Top 10 wine stories of 2006
By Mark Criden
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Well, $800 bottles don’t cook too many biscuits, either. U.S. consumers avoided this let-them-eat-cake campaign, letting oceans of high-priced reds languish in the pipeline. Charles Klatskin, one of America’s prominent wine collectors, refused to buy 2005 Bordeaux First Growth futures because ‘the prices are insane.” Even the French are angry with Bordeaux merchants for pricing the vintage beyond reason.
2. Duboeuf fined $40,000 for fraud. Lovers of le vrai Beaujolais have always been mystified how local kingpin Georges Duboeuf manages to produce so many artificial aromas—like bubblegum and banana—in his wines. Now they have a clue: a French court convicted Duboeuf this summer of falsely labeling and blending over 300,000 bottles.Duboeuf claims he was tripped up by a simple employee error. Sure.The court found that thousands of barrels were found to contain a mixture of cheap, average, and expensive wines.“Everything was mixed up together,” the prosecutor said. No word on the banana and bubblegum.
3. Ramsay prank turns Richard red. Has-been British singer/winemaker Cliff Richard was tricked into slamming his own wine by the notorious English bully-chef Gordon Ramsay. A guest on Ramsay’s show The F-Word, Richard was given two wines to taste blind. The first—a $600 bottle—was deemed ‘amazing.’ The second wine was Richard’s own Vida Nova from Portugal. One sip and Richard declared it, “Rubbish.I wouldn’t pay for that, it’s tainted, it’s insipid. It tastes like vinaigrette. I’d never buy that.” A chortling Ramsay revealed the singer had just trashed his own wine. Richard was not amused.
4. Jay-Z boycotts ‘racist’ Cristal. Luxury champagne maker Roederer Cristal had less booty to shake after rapper Jay-Z organized a hip-hop boycott. Boss Frédéric Rouzaud told the Economist that Roederer viewed Cristal’s association with rap “with curiosity and serenity.” Asked if he thought the association would harm the brand, he replied, “That’s a good question, but what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it.” Jay-Z, who like other rappers frequently mentioned Cristal in his lyrics, immediately cried “racism,” called for a boycott, and banned the cult cuvée from his “upscale sports lounge,” the 40/40 Club, replacing it with Dom Pérignon and Krug.No word yet as to whether Jay-Z’s number one hit “Hard Knock Life” will change the lyric: “Let’s sip the Cris and get pissy-pissy.”
5. Global warming winners and losers. It’s way too soon to finalize any scorecard, but we know that our jones for petroleum is going to impose major changes on the world’s vineyards. This year, an internal memo from Spanish wine giant Torres noted that increasingly hostile conditions associated with climate change are forcing vintners to head north.Grapes require very particular conditions to grow well. For the last few hundred years, for instance, European vineyards have thrived from Sicily to northern Germany. But with temperatures expected to climb between two and ten degrees by 2100, those particular conditions are likely to continue to migrate north, as shown by a study published this year by economists Orley Ashenfelter of Princeton and Karl Storchmann of Whitman College. As temperatures rise, losers will likely come from the warmer parts of the wine-growing world: Spain, southern France, southern Italy, and Napa Valley. But winners will emerge also. Soon, all those Canadian and New York State vintners struggling to ripen red wines will know the sweet—though hot—taste of success.
6. Worst bargains of the year. Here’s a word of advice if you’re tempted to purchase steeply discounted wine salvaged from New Orleans cellars: Don’t. Bottles that survived the floods were roasted when electricity faltered and should simply have been destroyed as soon as insurance claims were settled. There have already been sightings of wines being sold openly as Katrina-affected souvenirs, but be careful of buying bottles at auctions or on internet sites without being completely comfortable with their history.
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8. America trounces France again. New research shows that Americans will replace the French as the world’s biggest wine drinkers within three years. French wine consumption continues to drop; consumption is now half what it was forty years ago.America, meanwhile, is now odds on to take France’s crown as the biggest wine-drinking nation, as wine consumption here continues to grow.A new survey by the Wine Market Council found that in the past five years, the American wine drinking population increased by thirty-one percent, while the number of adults drinking beer and/or spirits but not wine decreased by twenty-five percent.
9. Parker hires new staff. Longtime Robert Parker amanuensis Pierre Rovani and more recent assistant Daniel Thomases climbed atop the wine writers scrap heap this summer. Parker replaced the pair at his Wine Advocate with two well-regarded scribes and two virtual unknowns.Taking over from Rovani as chief cook and bottle washer is the talented David Schildknecht, who has written for the Advocate since 2005. Besides major areas like Burgundy, Champagne, the Loire Valley, Southern France, Alsace, Germany, and Austria, Schildknecht will cover less-traveled areas, including New York and Southern Ontario.
The highly regarded Antonio Galloni, who created the Piedmont Report, will cover Italy’s major wine areas.Parker has also hired Jay Miller, with whom he has tasted wine weekly for almost twenty-five years to cover Port, the Pacific Northwest, Spain, Australia, and South America. Mark Squires, who oversees the Bulletin Board on Parker’s Web site, will cover Portugal’s dry wines. Parker himself will focus on Bordeaux, California, the Rhône Valley, and Provence.
10. Lebanese and Israeli wineries escape massive destruction. Winemakers on both sides of the border worried this summer when Israeli forces rolled into southern Lebanon in pursuit of Hezbollah. No Lebanese wineries were bombed, but anxiety was considerable as winemakers worried wineries that production facilities, cellars and caves could be considered hiding places for weapons. Israeli wineries in the Golan Heights suffered damage as rockets fired by Hezbollah destroyed vineyards. Despite the concern, the August 14 cease-fire held and wineries in Lebanon and Israel began harvesting in late August.
Best news for this holiday season is that the conflict hasn’t stopped efforts to use wine to promote conciliation. Haifa’s Special Reserve Wine Shop held three “Tastings for Peace’’ during the conflict, serving Israeli and Lebanese wines to a full house.
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Mark Criden (mcriden@yahoo.com) is a non-profit executive and the former chair of the Buffalo Branch of the International Wine & Food Society.
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