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birds, bottles and links…

By billn on February 05, 2012 #other sites

mistle-thrush

It’s the same every year; the orange berries on this tree are completely ignored until we have a severe frost – the frost can be January or it can be like yesterday’s -15°C – then the mistle thrushes appear and devour them all. They patiently wait in the higher trees for their ‘turn’; I counted fourteen (when they stood still for a moment) in the garden yesterday, until Carlo the cat made a poor effort at trying to catch one – to be fair, his charge through 20cm of fluffy snow was never going to be a thing of elegance!
The tree is now stripped bare, it only took one day, but the birds remain, surfing through the snow looking for those berries they dropped – I still don’t give Carlo much chance!

Anyway a few weekend links for you:

The latter auction catalogue is of interest for two reasons; firstly the unbelievably fabulous bottles and their attendant prices, but secondly because the source of some of these bottles is believed to be the same as those forged Ponsot bottles in the Acker-Merrall auction in 2008. You may note from the previous link that there are open questions about labels and the numbers on the labels of some of these lots. I have a high degree of scepticism as to why the bottles were were consigned from the US to be sold in the UK – is it simply because the UK is generally less litigious(?)
[Edit]: And now the smoking gun… I’m sure we are all happy to suspend (dis)belief and agree that Percy Fox would occasionally spell the name of their road incorrectly on the labels they fixed to bottles of Romanée-Conti:

percy-fox-sackvilee
A crop from the auction catalogue, page 98. Here’s a better image from the auction website…

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saturday links…

By billn on January 28, 2012 #other sites#site updates

Hot from the presses this weekend:

Thinking about listing links like those above, you may, or may not, be interested in how some people end up here, or hereabouts.

To the right is a summary of last year’s referrals (links) to this site. If you were to drill down on the ‘search engines’ you see what an effective monopoly of searches Google has; Yahoo and Bing combined reach a measly total of about 2,500 views. Twitter, despite media-darling status, was way down the list with 308 views. Maybe I should consider using it more – but then I never was much of a ‘pusher’!

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closing the spanish campogate

By billn on December 07, 2011 #other sites#the market

A heart-felt piece here.

I always think wtf (sorry…) when I hear of Spain being an ‘up-and-coming’ wine-region; I mean, how lazy is that? It simply suggests to me that I can’t trust what the writer is going to type next. Ryan’s Catavino piece (above) simply paints a picture of a region (sorry, country) with wine-styles so diverse that people around the world haven’t the basic knowledge to buy a Spanish wine, and that’s clearly not helped by producers that have clutched in desperation at every available style, process and presentation.

The essential problem is that people think of Spanish wine as an entity, and while you might also hear the phrase ‘French wine’, buyers of French wine are usually buying Burgundy or Bordeaux (or even Loire…!) with a decent idea of what it will taste like and really don’t consider ‘French wine’ an entity. Most people would be hard-pressed to come up with a Spanish wine region other than Rioja – here’s the nub of problem facing ‘Spanish wine’ – Pancho might not have been the solution but he clearly wasn’t the problem.

Perhaps Spanish wine really needs a bunch of MW business-men and women, but with their hands more on their hearts than in the tills, resolute about each region they represent and able to showcase a consistent style in their region – without consistency they will continue to have problems selling their wares. The local wine critics need also to be a part of the solution; criticising Neal Martin (that’s even a Spanish name isn’t it?) as the WA’s new man in Spain as ‘biased’, because several years ago he had the gaul (sorry, that’s not in Spain) to publish his experience of several sub-standard bottles, is not really part of any solution is it?

Let’s see what happens, but the country has to offer engagement and focus if it is to be a success in the market – quality is only an entry-ticket to the game – with Neal Martin I can’t think of another wide-circulation writer who offers such opportunity for real engagement, but I remain worried about the focus…

[Yes I have a cold – maybe another day or two before I exercise my corkscrew!]

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