with the sweet wine from Hungary, will now be known as Topaque. Eegad, that sounds like something from a medicine chest, not a liquor cabinet.

But if the Australian group for renaming fortified wines had listened to one suggestion they might have come up with something zippier. At a recent tasting, a non-Australian member of our group described these unctuous sweet wines as “lickoffable,” as in you want to drizzle them on your partner’s body and lick it off. Yikes! What a way to boost…sales!

James Godfrey (pictured right), winemaker for thirty years at Seppeltsfield in the Barossa Valley, told me that he saw the new names as an opportunity. The term sherry has “a lot of baggage,” he said, elaborating that the new name will give them an opportunity to energize their new category of aperas, including dry, medium dry and medium sweet (which replace Fino, Amontillados and Oloroso), with younger consumers.

To find the names, a trade group generated about 200 names that could still be trademarked and then ran them by some producers, journalists, sommeliers and shop owners to come up with a list of 20 finalists. Then they surveyed 600 consumers to come up with the winners, apera, topaque, vintage and tawny. (If you want to see more on their strategy for developing the “New Era” names, check out their incredibly detailed report here as pdf.)

What do you think about the new names? A clean break or sour grapes? And what of “lickoffable”?

And stay tuned for part two of this exciting story to see what I call it when I actually taste a bottle of Topaque!

In their annual survey of how and what American drinks, the smokin’ pollsters at Gallup point to a gender gap where men prefer beer and women prefer wine. (For beer-wine-spirits preferences, men are 58-19-18 while women are 21-50-24. Click through for full summary and charts.)

How does this square with your experience? In my own, I find a lot of enthusiasm for wine among them there young folks. And men and women seem equally into wine. But my evidence is purely anecdotal!

As to the economic effect of the recession, they say it is hard to sort out. But their main finding is that the percentage of Americans who drink alcohol is the same as last year, at 64%. Meanwhile, over on the Big Board, The AP has this about the quarterly numbers from Constellation (STZ): “Sales for the company, whose brands include Robert Mondavi wines and Svedka brand vodka, dropped 15 percent to $791.6 million from $931.8 million on the stronger dollar as well as the sales of the value spirits business, spirits contract production services and some Pacific Northwest wine brands.”

We haven’t done one of these for a while. But a site reader thought he could stump everyone with this shot from his travels (click to enlarge). As a clue, he writes “while this vineyard is in among the more picturesque parts of the region, it’s by no means the part of the region you go to to find the best wine.”

Details to follow! But in the meantime, where in the wine world was he?

UPDATE: Good guesses! The picture comes from kiwi lover Eric Arnold, author of First Big Crush: The Down and Dirty on Making Great Wine Down Under, who sent in the picture along with this commentary, satellite imagery, and a map! He writes:

“It’s a marginal piece of land at best. It’s out by Rarangi, toward the coast, which is a tiny dirty-hippie beach community; so it’s pretty sandy over there–nothing like the stony, minerally heart of the Wairau Valley. The highest-quality vineyards of Marlborough are about 10km inland from here, and on the south side of the river. While I’m not sure exactly what wines come from this specific vineyard, I do know that some of the grapes for Monkey Bay also come Rarangi. So I would say that while this vineyard is in among the more picturesque parts of the region, it’s by no means the part of the region you go to to find the best wine. The beach isn’t so bad, though….”

Click to view satellite image

The big red box is where most of the Sauvignon Blanc is grown in Marlborough. The small red box is this vineyard.

Thanks for playing. Send in your photos if you have a good one from your travels!

SIPPED: jugs
Dottie Gaiter and John Brecher recommend jug wines. But little jugs, really, just magnums. No Carlo Rossi. [WSJ]

SIPPED: viticultural sprawl
On Friday, the federal authorities that regulate wine gave the thumbs up to a new American Viticultural Area. And true to our rule, that the bigger they are, the more useless they are, this 29,914 square mile sprawlapalooza, our largest AVA, covers portions of Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois and Wisconsin and will be known as the Upper Mississippi River Valley. The TTB writes in the announcing document (found here as pdf) “We designate viticultural areas to allow vintners to better describe the origin of their wines and to allow consumers to better identify wines they may purchase.”

SIPPED: divine intervention
An Italian priest blamed Holy wine he had consumed at four masses that day when he was pulled over–and arrested–for drunk driving. [Daily Mail]

My friend replied that it was actually $48 on their web site. The clerk said that was a web-only price and the price via phone and in-store was actually $57.99.

So he hung up and placed the order on the web for in-store pick-up.

It wasn’t the first time he had encountered such a price spread. He also tried to buy a Pax syrah in NYC and found it online for a good price. Swinging by after work, he found the in-store price was $20 higher. The clerk shrugged when he mentioned the online/in-store difference, my friend had to buy the wine then and there so he did and says he will never buy wine from that store again.

Suggesting a similar situation, another friend said that he had heard of a guy who went into a wine store looking for a bottle that he had seen online for $17. But upon bringing it to the register, the price was $20 and the clerk refused to give the “internet” price again. So the guy left, went home, ordered online for $17, and picked up the wine in-store. Wow, such admirable dedication to low prices, but that guy (and my friend) really needed an iPhone.

Why should customers have to resort to smartphones to find the best deals in some wine stores? In part, it’s a testimony to the price-leveling power of google and wine-specific search tools such as wine-searcher.com. (Full disclosure: I make a tiny amount of money–pennies, literally–as an affiliate of wine-searcher.com.) The site searches the online inventory of almost 10,000 wine stores worldwide. The default display is sorted by price, from lowest to highest. So when a store makes a commitment to maintaining an online inventory, they have an incentive to offer a low price to appear on the first page of results of a search for a given wine. In store customers might not be so price savvy.

And what of daily emails from wine retailers? I subscribe to some, but generally I find them a blunt instrument, blasting out offers on wines that I have no interest in. But I may give them a closer look since I learned that some retailers use these blasts to offer deals that are particularly attractive, indeed, too hot even to be listed online. Maybe I will take off some of those spam blocks I had set up…

Daniel Posner (above, right), owner of the wine store Grapes The Wine Company, drew this review to my attention. The wine in question was the flagship Viu 1 from Viu Manent, a 75 year old winery in Chile. Writing in the Wine Advocate, Jay Miller had dropped the 62 on the 2006 while previous two vintages of Viu 1 scored 92 and 92+ respectively (about $60; find these wines).

So I dropped a line to Viu Manent through their web site and heard back from Jose Miguel Viu, managing director. He wrote: “We are in the process of evaluating the reasons why our wines were so poorly evaluated because, as you noticed, this is very unusual and was further aggravated by the fact that for the first time Wine Advocate decided to publish scores under 85 points…This is not to mention the excellent reception we have always had on other important publications. Viu 1 2006, for instance, became Wine Enthusiast Editor’s choice with 92 points on July’s 09 issue.”

A couple of more emails with Senor Viu established that Miller had tasted the wines at an event in Santiago organized by the Wines of Chile (see photos and a description of the tasting in a piece entitled “Jay Miller: Looking for Pleasure”). Further, Grant Phelps, the Viu Manent winemaker, said that the Viu 1 was “identical in almost every respect” to the 2003, 2004 and 2005, three vintages that he also made. Finally, Senor Viu offered to send me samples of the wines directly from the winery. I accepted.

But I didn’t want to taste them alone so I proposed to Daniel Posner that we could taste them together at his handsome new shop in North White Plains, NY. He then decided to invite his bitter Westchester rival, Max Marinucci (photo at the top; left) who owns the also handsome Wine Connection in Pound Ridge, NY, and one of his customers, Mark Franks, for lunch. It was very good to meet them both for the first time.

We settled into a booth and after a warm up tasting of some Spanish wines (described below) and moved into the Viu 1 vertical. Unfortunately I knew which wine was which but I concealed the identity of the wines from the others. From the heavy, bodybuilder bottle, I poured the opaque, purple/black wine in the glasses.

One person commented, “I’d give them all 62.” He followed up by saying that they are big wines that could be from anywhere and were broadly similar. But there was general agreement that the first wine tasted the best and that the last wine tasted different, more extracted, more dense, and bigger. “The wine that Miller would have liked the most,” as one taster put it.

But it turned out that was the 62 pointer, the 2006. Was it inferior? Sure. But 30 points worse, putting it in the realm of “a below average wine containing noticeable deficiencies, such as excessive acidity and/or tannin, an absence of flavor, or possibly dirty aromas or flavors”? Not to any of us.

As to the Spanish wine, Daniel had corresponded with Nola Palomar, a small producer of Spanish wines based in Andalusia. She had stated that she had trouble having the wines reviewed by the Wine Advocate despite being reviewed by Stephen Tanzer. Of the six wines, the 2008 Veleta Vijirieja stood out as a zippy summer sipper and the 2006 Veleta Noladas, a blend of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, and tempranillo had some interesting complexity; both were good values at under $15. Certainly more than 62 points!

Then we finished our lunch with a 1976 Lopez de Heredia Bosconia and a 1996 Ponsot, Clos de la Roche, split the bill, and headed out.

The irony of this comment was not lost on Mike Steinberger. In his new book, after noting that London is now, actually, a great food city, he turns the tables on Chirac, saying, “Where once the mere mention of food by a French leader would have elicited thoughts of Gallic refinement and achievement, its invocation now served to underscore the depths of France’s decline. They’ve even lost their edge in the kitchen.”

Mike is probably best known to wine geeks as the wine columnist for Slate.com. But in Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France, available on Amazon today, he broadens his focus to include food, specifically, haute cuisine in France. Unlike much food writing, which is prone to sometimes excessive praise, Mike takes up the task of analyzing the decline of French food through the lens of a love lost. Imbued with nostalgia and occasional bafflement at the new French ability to turn gold into lead, Mike wolfs down raw milk camembert and praline mille feuilles, talks with leading chefs and restaurateurs, probes the inner workings of the Michelin Guide, cross examines bureaucrats, journeys to Spain, has a glass of water with the head of McDonald’s Europe, meets a struggling vintner who sold his house in order to keep his winery, and contemplates the lack of ethnic diversity in French restaurants with a Pakistani-born chef.

It’s a meaty tale that provokes thought and stimulates the palate: wine and food lovers will want to savor it this summer.

Thanks to Bloomsbury, the publisher, we have three signed copies of the book to give away to readers of this site. To qualify for the drawing, hit the comments below and tell us where you had your best (or at least a great) meal, restaurant and city. If you’re not feeling in an haute cuisine spirit, tell us about your favorite street food experience. Enter by Thursday to qualify; randomly selected winners will be announced here on Friday morning.
UPDATE: Slate has just posted an excerpt about “How the Michelin guide crippled France’s restaurants.”

SIPPED: a whale tale
In a fascinating post that provides a look into the business of selling wine, Lyle Fass, formerly in high-end wine retail, posts to his blog about the death of “the whale,” namely, the big customer who orders $10,000 worth of wine with a single phone call. He describes his performance-based pay conundrum: “At my last retail job I was hired with the idea that I would get a cut of the profits from the whales I would bring to the store. I thought this was great. I made a lot of money and was happy selling wine to these whales. Never did I think in my wildest dreams that I would lose my job as the economy went in the tank. But I had a high salary and a high bonus structure and as a result, I was not bringing added value to the store anymore. I was a money vacuum. So I was rendered jobless.” He concludes by predicting that “the whale is not coming back for a long time, if ever.” [Rockss and Fruit]

SIPPED: Follow the leader
Web 2.0, user generated wine review, on sites such as cellartracker, theoretically shift the power of reviewing away from one critic and over to the masses. But using an illustration of one of his Tablas Creek wines, Jason Haas writes about the power of the first review as an “anchor,” which then can set a tone for subsequent reviews that’s hard to break.

SIPPED: hope
Vinexpo, the big wine trade show kicks off today in Bordeaux. AFP reports on a study from Vinexpo that forecasts worldwide wine sales rising to 390 billion euros in 2012 from the current 330 billion euros, citing increased demand from China and Russia. Global wine consumption softened last year.

Writing in today’s WSJ, Melanie Grayce West describes the annual “Rioja rumble” known as the Batalla del Vino, or battle of wine: “After mass, the melee on the hillside begins and red wine is fired from buckets, jugs, water guns, crop sprayers and any other vessel possible—the goal is to drench everyone in sight with red wine.” The town of Haro graciously provides the wine. The photo from the event, held on June 29 this year, begs your captioning–sound off in the comments!

And if you’re feeling summery, surf on over to the James Beard blog for five of my summer wine picks.

But to reward all of you site readers here with some wine picks, I organized and led a fun tasting of seven summery wines last week at a residence on the Upper East Side. I’ll paste the list of wines below for your perusing, from lightest to fullest, with some reactions from the folks in attendance. Incidentally, as I was talking about rosé being the ultimate lunch wine, especially if it was lunch outside under an umbrella, one woman had a funny quip: Who actually has lunches like that? Ah, perhaps we need an impossible wine-place pairing: the office!

Nino Franco, Rustico, Prosecco. $16. very popular
Broadbent selections, Vinho Verde, 2008, $10. sort of popular
Binner, Gewurztraminer, 2005. $25. I liked it a lot, they didn’t (probably too rich for a warm evening)
Bernard Baudry, rosé, Chinon, 2008. $17 popular
Marcel Lapierre, Morgon, 2007. $24. A delicious wine, unanimously loved
Rossignol-Trapet, Bourgogne rouge, 2006. $23 very popular
Les Hérétiques, vin de pays de l’Hérault, 2007. $8 very popular

Search for these wines at retail

In case you can’t read it, the ad says “Sonoma Valley Sobriety Test #1: If you can’t say Gundlach-Bundschu Gewurztraminer, then you shouldn’t be driving!”

I’d venture to say that both the Gun-Bun marketing and Sonoma sobriety tests have changed.

SIPPED: Hannibal Lecter
A study of 2,000 US and 1,000 UK wine consumers found strong knowledge of Bordeaux, Champagne and Burgundy but recognition of the Barossa Valley in Australia and Marlborough in New Zealand was weak. When participants were asked to free associate when presented the name “Marlborough” most American respondents said “cigarettes.” And when shown “Chianti” many replied “Silence of the lambs.” Hannibal Lecter FTW! (See the full presentation here as pdf)

SIPPED: Canadian Chardonnay
Stephen Spurrier presided over a blind tasting in Montreal akin to the Paris Tasting of 1976 that pitted American wines against French wines. The Société des alcools du Québec (SAQ) organized the event, inviting “Quebec’s top wine writers and sommeliers” as judges to reenact the Paris tasting. But they threw in come ringer wines from Canada, Australia and New Zealand in the Chardonnay category–and the Canadian Chardonnay, Le Clos Jordanne from the Niagara Escarpment, came out on top. “The result may redraw the global wine map, just as the Judgment of Paris did 33 years earlier,” opines CNN/Fortune. Le Clos Jordanne is owned by Constellation Brands (NYSE: STZ).

SPIT: Ladybug taint
Have you ever had the dreaded ladybug taint? Perhaps you know it as methoxypyrazines. Well, anyway. Scientists have now found that wine in Tetra Pak (aseptic cartons) can reduce that aroma. But, caution: the packaging is not good for aging! [NewScientist]

In Memorium: Johnny Hugel (Hugel) and Paul Avril (Clos des Papes)

In the foreground, Dean Hewitson stands in the Old Garden vineyard, which was planted in 1853 and grows today without irrigation. As you can see, the bush vines lie in unruly rows since they aren’t trellised. I tried the 2002 Old Garden Mourvedre and it had gamey aromas characteristic of the grape, as well as dark fruits and smooth sweet tannins. (find this wine; I’ll have to stick it in a blind tasting of mourvedres if I do one of those again.)

In the photo, the lights visible on the hill beyond Dean are illuminating the vast Orlando (Jacob’s Creek) wine making facility. Consider it a study in contrast.

We visited the vineyard at dusk and on the way back to the car, I heard a kookaburra laugh echo across the vineyard. For all you birders out there, you can see/hear the kookaburra here.