VdV #20 – le “roundup” des vins de Thanksgiving

Je veux remercier tous les gens qui ont participé à la dégustation de Thanksgiving. J’étais content de voir la gamme d’interpretations du thème un peu “ouvert.” Voici le “roundup” des posts!

• Matlebat a degusté un Côte Rôtie 2006 de René Rostaing avec une soupe au potiron et bacon (alliance classique de Syrah et bacon!) Voir le post.
• Julien Marchand, dans sa première participation aux Vendredis du Vin, dit “merci” aux bonnes recommandations qu’il a eu récemment, avec une bonne citation d’un livre de Michael Pollan que je dois absolument lire, et publie ses notes de dégustation des vins recommandés. Voir le post.
• Selon Rémy (ou bien Rémy), l’animateur des Vendredis du Vin, en disant “merci,” il “convient avant tout de regarder près de soi.” Donc il a pensé a un vin rouge québécois, la Cuvée Julien 2006 du Domaine les Brome. Voir le post.
• Olivier Lebaron, pensant à l’idée de la fête, se dirige vers les petites bulles, mais nous amène vers un vin hors des sentiers battus: le Crémant de Limoux “Joséphine” du Domaine les Hautes Terres. Voir le post.
• Iris Lisson a rangé des belles photos d’une joyeuse fête entre amis vignerons il y a près de vingt ans, et nous a posé une devinette: qui sont les gens representés dans les photos? Voir le post.
• Olif, parlant de nôtre fête nord-américaine “où la dinde aux canneberges canne sur les berges et où les tartes au potiron aux potes iront aussi,” dit merci à plus ou moins tout et à tous dans son post. Il déguste un Sauvignon qui s’appelle — ahem — “Merci,” tout en le remerciant, naturellement, de la Grange aux Belles. Voir le post.
• FGsuperfred a degusté un bon 2004 Mourvèdre de Jean-Louis Denois, avec un rapport qualité/prix excellent. Voir le post.
• Selon toon, le bon Château Cantenac 2003 représente parfaitement l’amitié de la famille qui le produit. Voir le post.
• Et finalement, moi, j’ai décrit la belle fête que j’ai passé cette année avec mes amis. Le thème le plus “évident” des posts, mais quand même, j’espère, un post divertissant. Voir le post.

Si j’ai oublié quelqu’un, je vous prie de me faire savoir! Tous les blogues, tous les producteurs, tous les vins des posts, s’il ne sont pas déja dans la base de données d’Able Grape, y seront d’ici quelques jours. Merci encore une fois, et à bientôt!

Doug

What are all these posts in French?

Some of you may be wondering why the Able Grape blog is suddenly peppered with french posts. My Québecois friend Rémy Charest, author of the excellent blogs À Chacun sa Bouteille (in French) and The Wine Case (in English), is also the force behind the tasting group Les Vendredis du Vin (a great French-language wine blogging community, a bit like Wine Blogging Wednesday, but, um, well, on Fridays instead because “Mercoledis du Vin” just sounds crappy), and asked if I’d like to lead this month’s dégustation. So I sat around, as Julian of Bubble Brothers nicely put it, slaving over a hot dictionary, putting together a couple of hopefully interesting and vaguely grammatically correct posts. It was a lot of fun, and a great chance to work on my French.

One of the things I most love about Able Grape is that it — like the world of wine itself — spans languages and cultures, and it’s been a great chance for me to connect with the wine community from all over the world. Coming soon will be Able Grape en Español, and improved versions of AG’s other languages… and as always, if you have comments, questions, or suggestions about how I can make Able Grape the best possible tool for you, please let me know.

PS: obligatory product plug: Able Grape knows about both VdV and WBW as concepts, so you should get great results for these queries, though our weekly update frequency may miss the very most recent posts.

VdV #20: les vins de Thanksgiving

J’ai passé ce Thanksgiving chez mon vieil ami Phil (ici à gauche), un Écossais, gourmand, amateur de vin, avec un coeur aussi grand que New York City (même s’il fait semblant d’être un petit peu grincheux). Je ne connaissais pas bien les autres 12-13 invités, mais nous étions unis par la fête même et l’amitié commune avec Phil, donc ils m’ont accepté comme si nous étions de la famille; nous avons causé, bu, mangé, (bu un p’tit peu plus), toute la soirée, pendant que Phil dansait entre la table et la petite cuisine à côté, cuisinant un repas exceptionnel: dinde aux canneberges, un gratin de cardons (mmmm), une salade de fenouil, une soupe aux lentilles… Moi, j’ai apporté la tarte aux pacanes et quelques bouteilles de vin. Voici les notes de dégustation des meilleurs vins:

VdV #20 – Thanksgiving

Quand Rémy m’a demandé si je voulais présider ce Vendredi du Vin, j’ai pensé deux choses. D’abord j’ai pensé: Rémy, t’es cinglé ou quoi? Avec mon français si rouillé, ça serait un désastre! Puis j’ai regardé le calendrier, j’ai vu que le dernier vendredi de novembre sera le jour après Thanksgiving, j’ai pensé que peut-être il serait intéressant de créer un thème autour de Thanksgiving, et j’ai accepté. Alors le cinglé c’est moi!

Je sais bien que Thanksgiving est une fête nord-américaine (toujours le quatrième jeudi de novembre aux États-Unis, le deuxième lundi d’octobre au Canada, les Canadiens étant toujours en avant de nous dans les choses importantes), mais j’espère qu’avec un peu d’explication, et un thème assez “ouvert,” la dégustation soit intéressante même pour nos amis d’outre-mer.

Thanksgiving, selon le mythe qu’on nous a inculqué ici depuis l’enfance,

Some fun new things

I’ve been updating the database more frequently, and with less fanfare, recently. But every once in a while it’s nice to point out some of the new sites, or small new improvements and features, that have quietly crept in. Here are some fun queries to try. I encourage you to compare with Google using the “Google” link next to the search box. And I also recommend trying the “reuse a second window” preference, it’s a faster way to explore your search results!

• DRC 2001
• 1995 Belair
• Better separation for things like Mad Dog (wine brand from Australia) and Mad Dog 20/20 (comes with its own paper bag).
• Improved handling of German vineyard names like Marcobrunn (I dare you to try to find a German vineyard not in the database…)
• Yellow+Blue Malbec
• 1103P rootstock (note the many synonyms we recognize).
• ML01 (genetically modified yeast for malolactic fermentation)
• Thousands of pages from France’s INIST, with abstracts from topics from terroir viticole et typicités organoleptiques to Effect of malolactic fermentation on ethyl carbamate formation in Chardonnay.
• Lots of new sites, from Cupcake Vineyards or Viña Miranda to the Chicago Tribune’s food & wine blog The Stew, to the new (and pretty cool!) comparison shopping engine 1000 Corks.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Anything missing? Drop me a note.

Live from the Wine Bloggers Conference

Well, this is certainly interesting. I’m in a room with a hundred and fifty other wine bloggers, at the opening session of the WBC. the air is filled with chatter, everyone’s blogging as fast as they can, and my glass is… …empty. Winemakers are supposed to be swapping tables every 5 minutes to pour and explain a different wine, but there appear to be more tables than winemakers. So we’ve started with the “gift” wine that came in our tchotchke bags, and we’re pouring it for ourselves.

Keep in mind that we have just minutes per wine, including listening to the winemaker, so these are hasty sketches and first impressions.

Getting ready for the Wine Blogger Conference

It’s been a crazy week, and every day I look at my blog and think, “today’s the day I’m going to do a little blogging.” I’ve got so many posts running around my head, waiting to come out. And then I get caught up in the myriad business-critical things going on at Able Grape Central, and, well, by 9 pm I just want to chill out with a nice glass of wine and a good book (yesterday’s pairing was the 2001 William Fèvre Chablis Grand Cru “Valmur,”, an acidic, minerally, leesy/honeyed bit of yum that I just couldn’t keep my hands off of, even though I really should wait another 3-5 years, and Niccolò Ammaniti’s latest book “Come Dio Comanda,” which won the “Strega” prize for Italian literature. Too early to comment on the book, but so far it seems on a par with Ammaniti’s usual blend of excellent writing and a really sick imagination).

Over the next couple of days I’ll have the pleasure of meeting many of you at the Wine Bloggers Conference, in Santa Rosa. Earlier this year I had the good fortune to attend the European Wine Blogger Conference, the first ever of its kind, and it was fantastic. I look forward to seeing how the two events differ, and to connecting with a lot of you over the weekend. Please say hi!

Watch the debate on Brunello!

As many of you are aware, in the wake of the recent Brunello di Montalcino scandals in Italy, the debate is heating up about whether or not the Brunello disciplinare (regulations) should be changed to allow non-Sangiovese varieties. Franco Ziliani has asked his community to pass on word of an upcoming debate.

Franco, an eminent Italian wine journalist and author of the excellent blog Vino al Vino, and Teobaldo Cappellano, traditional Barolo producer and founder of Vini Veri, will be pitted against the enologist Ezio Rivella, for many years the managing director of Castello Banfi, and Vittorio Fiore, noted consultant enologist and owner of Poggio Scalette. The debate is sponsored by Vinarius, the trade association of Italian enoteche, and will take place at the University of Siena, on the 3rd of October, at 3 PM local time. If you want to tune in, the debate will be broadcast live on the sites of the Tuscany Region and on Vinarius’s own site. It will be in Italian, but I expect there will be a number of English-language blogs with great summaries of the debate shortly thereafter (among them most certainly Jeremy Parzen’s Do Bianchi), and I’ll make sure I get them all quickly into Able Grape.

This is a critical subject, because it gets right to the heart of the purpose of wine appellations, and I, for one, will definitely be tuning in.

Spiffy new update with lots of great content

  Speaking of really great content...

I’ve been accumulating a big list of things I want to blog about, from the great trip to the EWBC, to some outstanding recent tastings, to sharing some of the Able Grape survey results, and every day for the past couple of weeks I’ve promised myself “tonight I’m going to sit down and do some serious blogging.” I’ve even partially written a few posts. But every evening, some other task has reared its ugly head, and I’ve yet to complete any of the posts that have been running around in my head. So I wanted to dash off a brief “update” post, while I make time for more in-depth ones, to come in the next few days.

First, I wanted to thank everyone that participated in our recent survey. I really, really appreciate your taking the time to let me know what you need, search-wise. I plan to post some preliminary results in the coming days, just to share some statistics about our user community. Lots of people have since said they’d like to have done the survey. I’ll probably re-open it, though not as a contest, so that I can continue to track feedback from anyone who’d like to contribute.

Second, I wanted to post a brief “blurb” about today’s database update, along with the usual smattering of things to try. We’re up to 38,578 sites, with more than 15 million pages of content. There are dozens of new sources, and few hundred thousand new pages. Here’s a random sample:

Last chance to help w/survey, we REALLY want your thoughts

Just a final reminder: the Able Grape survey is set to close at the end of the day (midnight PST) this Monday, 15 September.

If you use Able Grape, and haven’t done the survey, I really would like your input. If you don’t use Able Grape because there’s something else you want from it, I really would like your input. Please take a few minutes to fill out the survey; the more thoughtful replies I can get, the more useful I can make this search tool for all of us.

Plus there are some truly fantastic and rare wines I’m giving away to thank people for the very best responses.

Please also let your colleagues know — this is very important to us!

Thanks for your help!

• Contest background and rules, if you’re interested
• Cut to the chase: go directly to the survey