But what two- or three-pack of wine says Scamp? Jeff Lefevere of Good Grape did a neat selection of Alsatian varietals from the Willamette Valley. Awesome idea, and as an Oregonian I couldn’t agree more about promoting the whites from that region. Dr. Debs of Good Wine Under $20 did a great round-the-world trip of value, very apropos for her blog. I love good cheap wine, so was full of admiration for this idea. Brooklynguy did a two-pack of Loire wines, which he recommended for the holidays, and Ryan and Gabrielle of Catavino did a grouping of great Portuguese wines.

All great concepts, and I couldn’t bear to copy anyone. So I went back in my head (envision Wayne’s World wavy lines) to the days when I taught a weekly wine class, and remembered that my favorite classes to teach were the “X Varietal Around the World” ones. And because I’m such a Syrah freak, I thought we’d go that direction. Jill agreed, and we started trying to think about what three wines could take us around the world on the Syrah magic carpet ride… for about $60 bucks.

This was seriously hard work!

See, if you’re going to do a Syrah Around the World (which could sound positively dirty if you say it right), you must have a French one. But in France, they do not make very many 100% Syrah wines — mostly, they blend Syrah with Grenache and other lovely varietals into wines called Cotes du Rhone, Chateauneuf de Pape, etc. But you HAVE to have a French Syrah, because Syrah’s done so differently there and that’s the whole point of a ‘Round the World tasting: regional styles.

The two French wines that are all or mostly Syrah are: Hermitage Rouge and Crozes-Hermitage Rouge. The former is v. expensive. The latter is rather expensive. Jill and I spent most of our debate time looking, but finally found a C-H for Not Much Money that tastes French, from the good folks at Dme Ferraton. Voila.

Then the other obligatory region in a Syrah tasting is, of course, Australia. Because we both love it and because it’s just a kickin’ value for the cash, we chose the d’Arenberg Footbolt Shiraz. (Anything, dear reader, from d’Arenberg is The Shizzle. Love them into little green apples, I do.)

Finally, a Californian Syrah. I hadn’t heard of the winery that Jill suggested, but once I tried them I was very impressed. Not telling, though, until I post the actual review.

A huge shout-out must go to my friend Lady J, who spent last Sunday on the couch watching movies and tasting (well, she was drinking) wine with me. Her presence got me to ignore the morning sickness nausea that has become my hourly companion and pop the corks that have been nagging me for weeks and weeks. Plus I knew that the bottles I opened went to a good home.

So be on the look-out for reviews of the three wines in the blogger-pack upcoming. I’ve been so remiss that I might be at the back of the blogger-pack line, but reviews you shall have, dearies, and sooner than summer this time.

As a post-script I must note that I REALLY MISS DRINKING WINE. Tasting it makes me miss it that much more. And these three bottles were SO good. Gah.

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.

Thus, British supermarket chain Waitrose is debuting a line called Vin à Deux, consisting of eight premium French wines in 50 cl (that’s 500 ml in Britain) bottles. They’ll also expand their selection of wines in 250 ml bottles, while phasing out 375 ml — your typical half bottle — altogether.

Is Waitrose saving the British public from their own sot-like impulses? Gracious, but it seems to me that we have more than enough options for wine containers, especially that of the wine “box,” in which the plastic bladder-like container never allows air in and thus never lets wine go bad in the first place. If having a 5-liter box of wine in the fridge doesn’t lead to “overserving,” at home, then why on earth would having three-quarters of a liter in a bottle? This is the perfect opportunity for a new poll, don’t you think? Please direct your attention below and share your opinion via a few clicks or, certainly, a comment!

I know that the idea behind the Wine Blogging Wednesday #42 seven word limit was meant in a whimsical way, but it got me to thinking about the words we use to talk about wine. Of course, this has been a subject on my mind lately, as evidenced by the poll I’ve been running for a week or so about whether or not winespeak makes it difficult to learn about wine.

The results to the polls indicate that while occasional words are confusing (technical words like carbonic maceration and battonage, I’m guessing), on the whole people get what we wineaux mean when we babble on about aromas and flavors. Or at least, 8 of the 13 voters said so.

I can’t blame them; some of the more technical words having to do with wine are not things that you’d natrually just pick up on the side of the etymological road.  And you won’t get a chance to use them very often, unless you have lots of wine geek friends or you work in the business.

So that’s been kicking around in my head, along with all the other maundering thoughts of recession, elections, new jobs and the old What I Should Be Doing Right Now.  And then Andrew Barrow of the British wine blog Spittoon (love that tag line) proposed that we review a wine in only seven words, I thought “Boy, that’s going to be tough.”   My reviews tend to run about 200-500 words, and the tasting notes alone run 30-80, depending on the wine.  How to truly sum up a wine for my readers in a mere seven?

Poetry to the rescue!  Mr. Rogers got me writing poetry since before I could write (I dictated to my mother); I don’t write many poems these day, but if you want to communicate a lot of sensation in few words, a poem is your magic bullet.  So I figured I’d take those shockingly few seven words and make them a haiku.  It was tough, but I was happy with the results.

So now I’m thinking… why not other poetic forms? Why not a sonnet about a wine you love dearly? A villanelle about a wine you drink often? Drinking a wine that’s so complex it seems almost impossible, try a sestina! For a rustic vin de table, a limerick?   If poetry communicates the ineffable, then it seems made for wine, as anyone talking about wine is describing a completely subjective, sensual experience.  Poetry and wine!  Game, set, match.

Said categories include: Best Wine Blog Writing, Best Single Subject Wine Blog, Best Wine Review Blog, Best Wine Podcast or Video Blog, Best Winery Blog, Best Wine Business Blog, Best Wine Blog Graphics, and the good old stand-by, Best Wine Blog. You can nominate up to three blogs for each category, as long as they were in existence during 2007 and had at least 52 posts during that time. (In case you’re wondering, I posted about 75 times in 2007.)

Last year’s winners include Dr. Vino (for both Best Writing and Best Blog, which reminds me of the old Oscar quandary of Best Director and Best Picture), Pinotblogger, Vinography, The Good Grape, Wine Library TV and The Wine Collector Blog.

I remember when I was thinking of starting a wine blog, I did a lot of reading of the sites that were nominated for the Wine Blogging Awards, hoping to learn from the best. This is the most positive aspect of an online award that is awarded by both the community and a panel of judges; it calls attention to those who are recklessly committing excellence in the wine blogosphere.

If we’re all not careful, we might learn something.

Don’t delay; nominate your favorite wine blogs today!

Hugh Davies began to work for the winery in 1996, and Jamie and the family continued to run the winery after Jack passed away in 1998. I had the pleasure to work with Hugh when I represented his wines in the US Virgin Islands; he visited the market multiple times, and I was always impressed with his gentle, cheerful manner and infectious enthusiasm for sparkling wine.

My heart goes out to the entire Davies family at this difficult time. For a full obituary of Jamie Davies’ life, try the Napa Valley Register or the San Francisco Chronicle.

Jamie Davies , Grande Dame of Calistoga, will be sorely missed. All of us here at Wine Scamp International raise a glass in her honor.

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?

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!

If you don’t live here, you probably haven’t tasted a Texas wine. I know I hadn’t, until I moved to Austin. And there’s a good deal of wine to taste, really: Texas is fifth in U.S. wine production, after California, Washington, New York and Oregon. All in all, Texas makes about 1.5 million gallons of wine every year, and about 95% of it is consumed in Texas. Are we bad sharers? Well, it’s not like you’ve been asking for any.

I actually live very close to one of the most winery-rich areas in Texas, the Hill Country. In 2006, there were 127 wineries in Texas, and over 80% of them were small ones, with production of less than 10,000 gallons (that’s about 4000 cases) a year. I did the rounds of my nearby wineries when I moved here a couple of years ago, but haven’t had much time to revisit them with a wine blogger’s eye in the past 6 months. (Can you believe it’s been 6 months? Gee-whiz!) I’ll be trying to get out into wine country more often this year, starting with a little trip my sweetie and I are making, pre-Valentines, to a B&B near Kerrville called Trail’s End Guest House.

This is where Wes Marshall’s excellent book, The Wine Roads of Texas: An Essential Guide to Texas Wines and Wineries comes in. With more than 40 winery profiles organized into regions, it’s the perfect companion to any Texas road trip. (Really, a two-hour drive in Texas is less of a road trip and more of a commute, at least if you live in Houston or Dallas.)

This really is a book written for travelers: every chapter is divided up into trips, with 3 or 4 profiles on wineries that are close to each other (from a Texas perspective), followed by a breakdown of “Food, Shelter & Fun” to be found in the area. Shelter includes some camping options at nearby parks, and the restaurant recommendations are for those tiny little places that only locals recommend. You get the whole package with these trips: out-of-the way wineries with real stories behind them, local restaurants and fun things to do — like having your picture taken with the World’s Largest Strawberry (or a model thereof) in Poteet!

Wes Marshall is Appellation America’s regional correspondent for Texas; he writes for my local weekly, the Austin Chronicle, and a host of other papers. I really enjoy his work at the Chronicle — you might remember him as the guy who organized that huge blind tasting of “box” wines last summer. Recently he organized another of these big blind tastings for Texas-made spirits, which included setting Tito’s Handmade Vodka against Skyy 90 and Grey Goose with very Texas-pride-inspiring results. (Sidebar: I think Tito’s is one of the best vodkas in the universe. Buy some.) Anyhow, Wes Marshall is a fantastic cheerleader for Texas beverage, and his book’s a pleasure to read.

One of the things that resonates for me about The Wine Roads of Texas is that it’s really about the people who take the leap of faith and decide to try to earn a living from making wine. Texas does love its iconoclasts — hell, Kinky Friedman ran for governor a couple of years ago — but it takes a special kind of Texas grit to coax drinkable juice from the soils here. Every winery profile in this book is essentially the story of some brave soul who decided to throw caution to the winds, to risk it all. Somehow it makes a less-than-outstanding wine more palatable to know who put their blood, sweat and tears into the making of it. Sometimes literally; Cathie Winmill of Comfort Cellars (located in Comfort, TX) tells Wes that terracing her 2 acres of steep, limestone hillside vineyard was “grief therapy” for her after her husband died. That’s a Texas woman for you, I don’t care if she was born in Illinois.

The wine industry in Texas is not what you’d call young (we started growing grapes for wine around 1650, and it was a Texan who discovered the solution to France’s little bout with phylloxera in the 1880s), but it’s still finding its feet when it comes to what grapes do the best where, and what the consumer will buy. Remember, most Texas wine is drunk by Texans, and Texans seem to like their wine sweet, more than anything. An off-dry Cabernet Sauvignon? Not something that’s likely to endear you to Robert Parker, exactly. But that’s what the consumers in Texas want to buy, so that’s what Fredericksburg Winery has available.

Many of the wineries profiled in Marshall’s book sell their wine exclusively through the winery, though he does write about the state’s largest winery, Ste Genevieve, as well. From Big Bend to Tyler, from Lubbock to Del Rio, Wes covers wineries from all corners of Texas. Originally published in 2002, a second edition was released in 2007.

If you are a Texan who loves wine or a Texas wine lover, Wes Marshall’s book is really required reading. It’s also fun and engaging, full of true stories about the kind of people that continue to make Texas great.