What they found was rather interesting, though scientists have no explanation for it. Evidently, women who reported drinking wine regularly were 40% less likely to develop dementia, even though they tended to live longer, thereby giving them more time to do so. Even more dramatically, women who reported drinking only wine (that is, no beer or hard liquor) were 70% less likely to develop dementia. Women who drank liquor exclusively had a higher chance of developing dementia. Sorry, cosmo gals.

This being said, there is counterbalancing evidence about wine and women’s health: Reuters reported Sunday on a huge San Diego study indicating that postmenopausal women who consume one to two drinks a day are 32% more likely to develop breast cancer. Postmenopausal women who consumed three or more drinks a day were 51% more likely to develop a hormone-sensitive tumor. Granted, it doesn’t matter what kind of alcohol was drunk.

So… we women wine drinkers will be completely sane as we desperately try to chase the cancer out of our boobies? Thanks for sharing, Science!

Franco Allegrini comments in the article that he’s not sure in screwcap closures are better for wines meant to be drunk young, like their Valpolicella, but that they have to use much less sulfur in the wine when they use screwcaps. This reduction of intervention would generally be thought of as a good thing, and it’s a shame that the Italian wine regulators are so hidebound to their outmoded traditions that they can’t see the advantage of modern closure technology.

Allegrini will probably get less for their wine, bottling it with screwcaps as Valpolicella, than they would bottling it with corks as Valpolicella Classico. Co-owner Marilisa Allegrini thinks this will actually help, rather than hurt, the wine’s sales, considering the dollar’s activity these days.

Funny old world in which, when your country’s wine laws work against you, it can actually boost your sales.

This was necessary because I have finally been allowing myself to purchase wine. Not that I haven’t been buying the wine I’ve been tasting for you lo these last months — but a lot of my tasting has been in events and at wine bars. I have not until recently been able to afford to keep more than about 6 bottles around the house.

And look at me go! I learned, after pulling all my bottles out of the pantry and reorganizing them via the interwebs, that after relaxing the old purse strings for a mere 2 months, I have over 40 bottles in storage, to the tune of over $500. I have clearly been carried away, especially considering that almost half of my “cellar” is comprised of inexpensive, everyday bottles. Considering how much wine I drink on a weekly basis (not that much), the only word that comes to mind is ridonkulous, gentle reader.

Now I need more room. As you’ll see in the photos (finally, I get to show you my rack!), I’m keeping wines organized through a combined system of 12-bottle cases and shippers. Classy, eh? Nothing but the best at Wine Scamp World Headquarters. No, seriously — Mr. Scamp is an accomplished welder and is planning out a dilly of a rack for me, which will allow my collection, such as it is, to top out at 60 bottles. Cross your fingers for me.

But that’s not why I gathered you all here this evening — the subject at hand relates to another aspect of the coolness of CellarTracker. The site allows users to share their own tasting notes in the Personal and Community Tasting section, as well as the tasting notes they’ve found from wine critics in the Professional Tasting section.

Ah ha! I can see I’ve got you now. Where do I put my tasting notes? Do I include the notes I’ve written for Wine Scamp in the Professional Tasting section, all up in the face of Robert Parker and Stephen Tanzer? Or do I write separate tasting notes in the Personal and Community Section, a la Dr. Debs?

There are long, fascinating discussions on the blogosphere on this subject. Check out this post on Lenndevours, this one on Catavino and yet another at Fermentation. (There’s an interesting Catavino post regarding Cellartracker and tasting notes in general, if you’ve got the time.) Just so you have a full grasp of the details, I publish this blog via a small business, DBA Wine Scamp, and accept paid advertising on the site. This blog does represent, quixotically or no, an attempt to make money from my writing. It has not yet even begun to turn a profit, but money exists in the equation. I have a day job, of course, which involves some writing, but not in the wine business. I have a Creative Commons license.

So here is where I solicit your opinion — do the wine tasting notes I pen here at Wine Scamp International belong in the Professional Tasting section of CellarTracker? Am I enough of a pro?

I tasted 6 wines at the AWM last Saturday, all from the Pellegrini Family Vineyards in California. Robert Pellegrini and Moreno Panelli were there, representing the winery, as was Alison Smith of Texacali Wine Company, who represents Pellegrini in Texas. Ali is a fellow blogger, writing about her experience running her small wine sales and marketing business at the Texacali Wine Trail. She’s a charming woman who reps an interesting portfolio, and it was a pleasure to meet her.

Wines are listed in order of tasting:

Pellegrini Olivet Lane Chardonnay 2005 ($22): Pretty yellow straw in color. Hazelnut, cream, some butter and lots of ripe pear on the nose. Nice tart apple and spice on the palate. Great mouthfeel & long, pear-influenced finish. No pronounced acidity, but some mild mineral character gives it good balance. One of the better chardonnays I’ve tasted lately.

Pellegrini Olivet Lane Pinot Noir 2006 ($35): This was my favorite of the 5 wines tasted that day. Clear, light garnet in color. Rose, strawberry and cherry on the fetching nose, with just a hint of herbal character. The palate shows great earthy character (enough for structure, but not so much that your mouth looks like an Orbit commercial), with flavors of macerated cherry and tannins that grasp once and then let go immediately, acting as a gentle forcefield of flavor. I found this wine to be very elegant, bright and charming.

Pellegrini Carignan 2005 ($18): Deep ruby in color. There’s a slight floral cast to the raspberry, strawberry and brambly fruit. The grippy tannins taste a little green, with savory bacon notes and a thin slather of jam. Slightly austere, but crunchy-chewy-tasty. The grapes for this wine are purchased from the Piferro Home Ranch in Mendocino. The vines were planted in 1934 by Ric Piffero’s grandfather (or paw-paw, as we say in Texas), and this is actually a field blend of mostly Carignan with some Barbera and Zinfandel. Considering that the vineyard yields only slightly more than 2 tons per acre, this wine is a pretty decent value.

Pellegrini Cloverdale Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon 2005 ($27): Big earthy nose, with lots of dirt, coffee, tobacco and black fruit. Medium- to full-bodied, with tannins evident but balanced, and excellent deep cassis fruit and hints of dark chocolate. Lengthy finish of black raspberry and thyme. This is a preferred style of Cabernet for me: less fruity-bo-booty and more earthy than many. The Cloverdale Ranch is in Alexander Valley. When I went back by the AWM mid-week, I was told that a customer had bought out their entire stock of this wine (it looked like about 4 cases), assumedly for a party. I’m sure Alison will get them more supplies soon, but just so you know.

Pellegrini Milestone 2005 ($45): Plum, cassis, vanilla and earth on the nose, with blackberry and dried herbs as well; the nose is very integrated, like a good Bordeaux, and very distinctive and perfumed. I found green and black pepper on the palate, with tobacco notes and ripe bramble fruit. This wine has a great, sunny character, but with good structure; the fruity warmth and tannic backbone are well-balanced.

The Milestone was made to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the winery, and contains all five Bordeaux grape varieties (those being Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Malbec and Petit Verdot). Bob Pellegrini said that he’d wanted to make a meritage blend for a long time; he had St Emilion and Pomerol in mind when blending this mostly Merlot-based wine. He tentatively figures this wine to age for 6-10 years.

Bob told me he cut his teeth in the wine business with Alex Lichine, and developed a real love for Bordeaux and Burgundy. His grandfather told him years ago that when he got older he’d prefer younger wines, and he’s found that to be true, although he was a collector in his youth. The photo, which I borrowed from Ali’s wine blog, is of Bob and Moreno in Luckenbach, Texas, where everyone’s somebody.

If you’re a state patriot, you’ll be happy to know that Bob’s wife’s family is from Johnson City. Classy wines from almost-Texans at Pellegrini!

Professor Steve Allsop, whose National Drug Research Institute study concludes that larger wine glasses mislead wine drinkers, says this causes consumers to drink more than they intend to, as reported in an article in Australia’s Herald Sun.

Australia’s Department of Health defines a standard glass of wine as 150 ml, about 5 ounces.  Maximum recommended alcoholic intake for a woman is 2 glasses of wine; for a man, it’s 4.  The study showed that when people poured what they considered an average serving of wine, they ended up with 6 to 10 ounces in the glass.   Thus the Australian public over-serves itself with blithe ignorance, especially women.  I can only assume it’s especially women because we’re not supposed to drink as much as men.  Certainly it couldn’t be because we’re out of control and need male scientists and politicians to teach us how to modulate our behavior.  Great, glad we cleared that up.

Australia’s federal government is jumping into action to address this problem of heavy pouring by including a standard drink logo on bottles of wine to tell people how many servings are in the container.  That works really well with Americans and snack food, as anyone who counts out one 10-cracker serving of Wheat Thins for their afternoon snack knows.  So it’s good to see we’re setting a good example for the world with our abstemious approach to food portions.

I agree that it’s easy to pour a little heavy at home, especially into a glass big enough to swirl your wine in, but can we just cool it with the puritanical hullaballoo?   If we can trust women enough to assign them the job of feeding our children and patriarchs, surely we can trust them to pour the perfect portion of wine for every occasion.  Can’t we?

Evidently, some pub chains in England used to offer three different sized pours: small (125 ml/4 oz), medium (175 ml/6 oz), and large (250 ml/8 oz). Mulholland himself used to work for a pub chain which did away with the 4 oz. pours, saying “bigger glasses equal higher prices and more profits.” So now most pubs only sell 6 and 8 oz. servings, forcing people to drink more wine than they normally would, to Mulholland’s mind.

Am I a moron, or do the Brits just do it differently than we do? Back when I was helping restaurants set their prices, you wanted as small a pour as you could get away with, so you could sell more glasses from a bottle. A 750 ml bottle will serve five 5 oz. pours or four 6 oz. pours. If an 8 oz. pour is the norm in England, then those pubs are only selling 3 glasses per bottle. Either their glass prices are ridiculously high, or they’re doing it wrong.

For those of you who’ve never looked inside of the pricing structure of a by-the-glass program, SOP is to charge half the wholesale price of the bottle, plus a dollar or so. At least, that’s what I always recommended to the restaurant owners that I worked with.

So if a bottle of Brancott Sauvignon Blanc costs a bar owner $8, I would tell her to price a glass at $5 per glass if she’s selling a 5 oz. pour. If she’s selling a 6 oz. pour, I would recommend $6.50 per glass. Thusly, a bottle of 5 oz pours nets a $17 profit, and a bottle of 6 oz. pours nets an $18 profit.

This is not a lot, compared to the profit on a bottle of well liquor, which should run $40+ per bottle (figuring $4 well drinks), you’ll notice. This is another reason that the best way to make a small fortune by opening a wine bar is to start with a large one.

If you’re pouring only 3 glasses of wine from each bottle, you’ve got to charge about the value of the bottle for each glass to turn any kind of profit. Customers hate that, by and large. So there could be a number of things going on here: (1) pub owners are selling wine by the glass that their customers can’t buy in a store, (2) pub goers don’t mind paying the same money for a glass of wine in a pub as they do for the same bottle of wine in a store, or (3) pubs pay wholesalers less for wine than wine stores do, or wine stores have huge mark-ups in England.

It all strikes me as very strange. For one thing, that a British lawmaker would be as puritanical as American lawmakers are wont to be about wine. Also, that somehow it would be a good business decision for a pub to sell fewer, larger glasses of wine. It just doesn’t add up. Between this and the French judge’s recent decision that all wine reviews and recommendation articles must be considered alcohol advertising and thus must be accompanied by health warnings, I’m feeling like a fool for lauding the free-thinking European perspective on wine for so many years. Oh, lalalala!

Jeff’s post on Good Grape got the old wheels churning even harder; for him, Dr. Deb’s post dovetailed with a magazine article in Sante that he read about how menu descriptions affect how we eat in restaurants. As Jeff sums it up, a dish that’s more elaborately described on the menu will be described by those who’ve eaten it as “more appealing, tastier and the restaurant as being trendier and more contemporary.”

This would seem to argue, then, for more elaborate tasting notes, rather than less. If we are trying to get more Americans drinking wine (and we are; you’ll thank us when you’re older), then hopefully by introducing it in elaborate, flowery language will make everyone have better, fonder memories of their wine drinking experiences… and thus drink more wine.

As you may know, if you’re a regular here at the Wine Scamp, elaborate is not a problem for me. And as I commented on Dr. Deb’s site, one of the reasons I love wine so much is that gorgeous juxtaposition of sensation and language that is the tasting note. My first love being poetry, I have always been fascinated by our attempts to communicate the indescribable; emotions and sensations are so subjective that the attempt to encapsulate them in words seems almost impossible. So things get fancy, words get outlandish, and jargon and dialects are born.

Seems like the perfect opportunity for a Friday poll, which I can’t seem to get to work in this post, but which you can vote on in the sidebar to your right.  Sound off!

According to a story in Wines & Vines this Tuesday, Flora Springs, the Napa Valley winery owned by the Garvey and Komes families, has installed enough solar panels on a hillside behind their winery to power all of their yearly red wine production. How many solar panels does it take to power a year’s worth of red wine from Flora Springs?  435 SunTech panels at 170w each, that’s how many!  That covers over 6,000 square feet; they installed the panels on an elevated platform to allow for shady storage below.  Isn’t that clever, now?

Flora Springs takes its sustainability pretty seriously.  They’re in the process of getting all of their vineyards certified as organic, which takes 3 years in California.  About 70% of the vineyards will be certified organic by 2009.  No word if they’re planning to convert the white wine production to solar too, but kudos to Flora Springs!  They make great wine, and now there’s a great excuse to drink more of it.

Ironically enough, Washington prosecutors have no jurisdiction over out-of-state retailers who ship to Washington despite stupid protectionist wine laws that prohibit such activity.  The only people who could be in legal trouble from Washington state authorities would be people who actually ordered the wine, breaking the law while actually in Washington state!  Wut?

No company with this much of a rat-like approach to business, coupled with a severe lack of cognitive processing ability, should be allowed to have a link on this site.  Wine Scamp is no place for snitches, nor for tattle-tales.  So I’ve taken their ad off the site, and I hope you’ll join me in a boycott of wine.com for here on out.  Mostly for being morons, and then also for being wine law vigilantes.  Oops, I repeated myself.

I must join Tom Wark in directing your attention to the supreme response to wine.com’s perfidy, that of Emily and Stephan at Winemonger.com — it’s both brilliant and hilarious — located near the end of the comments to the post on Vinography.

It’s so thick and weighty, with such impenetrable columns of small type and no pictures! Ful-O-Pep, certainly, but in a very serious, Oliver Wendell Holmes kind of way.

And it discusses the wines coming in my first shipment from my Xmas present this year: a Tablas Creek Wine Club membership! (Thank you Dr. Debs for the recommendation.) And the wines arrive on Friday! And Tanzer gave most of them 90+ point ratings! And the wines arrive on Friday!

I leave on a trip to Oregon on Sunday and I’ve been wondering what to read on the plane, or rather how many books and what types I should bring. Now I can bring a magazine, too! And I can make little notes in the margins like my mom used to do in her theological texts while in grad school! I’m in wine grad school!

Yay.

Why Tanzer, you ask, and not Parker? Well, two reasons. First, I’ve received Parker’s zine before and I wanted to try something new. Second, I must confess that the stinkiness from the eBob board brouhahas wafting around the wine blogosphere lately has put a bit of a bad taste in my mouth about the Advocate. On top of that distastefulness surrounding the eBob board (and thus, name), I don’t get that “champion of the consumer” vibe from Mr. P any more; I’m feeling him much more as an institution and less as an industry outsider with some wine tips for little old me.

Also, I feel that Tanzer’s 90 point ratings are a little harder to come by, and he’s not AS seduced by the old fruit-bomb, high alcohol, high extraction style of wine that Mr. P prefers and lauds. Not that I’m adversely inclined toward a fruity-tuity-big-booty-patootie myself, but lately the booziness of a 16% bottle will get to me, and I’m really enjoying more balanced, structured juice these days. Really interesting interview with Stephen Tanzer over at Grape Radio, by the way. Check it out; I very much enjoyed it.

I’ve never regularly read Tanzer (he wasn’t very influential in my market when I was in the business), so I’m really looking forward to getting to know his work. The other magazine I’ve subscribed to is Restaurant Wine, which is another industry-focused publication. I’m thinking I’ll also pick up Wine Enthusiast or the Spectator, just to keep an eye on the more consumer-oriented print mags.

But away with these sober reflections and plans! I’m going to pour myself a glass of something and dig in to my new tome.