FunctionalAmbivalent

Hillbillies at the Gate

Broncho Wines, déclassé manufacturer of mass-market wines like Franzia and Two Buck Chuck, has endowed a chair at Cal State Fresno. Cal State Fresno's wine department is, of course, the déclassé program that has always taken a back seat to the much classier program at U.C. Davis.

As if that weren't good enough, the first professor to fill the Broncho Chair in Viticulture will be a professor of winemaking from -- I tingle in anticipation -- the University of Kentucky.

Is there a more déclassé wine region in the world than Kentucky?

Is this beautiful or what?

Critical Tracking Poll Shows Backlash

Here.

Wine Bubble

The 2005 Chateau Petrus debuted recently at nearly $5,000 a bottle, which puts my Petrus Index at 1,000. The Petrus Index is my own, personal measure of the distance between my indulgence in wine and the wine market. It's a simple calculation: A comparison of the cost of the newest vintage of Chateau Petrus and the highest price I would conceivably pay for a bottle of wine, expressed as a percentage.

When I first calculated the Petrus Index, Petrus was selling for about $150 a bottle and the highest price I could conceive of paying for a bottle of wine was $50. The Petrus Index stood at 300. At the time, I had never paid anything close to $50 for a bottle of wine, but I could imagine myself getting rich and taking my wife out for some incredible indulgence. For a long time, my dream bottle -- the bottle that was just out there over my comfort threshold -- was Stags Leap Cellars cab, going for about $25, so you can imagine the gasping audacity of telling myself that someday -- when the screenplay sells, when the business plan gets funded, when the liquidity event occurs -- I would go out and spend twice that much on a bottle of fine wine.

Over the years my income and wine prices have gone up together, but not proportionally. Every year, the Petrus Index has climbed -- from 300 to 400 to 500. This year, the Index nearly doubled. 2005 was a great year in Bordeaux, at least according to the critics, and the wine business guessing-game before the producers started selling the vintage was how much can the market bear? How high can prices go?

You think oil has shot up; take a look at high-status wines, and for exactly the same reason. The adoption of capitalism in China and India has created throngs of nouveau riche who long for classiness, and there's no better way for an arriviste to announce "I've arrived" than hosting a colossally expensive restaurant feed that includes a few bottles of precious, brand-name wine. Which means that a lot of Bordeaux and Burgundy that 10 years ago would have come to the United States is ending up in Shanghai.

Supply and demand being what it is, that's meant that the status producers have not yet found the price point that will create market resistance. To a guy who's just banked his first hundred-million-dollars, the difference between a $600 bottle of wine -- Petrus' price just a few years ago -- and a $5,000 bottle of wine is almost nothing. Given a great vintage like 2005, which creates a must-have mentality among those who collect and consume high-status wines, that prices have recently headed into outer space is no surprise.

But here's the thing: there's also a lot of high-status wine being bought for investment purposes. In the last 20 years, wine prices have done nothing but go up, and nothing attracts speculation like constant increases in price. Back when we lived in Los Angeles, we used to marvel at how we were never going to be able to afford a house. Prices were going up faster than our incomes, so no matter how much we saved we did nothing but lose ground. I remember saying, repeatedly, that housing prices couldn't go up like that forever, that something had to break. Ten years after we left L.A. the market broke, the bubble popped, the creative and corrupting financing schemes predicated on the belief that market prices would continue to rise forever cracked wide open and all it took was a price hiccup throwing people with 125% mortgages into a panic.

I know a guy who knows nothing about wine -- he's a bourbon drinker, actually -- but he has a few cases of Grand Cru socked away on the assumption that five years from now it'll be worth 10 times as much as it is now. He's got a graph, and when he extends the trend line of the last five years five years forward, he sees not just wine to drink but a new vacation home or a boat.

I, myself, noodled with a business plan for importing and aging small-production Barolos -- though I decided against it because I simply don't believe prices skyrocket forever, and putting my own money into a business predicated on the party lasting 15 more years struck me as maybe just a little bit insane. But I was there, thinking about it, considering the possibilities and making lists of potential investors I'd approach for capital.

I am, it turns out, a prude. Here's a report about Chinese gunslingers who are acquiring quantities of wine as an investment. They're not just importing Petrus and Lafite and DRC; the sure-thing mentality has spread beyond that. They're buying early vintages of new, high-status Chinese wines, confident that they, too, will ascend in value forever. It's a no brainer; look what's happened in just the last few years.

As one Chinese food industry analyst says:

"Luxury wine, like art, is a good investment, especially when the financial markets are in turmoil."

And Lord knows there's never been a collapse of art prices.

I think my Petrus Index indicates that what's going on with wine prices is a pure bubble. See, I'm pretty indulgent in my buying of wine. I can conceive of choosing to spending equivalent sums building a dinner around a great bottle instead of, say, taking a vacation. As it is, I spend more on wine than I should, so much that I routinely lie about it when friends ask. "Oh, I've got a few bottles downstairs. Nothing much, really. When I find something on sale, I buy a bunch of it. I think I'm saving money, over all." I don't think anyone believes me, but I'm embarrassed by the pile of boxes down there. It's not really defensible when what I really need to spend my money on is a new roof for the house.

My point is, if wine prices were rational, I'd be getting closer to a bottle of Petrus, not farther away.

And still the Petrus Index climbs. The bubble grows larger, another sure thing that's going to last forever.

Heresy Which I'm Going To Try This Weekend

This:

Just get a high quality box wine , fill an old fashioned glass with ice, and pour on the merlot or the cab.  Or just keep the box in the fridge.  Box wine is the future I tell you, the future! Spend money on the wine, not the fancy bottle and graphic arts marketing consulting PRBS.  Anyone who sniffs at you probably doesn't really like wine.  Just drink it before the ice melts.

I am, personally, a big fan of box wine. And I have a couple of light Riojas I chill slightly before drinking. But a merlot or cab on ice? This is like...I don't know what it's like.

Which is why I'm going to try it this weekend. I'll let you know.

UPDATE: I didn't do it. I couldn't do it. It just didn't seem right.

I did, however, find this interesting statistic in Benjamin Wallace's The Billionaire's Vinegar:

And while the California wine industry was nudging American awareness of it's product forward, as of 1980 a national poll found that 23% of wine drunk in the United States was on the rocks.

My New Favorite Wine Podcast

Will Write For Wine. Two likable women getting slammed and talking about wine and writing.

They know more about writing than they do about wine, but there are worse things in the world than hanging around with smart, giggly, drunk women.

In Episode 14, they decide hilariously against non-alcoholic wines, discuss the creation of sexual tension between characters, and create the best story ever. They also discuss kitchen appliances.

Celebrity Wine Update: Wine By the Pitcher

Former New York Met Tom Seaver has his own wine. Technically, this is not a Celebrity Wine Enterprise, since Seaver is doing more than providing a marketing hook for a wine manufactured by someone else. Seaver grows the grapes himself and appears to be quite serious about making a fine wine. The cabernet-based GTS sells for $85 a bottle.

Perhaps Now's the Time To Bring the Sophistication of Wine to the French

Wine consumption in the U.S. is growing rapidly, in no small part because of my own increasingly undeniable drinking problem but also because people think drinking wine is sophisticated rather than just being a way to get drunk. Growth in wine consumption is particularly startling among young people, who are abandoning their beer bongs and body shots in favor of wine. The so-called "Millennial" generation, which is all those smug twenty-somethings crowding bars on weeknights, is apparently becoming a wine drinking generation. Though, it should be noted, one study reveals that 37% of Millennials  limit themselves to wine that costs $3 or less.

Anyway, in France just the opposite is happening, as young people abandon wine. The reasons for that abandonment are the same as the reasons that have long been given for why Americans don't drink wine, among them expense and difficult-to-understand labels.

Surprisingly many of the young French adults -- with the exception of those studying wine -- found the product to be confusing. "I don't know which one to pick when I go in a store," said one person. "There are so many names and regions, and I don't know what they will taste like." Another commented, "It is very frustrating buying wine in France. If I find a wine I like from a certain region, and I go to buy from that region again, it often doesn't taste the same. It would be nice to have clear brands with a more consistent taste."

So, what the French need is more Yellow Tail Shiraz. Then they can be as sophisticated as Americans.

Kentucky May Be a Hillbilly State, but It's Not the Most Hillbilly State

Baptist busybodies in Alabama are outraged that a trade association and tourism board are promoting the state's wineries.

Things That Wine Tastes Like

According to the April 30, 2008 issue of Wine Spectator:

Briar, forest floor, loam, underbrush, earth, chalk, stone, hot stone, wet stone, slate, flint, iron, steel, candied grapefruit peel, vanilla pastry, vanilla cream, blood orange, mandarin orange, dried orange, chive, mushroom, violet candy, green apple skin, meat, grilled beef, "milky, resiny dried fruit," crushed fruit, licorice roots, plum sauce, beeswax, citronella, coffee, Turkish coffee, licorice snap, graphite, currant paste, dark roux, lanolin and pine

Taste descriptors not mentioned in that issue:

Lava, high-branch willow leaf, corpuscle, rope, mustache, lunch lady and ape

As in:

A delightful, ropey red with a spine of corpuscle supporting notes of lunch lady and ape, with just a hint of high-branch willow leaf.

Wine With Dinner and Kids

Eric Asimov wrestles with introducing his teenaged children to wine.

(Researchers) concluded that teenagers should be taught to enjoy wine with family meals, and 25 years later Dr. Vaillant stands by his recommendation. “The theoretical position is: driving a car, shooting a rifle, using alcohol are all dangerous activities,” he told me, “and the way you teach responsibility is to let parents teach appropriate use.”

“If you are taught to drink in a ceremonial way with food, then the purpose of alcohol is taste and celebration, not inebriation,” he added. “If you are forbidden to use it until college then you drink to get drunk.”

My children, both under 21, drink wine occasionally at dinner. My theory, like Asimov's, is that regarding wine naturally and seriously demystifies drinking, and makes binge drinking less fascinating.

My sons know quite a bit about wine because knowledge is part of the experience of drinking wine. We talk about wine as we drink it, about its sensory qualities and background. When my wife and I open an interesting bottle we let them have a smell and a taste; neither has ever had a full glass, but both have tried a wide variety of wines from around the world. They know that Pinot Noir is the grape of Burgundy and Cabernet Sauvignon in the grape of Bordeaux and Napa. I believe that the biggest risk of introducing them to wine in moderation at meals is that I will turn them into wine bores.

In Kentucky, where I live, I could go to jail for serving a half glass of wine to my children with Easter dinner. The odds against that are high, but there are absolutists who believe that all drinking is bad, and that anyone who serves any alcohol whatsoever to teenagers is corrupting and abusing them.

I disagree. Asimov disagrees. I'd be interested in your opinion.