Vinicultured: A Wine Blog

You’ve probably done it.  You’re researching for a term paper and you get engrossed in the Golgi apparatus or the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.  You start talking about it to your friends to the exclusion of almost anything a normal person would find remotely interesting.  Then, somewhere between the cisternae and the endoplasmic reticulum you realized that you’ve developed tunnel vision.  The more you specialize, the less you interest the average human being.

There’s an excellent post on the Palate Press that explores the topic of why no one reads wine blogs.  The author, Tom Johnson, looks at the utterly abysmal readership numbers–citing, for instance, the fact that “the top 100 wine blogs combined would be the 280th most popular blog in the country”–and offers two reasons for this phenomenon.

First, he observes that most wine blogs only offer wine reviews, leading to a “recipe for insignificance.”  I would tend to agree with Tom.  Wine reviews are useful but not intrinsically interesting, and they are available through a whole variety of sources such as wine magazines and review databases.  I personally dislike wine blogs that are 100% review-driven, although I do recognize that some people create such blogs primarily to keep track of what wines they’ve tried.  Nonetheless, as Tom writes, the best blogs are those that provide context and and tell stories.

Second, Tom points out that political blogs are nine times as likely as wine blogs to link to other related blogs.  He writes, “Wine bloggers in general are failing to use the defining characteristic of the worldwide web: the ability to link.”  Linking more often would create conversation and increase readership for all concerned.  I recommend that you read Tom’s article, which is well-researched and provocative (if the ninety-two and counting comments are any indication).

That being said, I would like to elaborate on one of his observations.  His article states the following:

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If you’re a student like me, chances are that you don’t normally purchase bottles of wine to cellar. Most of the bottles of wine you purchase are probably meant for immediate or short-term consumption. Indeed, most of the bottles are probably not meant for aging, anyway, and even if they are the lack of a proper climate-controlled environment makes it downright dangerous to try storing wine for extended periods of time.

Thus, I store my wine in cardboard boxes that have been turned sideways. It’s not the prettiest sight, but they’re stacked in one of my hallway closets where they are kept from light and heat. It’s also an approach that the wine writer Karen MacNeil uses for her own cellar, apparently.

However, wine storage does not have to be purely practical. Indeed, wine bottles can be stored in a way that is not only aesthetically pleasing but can actually be considered art.

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I’ve come to a sort of crossroads in my wine blogging journey.  The choice as I saw it was between getting more serious about it, or letting it go.  Letting it go would be an attractive option, especially because I’ve been concerned about my health, the quality of my legal scholarship, and my finances.  However, in the end I could not give this up, not after 100 posts and the time and effort I put into maintaining it.

Although my recent lack of posting might indicate that I’m not serious about my resolution, it is more indicative of law school craziness than any lack of discipline.  And, like a patient lover, my wine blog waits for me to return after a few weeks of neglect.

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This according to the Los Angeles Times.  I’d be interested to see how the 2009 vintage turns out, however.  I am predicting it will produce two broad types of wine: a HUGE volume of swill and a large volume of super-sized alcohol bombs.

The article states the following:

For consumers, the year’s bounty is expected to bring more availability and cheaper prices for all types of California wine, particularly premium and ultra-premium wines.

But I don’t see how this is possible.  Premium and ultra-premium wines?  It is an immutable truth of winemaking that lower yields mean better wines.  Fewer grapes mean that a vine will focus its energy on whatever fruit it has, which is why (fine) winemakers everywhere prune, prune, prune like crazy.  This leads to more concentrated, intense grapes, which in turn lead to better wine.

This is what Kermit Lynch had to say about it in his fantastic book, Adventures on the Wine Route:

When his crop yields 40 hectoliters to the hectare (4,000 liters per hectare, or 2,200 bottles per acre), Paul [Tardieu] says he is satisfied.  For a cheap vin de pays it is a drastically minuscule production.  In an abundant year such as 1979, the Meursault vineyards in Burgundy yield twice as much juice per acre and the wine sells for five to six times the price of [Tardieu’s].

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