AnuvaBlog

The LA Times reported today that:

“Only 10% in a four-year study of California State Fair judging were able to consistently give the same rating, or something close, to the same wine sampled multiple times in a large blind tasting.”

Click here for the full article

This is not at all surprising to me since I have quite often seen the variance in opinion in person, of wine judges and consumers alike. Why is this surprising to anyone else?

I suppose when someone adorns the title of Judge or simply writes something down on a piece of paper or puts it on Television, it becomes truth.  It never ceases to amaze me how many people put their blind faith in whatever they read, no matter where it comes from, and no matter what they see on TV.

I think it is much the same with wine even though, in my opinion, it is one of the hardest things to judge in the world for several reasons: people and their palates evolve and change and wine itself evolves and changes over time. The food and drink that I liked when I was 8 years old were very different than what I liked at 18 and then at 28. I didn’t even start liking wine till I was 24. My dad didn’t start liking wine till he was 55!!

Also, it is a myth that they always get better over time. Most wines cannot survive ideal storage conditions for more than about 5 years. Only very high quality wines continue to improve over long time horizons. But all wines change over time in the bottle.

So when this article refers to tasting the same wine at different competitions, does it mean an hour later or a month later? Because either way, if the wine has been exposed to oxygen for that amount of time longer it will have at least changed somewhat if not dramatically.

With such room for error within the person judging and the wine judged, how can anyone really be expected to be that consistent.

In recent weeks, I have been astounded by the impact that food has on wine and that wine has on food. On the airplane ride back to Buenos Aires, I was lucky enough to sit in business class where there were 6 wines on the menu, none of which I had tried. Port never tasted so good as when I had it with a simple scoop of chocolate ice cream. The Pinot Noir complimented the salmon quite well, but nothing really burst. The Chablis, while really remarkable on its own, didn’t really go well with the green bean and tomato salad.

And so while the general theme of food combining is like with like, one never really knows what exact food will make a wine pop, or what exact wine will make a food pop. Looking for the pop is a new found passion of mine because not only do I find it extremely pleasurable to experience citrus burst when combining a celery-fennel-grapefruit confiture salad with Anecon Torrontés, I find the hunt for and discussion about the possibilities fascinating.

We are going to be doing several internal food and wine combining tastings to determine what exactly will work with our foods best. And I mean exactly. Not “red meat” or “aged cheese”. I want to be able to say “braised pork belly with 78% dark chocolate mole over cornmeal spaeztle” (we served this with the Cavagnaro Malbec at one of our internal tastings and I nearly fainted it was so good). That is what makes me excited about what I do these days, the search for perfection. And the oohs and ahhs and empty plates at the end of the correct combination.

Stay tuned, dear readers, for more on this subject in the coming months.

Subprime wine does not exist. Neither does derivative wine or bundled mortgage backed wines. Wine will always come from grapes, be subject to human perception, and therefore be venerated and cherished throughout society. What prompts me to say this is that I have been hearing a lot lately about the economy (obviously), and have run across two very interesting articles, one on Jaime Goode’s blog, and the other on WineBusiness.com.

I find the juxtaposition of the two, one day after the other to be fascinating. The latter speaks of the 15th consecutive year of growth in domestic US consumption of wine and how that charge is being led by the millenial generation (mine).

The former speaks about the need for innovation and leadership in the wine industry and how managers who use performance metrics or look at the past in order to make decisions about the future either will suffer from slow reactions or simply have the wrong data to make predictions.

As a millenial generation wine industry entrepreneur, I find Goode’s stern warning to be something that needs to be heard by not only the wine industry, but by every other industry in general. Especially finance. My recent readings about the banking industry’s practices with respect to risk calculation and their own internal management of accounts is shocking. Who knew that those who guarded the gate to money lending would be the very ones to miscalculate when it came to their own businesses.

What is good news about the wine industry is that unlike finance, we deal with a physical product for which there is no substitute. We cannot downsize a bottle of wine. We cannot create a derivative of it–it its most general sense.

This is the beauty of wine: it bring us together physically and virtually and gives us something to talk about and also to talk over.

Pork bellies are not the most commonly eaten food in America. Mostly because we are not used to eating such a large quantity of fat–obvious fat–on our cuts of meat. We are trained to cut off the fat.

The luscious and aggressive tannins in the Cavagnaro Malbec, though, make it the perfect wine to go with such a fatty meat. The grease of the pork belly, coating your mouth with a succulent swine flavor, washes completely away with the tannin of this Malbec leaving  a slightly smokey aftertaste.

I personally had never been a fat of such fatty cuts of meat before trying this, but it certainly worked for me. I hope that you are all out there experimenting with new food and wine combinations and get lucky like I did. Learn by doing!

Well, in a down economy it seems like wine tastings are the way to go. Anuva has done no less than 60 tastings in the last 75 days (all this with our 3 man team) featuring our collections of malbec, torrontes, and bonarda.

It seems like Anuva and Argentina are in line with the trend for the “value” wine purchasing that so many have headed toward in the last quarter of 2008. Wine connoisseur, enthusiast, novice and newcomer have all appreciated our wines and our service and I am proud to say that we had an excellent 2008.