Sensory Perception: During their blending sessions, winemakers Scott and Mollie insist on complete silence in the lab. Music can significantly alter one’s perception of wine. We enjoy conducting experiments with our dinner guests. We place two identical glasses of wine on the table and ask them to assess each separately. After tasting the first glass, we subtly change the music. Not a single person has ever recognized that it was the exact wine. Each person had their preference.
Curious what @winesmith might add to the conversation. Not heard from him in some time now and wondering what’s up in his world…
I did a similar experiment on NPR’s Soundcheck in 2012. It’s an interesting story. I was in Milan, Italy to do an article on the giant winery exhibition SIMEI for Wines & Vines when I got this phone call from NPR. They had cognitive musicologist Daniel Levitin (This Is Your Brain On Music) on a conference call from U. Montreal and wanted us to do a show in a couple hours.
So I found a quiet alley in Milan and Daniel and I cooked up a scheme where we had the host taste three wines while we changed the background music. The host didn’t know what was going on. He described the three wines very differently even though they were the same wine.
I’ve run a lot of crazy experiments in my time, but this one takes the cake.
@ScottW58 Interesting article I had missed. Living on the East coast, the price advantage of European ‘bulk’ quality wines is large and on a price/quality ratio, below the very high end, European wines - especially dry whites - provide both better value and quality. Longtime Casematers and Wooters know I’m a lifelong advocate of California wines, but years of living in the East have made me very much aware of the sound reasons which California wines in the mid-price range and low price range have so much trouble doing well in this part of the country.
@rpm@ScottW58 In the last few years even over here the California wines have continued their price increases and compare less favourably to European whites than they used to.
@klezman@rpm
Yes even when I was on the east coast wine boards 15 or more years ago and I started to buy European wines at the low to mid level it was obvious the difference in bang for your buck and that was a big topic of discussion. I still love good California/Oregon etc wines and buy them but my cellar has changed over the years from over 90% USA wines to 22%. Of course ymmv.
"It’s only June, and fires in the wine country and elsewhere in California have already started. The Point Fire, Sonoma County’s first wildfire of the season, erupted Sunday afternoon northwest of Healdsburg. This does not bode well for the rest of the harvest.
So far, 34,000 acres have burned in California.
This is four times the five-year average for the same period. This sharp rise is primarily attributed to vegetation growth fueled by atmospheric river rains, which have dried out and become highly flammable under the current hot and dry conditions.
More information on smoke taint here.
Let’s hope all stay cool and smoke-free in the coming months.
This may not be new news but I see that RWS (logistics handled by WCC) are now offering a summer hold (ships mid October) for the same price as their summer shipping ($10). I guess their volumes are relatively small compared to Casemates.
@ctmariner They do make it clear their flow is not ‘ship on demand’,
but rather we’ll ship when we think it’s safe to do so.
Could be when you’re out-of-town…
@jmdavidson1Tinned tuna in pesto, my first time seeing that. Kind of a shortcut to pasta alla Carlofortina? I’ll stick to the trad recipe. This might be nice in a sandwich though.
Speaking of, I tried Costco’s jarred pesto, I thought it was quite good.
Don’t know if anybody else has had this happen but the forum pages aren’t loading properly on mobile right now. Seemed to start with a Samsung browser update the other day and it’s affecting lots of sites. The main page on meh is loading the desktop version, for example.
Maybe the IT folks can check out out. I don’t remember who to tag. @WineDavid59@rjquillin
California-based Vintage Wine Estate, one of the largest winemakers in the United States, has filed for bankruptcy as a surge in demand during the COVID-19 pandemic turned into a slump in subsequent years.
Vintage, which owns or leases around 1,850 acres of wine-growing land in the United States, employs more than 400 workers in 15 states, operates 11 wineries, and sells 30 brands.
@rjquillin@ScottW58 Yup, they’re in a kind of no man’s land of value. Not cheap enough to compete with the $8/btl crowd but not good enough to attract the high dollar spenders.
As someone who (in my youth) enjoyed setting up domino chains (having only a single set of dominoes), things like this fascinate me (in spit of the few “touches” needed to keep things moving). 100,000 Dominoes Topple
I decided to take this to the pub, instead of going WAY OT on the Mystery Case thread in response to @moondigger.
<rant> I used CT “value” in quotation marks when I posted over there because the term can mean anything in CT. It could be user entered, community average, from a professional website, or a combination. CT is willing to publish as community average if there are 2 entries, which opens a statistical can of worms, not the least of which stem from the undisclosed sources and sample size. Then there are problems with self-reported data and the lack of guidelines for reporting (Does everyone report the same way? Is that only the cost of the wine? Or with tax? shipping?) Wine values change over time; should a more recent acquisition be weighted more heavily than an older one?
All that being said, other alternatives like shopping the web, are too time consuming especially considering that the purchase has already been made. So I look at the CT “value”, I just don’t rely on it. </rant>
@davirom I checked the wines I received in the random offer on CT mainly hoping to find useful tasting notes, but noticed the same thing you did about the “values” – they don’t seem to be authoritative/reliable due to the factors you mention.
@davirom@moondigger
Sometimes I look though other vintages of a wine to get an overall feel for it’s “average value”. Sometimes one vintage is an outlier, such as when it appears on a flash site. Also, recent auction prices trump the average price paid by the community. So, a wine we all paid $50 for might show up as having a community value of $30 if that’s what it went for at whatever auction(s) they use for valuation.
@chipgreen@davirom@moondigger yup, it’s a mess. I always enter total cost to me since that’s what matters most. For Garagiste purchases that puts me above the average value in most cases.
@chipgreen@davirom@moondigger me too. It’s actually the main reason I pay up. Even though it’s full of issues I still find the pricing indicative. And at least if you look at the stores people have purchased from it gives you a sense of how to interpret the price.
@davirom@klezman@moondigger
I don’t believe you can view the stores on the app, only on the website. I used to look at that fairly often but have become dependent on the app, despite that and other limitations.
@klezman@rjquillin 024 at 5:03 p.m. ET
Our usual rule about commenting on the ultraright conspiracy theories and apologies for various authoritarians that Tucker Carlson emits is: the less said the better. If editorial writers responded to every inflammatory or false remark he made, or repeated, there would be no time or space for them to do anything else. Also, Mr. Carlson thrives on mainstream media criticism, and we’re reluctant to play that game.
Every rule has an exception, though. There needs to be one for Mr. Carlson’s interview Monday of a revisionist World War II historian — one Darryl Cooper, whom Mr. Carlson introduced as the “best and most honest popular historian working in the United States today.” At that, Mr. Cooper used Mr. Carlson’s show on X to explain, with no opposition from Mr. Carlson, why Britain’s Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of that conflict and to imply that German atrocities on the Eastern Front stemmed from a failure to plan for all the prisoners Adolf Hitler’s troops captured.
Another of our rules — and we won’t make an exception in this case — is not to re-litigate the basic facts and morality of World War II and the Holocaust. Suffice it to say that the only major point Mr. Cooper definitely got right was that the democratic West drew lessons from those horrific mid-20th century events — the need to resist, not appease, tyranny and to sustain a vital political center — that were foundational to the postwar political order. This obscure right-wing “historian” just thinks that those were not necessarily the right lessons, as he told Mr. Carlson. His project, abetted by Mr. Carlson, would seem to be delegitimizing liberal democracy and the U.S. position in the world, as we’ve known them in the postwar period, through a spurious attack on their basis in history.
This is someone who wrote Tuesday on X that Churchill is blameworthy in part because, after Hitler invaded Poland (85 years, almost to the day, before Mr. Cooper’s interview with Mr. Carlson aired), Britain ignored the führer’s offer to “give back the parts of Poland that were not majority German, and [to] work with the other powers to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.”
The ultimate issue is not what this episode says about Mr. Carlson; spreading toxic nonsense is par for his course these days, unfortunately. The issue is Mr. Carlson’s influence in the Republican Party, which gave Mr. Carlson a prime speaking opportunity at its national convention in July as well as a prestigious seat in former president Donald Trump’s row at that event. It was Mr. Carlson who, by many accounts, urged Mr. Trump to pick Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) as his running mate. In turn, Mr. Vance is scheduled to appear onstage with Mr. Carlson when the latter’s live tour reaches Hershey, Pa., on Sept. 21.
This poses an elementary political test for the Republican ticket: Will Mr. Vance keep his date with Mr. Carlson, thus lending his imprimatur to someone who lent his imprimatur to Mr. Cooper? If he does keep it, will he at least confront Mr. Carlson? Encouragingly, some prominent conservative intellectuals and Republican elected officials have denounced the Carlson-Cooper show, demonstrating both intellectual integrity and the principle that the best approach to such odious expression is not suppression or censorship but “counterspeech.”
Mr. Vance’s spokesman told us that the senator “doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture but he obviously does not share the views of the guest interviewed by Tucker Carlson.” The GOP ticket rejects antisemitism, he added. As for where Mr. Vance will be and what he’ll do on Sept. 21 — stay tuned, apparently.
Next to the one Mr. Carlson got, one of the warmest rounds of applause for any speaker at the GOP convention in Milwaukee greeted 98-year-old World War II U.S. Army veteran William Pekrul, who landed with U.S. troops in France in 1944 and later fought at the Battle of the Bulge. Mr. Pekrul told delegates that, if Mr. Trump wins the presidency again, “I would go back to reenlist today. I would storm whatever beach my country needs me to.”
They cheered Mr. Pekrul seemingly oblivious to the irony that Mr. Trump’s slogan — “America First” — was also the name of a political movement that opposed any U.S. intervention in Europe after the invasion of Poland until Germany’s declaration of war against the United States the day after Pearl Harbor. Mr. Pekrul and millions of other Americans sacrificed mightily, alongside their British allies, to liberate Western Europe from the Nazi dictator for whom Mr. Cooper made excuses on Mr. Carlson’s show. Question: If Churchill was a “villain” then what does that make Mr. Pekrul?
He criticized one of California’s most popular wines. Then he got a letter from its lawyers.
By Jess Lander,
Wine reporter
Oct 9, 2024
A wine and spirits store in Leawood, Kan., is suddenly caught in the middle of a false advertising dispute over one of America’s most popular wines: Meiomi Pinot Noir.
A cheeky marketing display at Ranchmart Wine & Spirits, located roughly 1 mile from the Kansas-Missouri border, features boxes of Meiomi stacked against eye-catching, orange and blue boxes of a lesser-known Pinot called Dial Tone. Above the bottles, an ad for Dial Tone, produced by Sonoma County winemaker Adam Lee, reads: “There is less sugar in 32 bottles of Dial Tone Pinot Noir than in just 1 bottle of Meiomi Pinot Noir.”
Meiomi’s parent company Constellation Brands caught wind of the display and on Sept. 25, Lee received a sternly worded letter from the conglomerate’s lawyers. The letter, which the Chronicle reviewed, demanded that Lee provide evidence to support his claims and suggested his ad may violate a federal law prohibiting false advertising. “Constellation welcomes competition in the marketplace,” the letter stated, “so long as such competition is fair and does not mislead consumers.”
Constellation, which acquired Meiomi from founder Joe Wagner in 2015 for $315 million and which is the fourth-largest wine producer in the country according to Wine Business, did not respond to the Chronicle’s request for comment.
“ ‘Oh s—,’ was my first reaction,” Lee said of the letter. But he also admitted he was “poking the bear a little bit.”
Studies show that transparency is an increasingly important company value to food and beverage consumers. In the wine industry, this mindset has boosted the natural wine movement; inspired many grape growers to phase out herbicides like Roundup; and pushed the U.S. government to consider an ingredient labeling requirement.
Lee’s ad dares to make a contentious wine industry secret public knowledge: Wines that share the same shelf at the supermarket can have wildly varying levels of residual sugar — which refers to the amount of sugar left unfermented — and still all be classified as “dry.”
It’s widely known that the average American drinker prefers wines with some sweetness, which can also help mask some of the shortcomings of cheap, lower-quality wine. Meiomi — which has a production of over 1 million cases a year — is frequently cast as the lead villain in a group of corporate brands that wine professionals and oenophiles love to hate. (Caymus and the Prisoner are others.) Meiomi’s critics often say it’s overmanipulated or artificial, too sweet and doesn’t taste like a traditional Pinot Noir. (Wine Spectator has reported that past vintages of Meiomi contained small amounts of grapes including Riesling and Gewurztraminer.)
“A lot of commercially available wines are not very well made and not very honest about what is in the bottle,” said Travis Johnson, the Ranchmart general manager who created the display. “Meiomi is pretty much used as a pejorative when it comes to fine wines in the industry. It tastes like a laboratory project.”
The idea for the ad came about when Lee, who was adopted, went to Texas to meet some of his blood relatives. They presented him with a bottle of Meiomi to drink and he was “surprised at how sweet it was.” Back home in California, Lee, best known as the founder of single-vineyard Pinot brand Siduri, decided to conduct an experiment. In January, he brought a bottle of the 2021 Meiomi and a bottle of the 2022 Dial Tone to his local wine lab for testing. The analysis report, which the Chronicle reviewed, stated that the bottle of Meiomi had 19.4 grams per liter of residual sugar compared to 0.6 in the Dial Tone.
Lee did some simple math to determine the assertion in his ad, which he posted on social media. Johnson reached out and asked for a copy to display in the store, even though he sells “truckloads” of Meiomi. “I sell people Meiomi because it pays the bills,” Johnson said, estimating he’s sold roughly 800 bottles this year. “I have a never-ending infinity stack of Meiomi that just never depletes.”
While drinkers can typically perceive residual sugar above a threshold of 2 or 3 grams per liter, it’s not uncommon to find dry wines on supermarket shelves with up to 10 grams per liter. Yet Meiomi’s sugar level is nearly double that, Lee pointed out.
He created Dial Tone to offer consumers an inexpensive Pinot Noir alternative to brands like Meiomi that’s “honestly made.” (At Ranchmart, Meiomi costs $24 and Dial Tone $36, though Lee said Dial Tone is sold for cheaper elsewhere.) Lee said he doesn’t use artificial additives like oak chips, a cheaper alternative to oak barrels to impart an oaky flavor, or grape juice concentrate like Mega Purple. Typically used to intensify a wine’s color, Mega Purple also increases the wine’s sugar content.
“I think that everyone needs wines to start out with, and a lot of people start out with sweeter wines. I don’t have an issue with that,” Lee said. “I do think it’s a problem to have this level of sweetness in a wine classified as the same thing as the dry, traditional Pinot Noirs that most everyone else makes.” Lee doesn’t necessarily think ingredient labeling is the best solution but suggested that retailers and restaurants could better differentiate sweetness in the presentation of their inventory.
When he received the letter from Constellation, Lee conducted a second analysis, testing the subsequent vintage of each wine: the 2022 Meiomi and 2023 Dial Tone. The sugar levels were lower for both — 18.3 grams per liter for Meiomi and 0.4 for Dial Tone — but Lee believes it actually strengthens his marketing proposition. Now, the math enables him to claim that there’s less residual sugar in 45 bottles of Dial Tone than in a single bottle of Meiomi, up from 32. According to the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, Meiomi’s most recent release, the 2023 Pinot Noir, contains 21 grams of sugar per liter.
After consulting his lawyer, Lee sent Constellation a response with the recent lab results but didn’t back off his brazen approach. “I think you’re saying that I should keep making truthful statements about Meiomi,” he wrote. “Thanks for that. Like most people these days, I care about how much sugar I ingest.”
He concluded with an offer to sell Constellation a couple of bottles of Dial Tone so the company can conduct their own tests. “Just send me the credit card information,” the letter quipped.
He’s not too worried about a potential lawsuit, stating, “the numbers are what the numbers are.” Plus, he said, his insurance would cover any advertising-related litigation. Similarly, Johnson said he’s not concerned that Constellation will pursue legal action against Ranchmart — and doesn’t plan to take the display down.
“It’s a great conversation starter,” said Johnson, “and a great way to convert people to drink things based on what they like, not just based on what a great marketing budget tells them to.”
And in is return letter to the Constellation lawyers posted on his website Adam said he was busy with harvest but if they wanted a couple of bottles of his wine to test they could send him a credit card number and don’t forget the 3 digit security code
@Mark_L
Surprised he isn’t doing another kickstarter. I have so many of his wines, not sure which library wines he is or will be selling but I doubt there’s much that I don’t have already.
I noticed some talk on other threads about average price for a wine on CellarTracker - I am not an active user on the website but I have never seen the average price on there. Can anyone enlighten me on where it is located?
@ctmariner@rjquillin I believe the minimum is $30/year to use that feature. They are transparent about their “recommendations” and the actual requirements for subscription levels for what you get.
@ctmariner@klezman
The suggested pricing now seems to be $40 for < 100 bottles. From past experience I’ve found a direct PP remittance can be of any amount. To obtain additional features however, even that may have changed with the new model. ymmv
Kvetch time - when and why did it become common to put a superfluous and misleading apostrophe into words when making them plural?
Pizzas -> pizza’s
Holidays -> holiday’s
This seems like a recent “innovation” in written English that does nothing other than confuse and make people look illiterate. I’ve seen it in proofread and expensively printed marketing material, restaurant menus (or menu’s? ), professional emails, and more. It’s tempting to blame the young people, but this one doesn’t seem to hinge on age. How did this happen??
(Then I’ll ask about the recent innovation of “I’s” in place of “my”. Including by one of my kid’s teachers. )
@kawichris650 I don’t recall what vintage you were looking for? I have a bottle of this that I will never get around to, I will send it to you for the price of shipping if you’re interested?
@ScottW58
So close! The vintage I’m after is 1985. If only my friend was 2 years older haha. Thank you so much for the offer though. That’s very kind of you.
Why won’t you ever get around to opening that? Is port not your cup of tea?
Already a new cyberpub thread, new deal thread, new clue thread, and new “what are you drinking” thread. It seems someone is eager for 2024.
@kawichris650 bored, and just want '23 to be done, not that '24 will be any better, but likely quite interesting.
@davirom There must be a palate/palette/pallet version out there somewhere…
@davirom @klezman
I’ve looked, perhaps not well enough however
@klezman @rjquillin Not saying this is good, or funny, but at least it’s descriptive.
@davirom @klezman @rjquillin
@davirom @rjquillin That image should be used in a slashdown thing. Maybe you can get the powers that be to do it, Ron?
Surprised no one one here is condemning Israel’s killing of innocent Palestinians in Gaza.
@losthighwayz nobody condemned the Hamas massacre, rape, abuse, and hostage taking of Israelis either.
He’s not wrong…
The Timeless Appeal of Champagne and Fried Chicken
An excerpt from a recent email from Scott Harvey
Sensory Perception: During their blending sessions, winemakers Scott and Mollie insist on complete silence in the lab. Music can significantly alter one’s perception of wine. We enjoy conducting experiments with our dinner guests. We place two identical glasses of wine on the table and ask them to assess each separately. After tasting the first glass, we subtly change the music. Not a single person has ever recognized that it was the exact wine. Each person had their preference.
Curious what @winesmith might add to the conversation. Not heard from him in some time now and wondering what’s up in his world…
I did a similar experiment on NPR’s Soundcheck in 2012. It’s an interesting story. I was in Milan, Italy to do an article on the giant winery exhibition SIMEI for Wines & Vines when I got this phone call from NPR. They had cognitive musicologist Daniel Levitin (This Is Your Brain On Music) on a conference call from U. Montreal and wanted us to do a show in a couple hours.
So I found a quiet alley in Milan and Daniel and I cooked up a scheme where we had the host taste three wines while we changed the background music. The host didn’t know what was going on. He described the three wines very differently even though they were the same wine.
I’ve run a lot of crazy experiments in my time, but this one takes the cake.
Hey LA folks! We are going to the Tercero wine dinner at Rustic Kitchen on Thursday this week. They still have room - can we convince anybody to join us?
https://rustickitchen.la/tercero-winemaker-dinner-may-23-2024/
Interesting article to say the least, well I guess foreign bulk wine may be better
I guess what you don’t know won’t hurt you.
https://lodigrowers.com/imported-foreign-bulk-wine-the-dirty-secret-no-one-in-california-wine-is-talking-about/
@ScottW58 Wow, that’s terrible. Clearly they need to require country of origin labelling to be more clear and conspicuous.
@klezman
If you see American wine on the lable run don’t walk I guess.
@ScottW58 Interesting article I had missed. Living on the East coast, the price advantage of European ‘bulk’ quality wines is large and on a price/quality ratio, below the very high end, European wines - especially dry whites - provide both better value and quality. Longtime Casematers and Wooters know I’m a lifelong advocate of California wines, but years of living in the East have made me very much aware of the sound reasons which California wines in the mid-price range and low price range have so much trouble doing well in this part of the country.
@rpm @ScottW58 In the last few years even over here the California wines have continued their price increases and compare less favourably to European whites than they used to.
@klezman @rpm
Yes even when I was on the east coast wine boards 15 or more years ago and I started to buy European wines at the low to mid level it was obvious the difference in bang for your buck and that was a big topic of discussion. I still love good California/Oregon etc wines and buy them but my cellar has changed over the years from over 90% USA wines to 22%. Of course ymmv.
Happy Father’s Day to all the CaseMatey Dads!!!
Cheers!
@karenhynes
Indeed! Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there!
Well, this sounds bad…
"It’s only June, and fires in the wine country and elsewhere in California have already started. The Point Fire, Sonoma County’s first wildfire of the season, erupted Sunday afternoon northwest of Healdsburg. This does not bode well for the rest of the harvest.
So far, 34,000 acres have burned in California.
This is four times the five-year average for the same period. This sharp rise is primarily attributed to vegetation growth fueled by atmospheric river rains, which have dried out and become highly flammable under the current hot and dry conditions.
More information on smoke taint here.
Let’s hope all stay cool and smoke-free in the coming months.
Warm regards,
Scott and Jana"
[mod] to add link here
@InFrom yeah. We really need to suck CO2 or if the atmosphere and reverse this crap.
@InFrom @klezman If only there was some kind of machine that could do that…and perhaps produce Oxygen at the same time…
We may be headed for a lowest number of posts in an offering thread! At 8:30 eastern there are 5: mediocre bot, ilcesare, Mark, and 2 rats!
@davirom
And the Rats weren’t all that excited either.
Standby for some future mystery bottles.
@davirom @rjquillin
Lackluster for sure.
This may not be new news but I see that RWS (logistics handled by WCC) are now offering a summer hold (ships mid October) for the same price as their summer shipping ($10). I guess their volumes are relatively small compared to Casemates.
@ctmariner They do make it clear their flow is not ‘ship on demand’,
but rather we’ll ship when we think it’s safe to do so.
Could be when you’re out-of-town…
@rjquillin Yep - so will be subject to the normal UPS vagaries when trying to put a vacation hold or redirect your wine shipment!
@jmdavidson1 Tinned tuna in pesto, my first time seeing that. Kind of a shortcut to pasta alla Carlofortina? I’ll stick to the trad recipe. This might be nice in a sandwich though.
Speaking of, I tried Costco’s jarred pesto, I thought it was quite good.
@InFrom I only use the jarred tuna for that dish. As you know, there is a difference between that and canned. I’ll check out the Costco pesto. Thanks.
@jmdavidson1 It’s great with jarred tuna, and fresh ain’t too shabby. (I followed this recipe, when I did it with fresh tuna.)
Don’t know if anybody else has had this happen but the forum pages aren’t loading properly on mobile right now. Seemed to start with a Samsung browser update the other day and it’s affecting lots of sites. The main page on meh is loading the desktop version, for example.
Maybe the IT folks can check out out. I don’t remember who to tag.
@WineDavid59 @rjquillin
@klezman Possibly a Crowdstrike thing?
@davirom this started a few days ago. Unrelated I think.
Seems fine on my S9 right now
Vintage Wine Estate, Major US Wine Producer, Files for Bankruptcy
California-based Vintage Wine Estate, one of the largest winemakers in the United States, has filed for bankruptcy as a surge in demand during the COVID-19 pandemic turned into a slump in subsequent years.
Vintage, which owns or leases around 1,850 acres of wine-growing land in the United States, employs more than 400 workers in 15 states, operates 11 wineries, and sells 30 brands.
B.R. Cohn
Clos Pegase
Cosentino Winery
Firesteed
Girard Winery
Kunde Winery
Laetitia Vineyard & Winery
Owen Roe
Sonoma Coast Vineyards
Swanson Vineyards
Viansa
@rjquillin
Judging by the list I can see why.
@rjquillin @ScottW58 Yup, they’re in a kind of no man’s land of value. Not cheap enough to compete with the $8/btl crowd but not good enough to attract the high dollar spenders.
@klezman @ScottW58
Likely what happens when you have a debt load from acquisitions; not much room to move.
As someone who (in my youth) enjoyed setting up domino chains (having only a single set of dominoes), things like this fascinate me (in spit of the few “touches” needed to keep things moving).
100,000 Dominoes Topple
I decided to take this to the pub, instead of going WAY OT on the Mystery Case thread in response to @moondigger.
<rant> I used CT “value” in quotation marks when I posted over there because the term can mean anything in CT. It could be user entered, community average, from a professional website, or a combination. CT is willing to publish as community average if there are 2 entries, which opens a statistical can of worms, not the least of which stem from the undisclosed sources and sample size. Then there are problems with self-reported data and the lack of guidelines for reporting (Does everyone report the same way? Is that only the cost of the wine? Or with tax? shipping?) Wine values change over time; should a more recent acquisition be weighted more heavily than an older one?
All that being said, other alternatives like shopping the web, are too time consuming especially considering that the purchase has already been made. So I look at the CT “value”, I just don’t rely on it. </rant>
@davirom I checked the wines I received in the random offer on CT mainly hoping to find useful tasting notes, but noticed the same thing you did about the “values” – they don’t seem to be authoritative/reliable due to the factors you mention.
@davirom @moondigger
Sometimes I look though other vintages of a wine to get an overall feel for it’s “average value”. Sometimes one vintage is an outlier, such as when it appears on a flash site. Also, recent auction prices trump the average price paid by the community. So, a wine we all paid $50 for might show up as having a community value of $30 if that’s what it went for at whatever auction(s) they use for valuation.
@chipgreen @davirom @moondigger yup, it’s a mess. I always enter total cost to me since that’s what matters most. For Garagiste purchases that puts me above the average value in most cases.
@chipgreen @klezman @moondigger Don’t get me wrong, I’m a premium member of CT and find value in it. Just not valuation
.
@chipgreen @davirom @moondigger me too. It’s actually the main reason I pay up. Even though it’s full of issues I still find the pricing indicative. And at least if you look at the stores people have purchased from it gives you a sense of how to interpret the price.
@davirom @klezman @moondigger
I don’t believe you can view the stores on the app, only on the website. I used to look at that fairly often but have become dependent on the app, despite that and other limitations.
@chipgreen @davirom @moondigger I almost never use the app. Didn’t know that.
Weights and Measures?
Will the Republican ticket fail this revisionist World War II history test?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/09/05/tucker-carlson-darryl-cooper-jd-vance/
@canonizer Yikes
@canonizer @klezman yes, paywall
@klezman @rjquillin 024 at 5:03 p.m. ET
Our usual rule about commenting on the ultraright conspiracy theories and apologies for various authoritarians that Tucker Carlson emits is: the less said the better. If editorial writers responded to every inflammatory or false remark he made, or repeated, there would be no time or space for them to do anything else. Also, Mr. Carlson thrives on mainstream media criticism, and we’re reluctant to play that game.
Every rule has an exception, though. There needs to be one for Mr. Carlson’s interview Monday of a revisionist World War II historian — one Darryl Cooper, whom Mr. Carlson introduced as the “best and most honest popular historian working in the United States today.” At that, Mr. Cooper used Mr. Carlson’s show on X to explain, with no opposition from Mr. Carlson, why Britain’s Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of that conflict and to imply that German atrocities on the Eastern Front stemmed from a failure to plan for all the prisoners Adolf Hitler’s troops captured.
Another of our rules — and we won’t make an exception in this case — is not to re-litigate the basic facts and morality of World War II and the Holocaust. Suffice it to say that the only major point Mr. Cooper definitely got right was that the democratic West drew lessons from those horrific mid-20th century events — the need to resist, not appease, tyranny and to sustain a vital political center — that were foundational to the postwar political order. This obscure right-wing “historian” just thinks that those were not necessarily the right lessons, as he told Mr. Carlson. His project, abetted by Mr. Carlson, would seem to be delegitimizing liberal democracy and the U.S. position in the world, as we’ve known them in the postwar period, through a spurious attack on their basis in history.
This is someone who wrote Tuesday on X that Churchill is blameworthy in part because, after Hitler invaded Poland (85 years, almost to the day, before Mr. Cooper’s interview with Mr. Carlson aired), Britain ignored the führer’s offer to “give back the parts of Poland that were not majority German, and [to] work with the other powers to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.”
The ultimate issue is not what this episode says about Mr. Carlson; spreading toxic nonsense is par for his course these days, unfortunately. The issue is Mr. Carlson’s influence in the Republican Party, which gave Mr. Carlson a prime speaking opportunity at its national convention in July as well as a prestigious seat in former president Donald Trump’s row at that event. It was Mr. Carlson who, by many accounts, urged Mr. Trump to pick Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) as his running mate. In turn, Mr. Vance is scheduled to appear onstage with Mr. Carlson when the latter’s live tour reaches Hershey, Pa., on Sept. 21.
This poses an elementary political test for the Republican ticket: Will Mr. Vance keep his date with Mr. Carlson, thus lending his imprimatur to someone who lent his imprimatur to Mr. Cooper? If he does keep it, will he at least confront Mr. Carlson? Encouragingly, some prominent conservative intellectuals and Republican elected officials have denounced the Carlson-Cooper show, demonstrating both intellectual integrity and the principle that the best approach to such odious expression is not suppression or censorship but “counterspeech.”
Mr. Vance’s spokesman told us that the senator “doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture but he obviously does not share the views of the guest interviewed by Tucker Carlson.” The GOP ticket rejects antisemitism, he added. As for where Mr. Vance will be and what he’ll do on Sept. 21 — stay tuned, apparently.
Next to the one Mr. Carlson got, one of the warmest rounds of applause for any speaker at the GOP convention in Milwaukee greeted 98-year-old World War II U.S. Army veteran William Pekrul, who landed with U.S. troops in France in 1944 and later fought at the Battle of the Bulge. Mr. Pekrul told delegates that, if Mr. Trump wins the presidency again, “I would go back to reenlist today. I would storm whatever beach my country needs me to.”
They cheered Mr. Pekrul seemingly oblivious to the irony that Mr. Trump’s slogan — “America First” — was also the name of a political movement that opposed any U.S. intervention in Europe after the invasion of Poland until Germany’s declaration of war against the United States the day after Pearl Harbor. Mr. Pekrul and millions of other Americans sacrificed mightily, alongside their British allies, to liberate Western Europe from the Nazi dictator for whom Mr. Cooper made excuses on Mr. Carlson’s show. Question: If Churchill was a “villain” then what does that make Mr. Pekrul?
Interesting article about the wine biz.
I’d call this required reading in today’s world. Gift link to bypass the paywall.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/04/opinion/israel-jews-antisemitism.html?unlocked_article_code=1.P04.EcTS.b6I5rf6tZ5BD&smid=url-share
And yes, this could be in the politics thread, but I think it deserves more attention than it would get over there.
Adam Lee vs Meiomi/Constellation
bravo lol
[mod edit to trim url]
@ScottW58
Mod trimmed now it has paywall? Why?
@ScottW58
I encountered the paywall, but managed to get around it. I’ll post the story here for everyone to read.
He criticized one of California’s most popular wines. Then he got a letter from its lawyers.
By Jess Lander,
Wine reporter
Oct 9, 2024
A wine and spirits store in Leawood, Kan., is suddenly caught in the middle of a false advertising dispute over one of America’s most popular wines: Meiomi Pinot Noir.
A cheeky marketing display at Ranchmart Wine & Spirits, located roughly 1 mile from the Kansas-Missouri border, features boxes of Meiomi stacked against eye-catching, orange and blue boxes of a lesser-known Pinot called Dial Tone. Above the bottles, an ad for Dial Tone, produced by Sonoma County winemaker Adam Lee, reads: “There is less sugar in 32 bottles of Dial Tone Pinot Noir than in just 1 bottle of Meiomi Pinot Noir.”
Meiomi’s parent company Constellation Brands caught wind of the display and on Sept. 25, Lee received a sternly worded letter from the conglomerate’s lawyers. The letter, which the Chronicle reviewed, demanded that Lee provide evidence to support his claims and suggested his ad may violate a federal law prohibiting false advertising. “Constellation welcomes competition in the marketplace,” the letter stated, “so long as such competition is fair and does not mislead consumers.”
Constellation, which acquired Meiomi from founder Joe Wagner in 2015 for $315 million and which is the fourth-largest wine producer in the country according to Wine Business, did not respond to the Chronicle’s request for comment.
“ ‘Oh s—,’ was my first reaction,” Lee said of the letter. But he also admitted he was “poking the bear a little bit.”
Studies show that transparency is an increasingly important company value to food and beverage consumers. In the wine industry, this mindset has boosted the natural wine movement; inspired many grape growers to phase out herbicides like Roundup; and pushed the U.S. government to consider an ingredient labeling requirement.
Lee’s ad dares to make a contentious wine industry secret public knowledge: Wines that share the same shelf at the supermarket can have wildly varying levels of residual sugar — which refers to the amount of sugar left unfermented — and still all be classified as “dry.”
It’s widely known that the average American drinker prefers wines with some sweetness, which can also help mask some of the shortcomings of cheap, lower-quality wine. Meiomi — which has a production of over 1 million cases a year — is frequently cast as the lead villain in a group of corporate brands that wine professionals and oenophiles love to hate. (Caymus and the Prisoner are others.) Meiomi’s critics often say it’s overmanipulated or artificial, too sweet and doesn’t taste like a traditional Pinot Noir. (Wine Spectator has reported that past vintages of Meiomi contained small amounts of grapes including Riesling and Gewurztraminer.)
“A lot of commercially available wines are not very well made and not very honest about what is in the bottle,” said Travis Johnson, the Ranchmart general manager who created the display. “Meiomi is pretty much used as a pejorative when it comes to fine wines in the industry. It tastes like a laboratory project.”
The idea for the ad came about when Lee, who was adopted, went to Texas to meet some of his blood relatives. They presented him with a bottle of Meiomi to drink and he was “surprised at how sweet it was.” Back home in California, Lee, best known as the founder of single-vineyard Pinot brand Siduri, decided to conduct an experiment. In January, he brought a bottle of the 2021 Meiomi and a bottle of the 2022 Dial Tone to his local wine lab for testing. The analysis report, which the Chronicle reviewed, stated that the bottle of Meiomi had 19.4 grams per liter of residual sugar compared to 0.6 in the Dial Tone.
Lee did some simple math to determine the assertion in his ad, which he posted on social media. Johnson reached out and asked for a copy to display in the store, even though he sells “truckloads” of Meiomi. “I sell people Meiomi because it pays the bills,” Johnson said, estimating he’s sold roughly 800 bottles this year. “I have a never-ending infinity stack of Meiomi that just never depletes.”
While drinkers can typically perceive residual sugar above a threshold of 2 or 3 grams per liter, it’s not uncommon to find dry wines on supermarket shelves with up to 10 grams per liter. Yet Meiomi’s sugar level is nearly double that, Lee pointed out.
He created Dial Tone to offer consumers an inexpensive Pinot Noir alternative to brands like Meiomi that’s “honestly made.” (At Ranchmart, Meiomi costs $24 and Dial Tone $36, though Lee said Dial Tone is sold for cheaper elsewhere.) Lee said he doesn’t use artificial additives like oak chips, a cheaper alternative to oak barrels to impart an oaky flavor, or grape juice concentrate like Mega Purple. Typically used to intensify a wine’s color, Mega Purple also increases the wine’s sugar content.
“I think that everyone needs wines to start out with, and a lot of people start out with sweeter wines. I don’t have an issue with that,” Lee said. “I do think it’s a problem to have this level of sweetness in a wine classified as the same thing as the dry, traditional Pinot Noirs that most everyone else makes.” Lee doesn’t necessarily think ingredient labeling is the best solution but suggested that retailers and restaurants could better differentiate sweetness in the presentation of their inventory.
When he received the letter from Constellation, Lee conducted a second analysis, testing the subsequent vintage of each wine: the 2022 Meiomi and 2023 Dial Tone. The sugar levels were lower for both — 18.3 grams per liter for Meiomi and 0.4 for Dial Tone — but Lee believes it actually strengthens his marketing proposition. Now, the math enables him to claim that there’s less residual sugar in 45 bottles of Dial Tone than in a single bottle of Meiomi, up from 32. According to the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, Meiomi’s most recent release, the 2023 Pinot Noir, contains 21 grams of sugar per liter.
After consulting his lawyer, Lee sent Constellation a response with the recent lab results but didn’t back off his brazen approach. “I think you’re saying that I should keep making truthful statements about Meiomi,” he wrote. “Thanks for that. Like most people these days, I care about how much sugar I ingest.”
He concluded with an offer to sell Constellation a couple of bottles of Dial Tone so the company can conduct their own tests. “Just send me the credit card information,” the letter quipped.
He’s not too worried about a potential lawsuit, stating, “the numbers are what the numbers are.” Plus, he said, his insurance would cover any advertising-related litigation. Similarly, Johnson said he’s not concerned that Constellation will pursue legal action against Ranchmart — and doesn’t plan to take the display down.
“It’s a great conversation starter,” said Johnson, “and a great way to convert people to drink things based on what they like, not just based on what a great marketing budget tells them to.”
@kawichris650
Thanks for the full posting.
I didn’t notice a pay-wall in the link from Scott.
This is absolutely
@kawichris650 @rjquillin That’s amazing. Love that Adam did that.
And in is return letter to the Constellation lawyers posted on his website Adam said he was busy with harvest but if they wanted a couple of bottles of his wine to test they could send him a credit card number and don’t forget the 3 digit security code
Andrew Murray buys Qupe. If you enjoy SB wines then you know Lindquist and Qupe
https://www.independent.com/2024/10/08/andrew-murray-buys-qupe-wine/?amp=1
@losthighwayz Maybe WDs group can work some magic with Murray and get a Qupe offer here.
@jmdavidson1 @losthighwayz Glad to see Qupe going back into responsible hands! And at a crazy cheap price, too.
@klezman @losthighwayz Yea. At that price, all of the casemates clientele could’ve pooled their money and bought it and we’d all be winery owners. LOL.
@jmdavidson1 @losthighwayz If only we’d known!
@rjquillin, guy wants to know, what’s your favorite drinking song?
https://casemates.com/forum/topics/what-is-your-favorite-drinking-song
@InFrom just did it
@rjquillin That one always perks up a party!
@rjquillin I should have mentioned, I do have that record in vinyl.
Some great BB; go Blue
@rjquillin
Twas a great night!
@rjquillin @ScottW58 I was so not paying attention that I didn’t even realise until this morning that the fireworks I heard were for the Dodgers!
I’m not sure where I found the link to this, but what’s up with Clark’s WineSmith Reincarnation?
@Mark_L
Surprised he isn’t doing another kickstarter. I have so many of his wines, not sure which library wines he is or will be selling but I doubt there’s much that I don’t have already.
@chipgreen @Mark_L
I think the long story short is an investor backed out and he got his inventory back.
Not sure what happened to the link, but here is another:
I noticed some talk on other threads about average price for a wine on CellarTracker - I am not an active user on the website but I have never seen the average price on there. Can anyone enlighten me on where it is located?
@ctmariner
Pretty sure you have to be a paid subscriber for pricing info, other than your cost entries, even if at the lowest entry level “donation”
@rjquillin That makes sense - thank you!
@ctmariner @rjquillin I believe the minimum is $30/year to use that feature. They are transparent about their “recommendations” and the actual requirements for subscription levels for what you get.
@ctmariner @klezman
The suggested pricing now seems to be $40 for < 100 bottles. From past experience I’ve found a direct PP remittance can be of any amount. To obtain additional features however, even that may have changed with the new model. ymmv
@klezman
have you renewed recently since the pricing model change, or just use the free version features?
Kvetch time - when and why did it become common to put a superfluous and misleading apostrophe into words when making them plural?
Pizzas -> pizza’s
Holidays -> holiday’s
This seems like a recent “innovation” in written English that does nothing other than confuse and make people look illiterate. I’ve seen it in proofread and expensively printed marketing material, restaurant menus (or menu’s?
), professional emails, and more. It’s tempting to blame the young people, but this one doesn’t seem to hinge on age. How did this happen??
(Then I’ll ask about the recent innovation of “I’s” in place of “my”. Including by one of my kid’s teachers.
)
Is anyone here at all familiar with non-vintage 40 year old port?
I might be able to get my hands on one that was bottled in 2011, which is why I started to go down the rabbit hole trying to understand how it’s made.
There doesn’t seem to be much info available (or my interweb sleuthing skills are lacking).
My basic understanding is it’s a blend of many different wines. But are all of the components 40 years old, or just a certain percentage of the blend?
Thanks in advance to anyone that can offer some insight.
@kawichris650 The best info I can find is this
@kawichris650 I don’t recall what vintage you were looking for? I have a bottle of this that I will never get around to, I will send it to
you for the price of shipping if you’re interested?
@Mark_L
Thanks for that. Perhaps the info is proprietary and that’s why it seems impossible to find.
@ScottW58
So close! The vintage I’m after is 1985. If only my friend was 2 years older haha. Thank you so much for the offer though. That’s very kind of you.
Why won’t you ever get around to opening that? Is port not your cup of tea?
@kawichris650
Yeah not really my cup of tea.
@ScottW58 No, you champagne or a great sauttene. Glad we are friends.