SPARKLERS

NV Bitch Bubbly

Don’t let the novelty factor of this wine fool you. Though not at all complex, this is a perfectly quaffable sparkler from South Australia made from a blend of Chardonnay, Shiraz and Grenache with overwhelming strawberries, candy and citrus on the palate.  Because sometimes you want the thrill of the impish gimmick (at least that’s one explanation for the last three, two-week relationships some of you have had).Pair it with: fruit tarts and one-night stands, $9

Gruet Brut Rose, another inexpensive but effective sparkler.

NV Gruet Brut Rosé

Another sparkler, this bubbly comes from closer to home in New Mexico. It’s not a surprise that the wine’s deep garnet color releases strawberry, raspberry and cherry on the nose and palate.

Pair it with: a morning omelet or other egg dish and a hopeful first date, $16

Rosés

One wine blogger declared this wine a "date-saver."

2008 Elio Perrone Bigaro

Wine blogger James Laurenti declared this wine the “panty remover” for its sublime flavors and hint of bubbles.  Present this delicately rosey wine with elegantly plated orange, garnet quince paste and a creamy cheese to make this as erotic for the eyes as it is for your taste buds. Slightly off sweet and just a tad frizzante with apricot and rosehip on the nose.

Pair it with: creamy cheeses, quince paste, sorbets and handfeeding your best sweety any combination of the aforementioned, $22

A bottle of Broadbent, the Outerbanks and some Spanish Mackerel (not pictured).

So, here goes my pick (drum roll, please): Broadbent’s Vinho Verde is probably, no definitely, the best white I have had for ten clams in a while. Seriously it’s like crack and sooo easy to drink at 9% alcohol. If you’re looking for a wine this summer to quaff on the deck, at the beach, with seafood, this is your ticket to paradise. It’s slightly effervescent too, which makes it even more fun to drink.

–Amy

Unfortunately Malbec is going through a bit of a galaxy-ending, super-nova explosion right now and anyone and everyone is planting and vinifying Argentina’s sweetheart grape.

Cholila Ranch. $9.99 at Whole Foods Image: Amy Loeffler

Malbec has always been a great value for the money and as Lewis Black attested in the Wine Spectator, you can procure a decent bottle of Malbec for 15 smackers that is not only drinkable, but downright enjoyable. 20 smackers and you might as well keep that bottle to yourself. In a closet. Far away from friends and family.

No doubt the grape’s recent surge in popularity carries with it a sinister set of unintended consequences. I started seeing evidence of this when I poured for the now defunct Billington Wines and their major money maker, a lower-end Malbec from Nicolas Catena, was sold to E and J Gallo.  The inevitable conclusion of what was sure to be a tremendous boost in production  meant that quality would suffer. Needless to say, it’s been a loooong time since I have had the pleasure of enjoying an honest-to-goodness $10 Malbec from Gallo or otherwise.

Last night I picked up a bottle of Cholila Ranch Malbec from Whole Foods for $9.99 in the hopes of discovering a rare item: a drinkable and mass-produced, inexpensive wine.  The wine definitely exhibited characteristics of Malbec with hints of violet on the nose and dark fruit and vanilla on the palate. The wine, however, tasted like it had been put through a teleportation device that reassembled its wine atoms incorrectly. The nuances of the flavors settled on my palate imprecisely like a collage made without the use of scissors.

Needless to say I was very disappointed. I know a 10-dollar wine is not going to rock my world like a hunat-dolla Pinot Noir, but frankly I think I would rather spend 10 more dollars and drink something I really want to drink than wish away my dinner lamenting the 10 bucks I wasted on a bottle of too-rough-around-the-edges- wine.

What about anyone else out there? Have you had a Malbec worth writing home about recently?

-Amy

Gary Vee’s version of speed dating: speed tasting. Video: Youtube

D.C.-based Allison Aitken’s wine blog “A Glass After Work” is typical of the 133,000,000 English-language  blogs that exist on the Internet today. Like 65% of her fellow bloggers she uses her blog as an outlet to explore her passion, which for Aitken is all things oeno. Her blog is primarily musings about tasting notes peppered with tidbits about her personal life and press outings around town.  Certainly she embodies the way social media such as blogging, twittering and facebooking has brought more folks to the wine conversation.

Tyler Colman, aka Dr. Vino (drvino.com), agrees that social media has not only wrested wine writing from legacy publications such as Robert M. Parker, Jr.’s The Wine Advocate, and other glossies such as The Wine Spectator and Decanter, but that this trend is in fact a good one. “Previously, many aspects of wine appreciation were too often taken as given; today, they are much for discussed and contested. Consumers are more savvy, ” said Colman in an e-mail. He also points to the rise of wine blogs like cellartracker.com that boast record levels of readership and in April of this year achieved 1,000,000 consumer tasting notes on its site.

Hardy Wallace blogs, tweets and facebooks about wine like it was his job, because  unlike most bloggers, it actually is his day job.  As Director of Social Media at Murphy-Goode Winery in Healdsburg, Calif. (and the agent provacateur behind dirtysouthwine.com), he owes his current position to the rough and tumble, wild west nature of social media. Though Murphy-Goode is not a particularly stuffy wine producer steeped in Old World ceremony, the winery wanted to reach consumers that comprise the next generation of wine drinkers, and needed someone like Wallace to show them how it’s done.

The ability to blog about wine is as much a tool to reach Generation Y as it is a unique mechanism to keep discussions organic in Wallace’s opinion. His recent blog post featuring Thanksgiving wine recommendations eschewed the traditional Pinot Noir pairings that bulk up lists from editorial staff that may or may not have even tasted themselves at print publications . As a blogger he’s not subject to deadlines that are telegraphed far into the future, and tasted the wines days before he blogged about them. “A lot of people in the print world did their Thanksgiving wines in July,” he says. “Blogging is hot, it’s now, it’s raw.”

Video:Youtube  Hardy Wallace exploits new media to bring a wider audience to fine food and wine.

Wallace writes with an irreverent voice (although he calls it “entertaining”) and exists in a Rebalaisan wine world orchestrating carnavalesque contests of wine pairings with savory victuals such as Popeye’s Fried Chicken and Francois Pinon Vouvray Brut Non-Dosé, a selection from importer Louis/Dressner and contest winner. The next post however finds Wallace at Thomas Keller’s temple of fine dining gastronomy, and he most certainly did not enjoy fried chicken that evening.

And while wine writing has long been thought of as an impenetrable fortress of prose thanks in part to abstract descriptions of fermented grape juice that have long been described much like some people describe ex-lovers: slutty, mischevious, daring, Wallace’s readership is indicative of a snarkier cork dork set. Indeed one member of his dirtysouthwine blog  referred to her Thanksgiving wine pick as “bad-a*s pimp juice.”

It would be easy to dismiss Wallace as a hokey Cinderella social media story, an amateur oenophile making good (pardon the pun) by procuring a dream job at a winery just by shooting some video. But Wallace is in fact an accredited sommelier, a certification that your typical wine blogger is not apt to possess.  And the Thanksgiving wine post wasn’t ruminations on just a few bottles of this and that, he was part of a group that tried 50 bottles blind with all of the Thanksgiving trimmings, so he actually knew what he was writing about as far as not recommending a tried and true staple, Pinot Noir. Though he readily admits he is not a journalist, he is a credible witness to the social media wine story. “Most people in the blog world don’t have an editor, it’s coming to you unfiltered without another look. It’s kind of shooting from the hip,” says Wallace.

Alice Feiring Image: mydailywine.com

But has the ability to tap into the upstart energy of the social media left wine writing somehow degraded? “It’s gossipy, but it’s not journalism,” says Alice Feiring, a New York-based wine writer who is revered not only for her journalistic integrity in regards to wine writing, but also a smart nose and palate.  “There’s no journalistic standard. People come to wine media because they like to drink. Very few have any qualifying reason for having an opinion,” she says.

Before the avalanche of wine blogs Feiring says that wine journalism was poised to become as rich and varied as food writing. The demand for finding out the story behind the story has changed, however, with ad infinitum oenoblogs about the last thing so and so drank, and speed tastings on youtube a la Gary Vaynerchuk’s winelibrarytv.com.  Indeed she actually laments that she gets more hits on her Web site, alicefiering.com, when she does wine reviews.

Though it’s not her job, using social media is a necessity of her profession. “Do I blog and tweet to keep my profile raised? Yes!” she says.

Beyond that though, Feiring sees little use for serious wine drinkers and wine writers to lay themselves bare to the almighty Internet.

“There is something that is transitory about new media,” she says. The immediacy of social networking tools has widened the circle of those who come to the wine conversation but it’s not so much democratic as dumbed down for Feiring because “very few people take what they read with several grains of salt.” She also doesn’t envision people who are still interested in status bottles heading to the Internet to find out what the run-of-the-mill blogger has to say about a grand cru Burgundy (this is also due to the fact that a common blogger probably doesn’t have access to status bottles, either).

Though Feiring is representative of a more traditional style of journalism, she has used the Web to lob grenades at the establishment with blog posts such as “The Elusive Californian Terroir,” but it is her print work that has caused the most controversy, notably her book, The Battle for Wine and Love or How I Saved the World from Parkerization (Robert Parker being the poster boy for what Feiring calls the “one world, one taste phenomena”). “Print is going away but I think it still carries the most respect,” she says.

–Amy