Largest US Paper Gets a Wine Blog
Wine writers from the Dayton Daily News, MSNBC, The New York Times, the Akron Beacon…
…and now, USA Today, the American newspaper with the largest circulation (not counting the National Enquirer), will be producing a wine blog.
USA Today’s food and wine writer Jerry Shriver announced today that he will be writing a wine blog beginning May 12. According to Jerry, he will produce daily entries that focus on reviewing wines that cost $15 or less and are generally available in the major markets across the country.
"The idea is to test the oft-repeated assertion that more good-quality,
low-cost wine is available to consumers now than at any point in
history. I think this is true, given advances in technology and the
entrance of many more wine-producing nations on the world stage, but I
really won’t know for certain until I take an in-depth look.
Not a bad idea, particularly given the vast and broad character of USA Today’s readership.
More wine blogs will likely show up on Mainly Print Media (MPM) websites. It makes sense. Wine buyers tend to have higher incomes, more disposable income and are more attractive to advertisers.
Fantastic photo of Jerry. My only question is, why stop at 3/4 full? Fill it to the brim!
$15. where? AZ? CA? Seems a $15. wine in CA is priced over $20. as soon as it is trucked across state lines.
The issue of additions is a shibboleth, but one which is paramount in that price range.
Slowly we are obtaining geographic sourcing truth in labeling, thanks to some hard working folks in Napa who scotched the Lodi brand-nappers in court, finally, recently.
Anyone got a good book on ampelography to suggest? I just learned yesterday that the primativo parentage of zin conjecture was superseded by molecular bioscience eight years ago when a Viennese clone of an Albanian grape was discovered to be a superintending origin, making zin actually much more likely a Dalmatian, Albanian, or Greek varietal. The name given is Crljenak Kastelanski [1].
We have got magic science now at the experiment stations, so you can plant a nematode resistant rootstock in a sandy soil where summer temperature rises above 100 degrees routinely, and still, if the scion is a ‘zin’, that $15. bottle of zinfandel legally is labelled CA zin; add a few vinifera-like food extracts during aging and trellised vines yielding 10 tons/acre can look bright in the glass and you never notice the malic tartness is absent, that its color is smokily impenetrable…
I will have to peruse the column a few times to see what it is that readers of USA-T are counseled to quaff.
Though I must admit the last review in Wine Spectator I read of the best wines of the year in review, if one persisted into the fine print in the hinder pages of that thick trade magazine, included a surprising number of wines priced well below the $15. threshold, complete with zesty prose microparagraphs of appreciative review.
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Notes: [1] http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=7124&title=Researchers%20Discover%20Zinfandel's%20Hidden%20Roots
>>Anyone got a good book on ampelography to suggest?
Pierre Galet’s “A Practical Ampelography” is probably the best, but it was published in 1979 and has been out of print for about two decades. Consequently it’s difficult to find and really expensive if you do track down a copy.
Less academic in approach is Galet’s “Grape Varieties”, part of the Hachette Wine Library series. It’s very readable and has lots of pictures. It’s out in softcover and is easy to track down. A good ampelography book from Australia is “Wine Grape Varieties” by Kerridge & Antcliff- almost impossible to find over here in the USA, it’s well written but doesn’t really contain any information that you’re not going to find elsewhere.
Jancis Robinson’s “Guide to Wine Grapes” is excellent though, and seemingly omnipresent on bookshelves at shops that sell wine books. It’s also the only one of the books listed here that even MENTIONS Zinfandel. Go figure. DF