On bottle shapes

Recently I have started taking more notice of the shape of bottle that wine is coming in. When I first got into wine I noticed that there were different shapes, but I assumed that this was stylistic on a very simple level. Now I realize that there is a subtle twist to the choice – Bordeaux bottle for a Bordeaux style wine, Rhone bottle for a Rhone style wine and so on. While I can appreciate that this helps to distinguish the style of wine while it sits in the shop, I have some problems with this approach.

For one, I think that this is too much of a shadow of the old world being projected onto the new world of wine. I believe that the new world have some styles all their own, and they manage to have these styles recognized without changing the bottle shape (or at least I argue that they do). I also don’t appreciate the difficulties it creates in wine storage. Some cabinets are optimized to the standard Bordeaux bottle, and having extra tall Bordeaux bottles or Rhone bottles complicates stacking, etc.

Now, given that some winemakers choose one shape over another for whatever reason (Torbreck seems to like the sloping neck and Penfolds likes the Bordeaux, for example) I also wish that there was less variety within a bottle shape. I have many variations on Bordeaux in my collection, which is somewhat strange to me. They are all 750ml bottles, why not standardize like Penfolds did on the standard size to make storage easier? I have often wondered out loud if any bottle that is not a standard Bordeaux is meant to be aged at all (I know that they are, but my point is that you would make it easier for people with many stacking systems if your age-able wine were in a standard size). Was the stack-ability a factor in Penfolds choosing the shape that they did?

P.S. Please take some salt with this post. This is random musings piped straight from my head to the blog. Not a guarantee. Checks will not be honoured. Tongue was in cheek a smidgen.

The lake of wine

I just read this post

http://seattlewineblogger.blogspot.com/2007/05/australian-marketing-machine-makes-260.html

again, and I feel that I must respectfully respond. Particularly to the point about Australian wine only being good at the absolute top and bottom ends of the price scale. My experience does not really mesh with this at all – I actually don’t particularly enjoy the cheaper Australian offerings at all. The majority of my drinking is done at the $15 – $30 price point with Australian wine, and occasionally I venture even into the triple digits. The only reason that I don’t drink $50 bottles of Australian wine more often is because I can’t afford to. If I could I would literally be buying cases of the stuff and digging a big hole in the ground to store them in.

There are two reasons why this blogger might have developed this opinion. Perhaps this person does not like the Australian style of wine – I have a co-worker from France who finds Australian wine too strong for his taste (which is funny, because I find most French and Italian stuff to be watery and fruity juice tasting). There is no right or wrong to this, it is a matter of taste.

The other reason may be that this blogger might not have had much *good* Australian wine in these price points. Indeed, even living on the west coast it can be hard to find the fine examples, and I personally think that many wine buyers in supermarkets around here share the opinion that Australian wine is either “value” or “collectible” and don’t stock anything else. There are many small and medium size wineries making great stuff at every price point, you just need to look around somewhere other than a supermarket or anywhere else that stocks “International Wine” without knowing a lot about what to stock.

I think that the easiest way to sample great Australian reds is to sign up at Garagiste, and buy a bottle of anything red that fits into your target price point. They are very good at choosing great stuff and were a boon to me in terms of beefing up the collection. Pete’s wine in Bellevue and Seattle Wine Co in Bellevue also have a great selection of Australian wines. I found a bottle of Yalumba Octavius at Pete’s, and everything I saw in Seattle Wine Co last time I was there looked top notch.

Interesting article about wine buying

http://www.blueaustral.com/gift/wine-buying-for-the-novice/

There are a lot of good tips here. I like the point about not buying too much too early. I wondered for a minute if I was doing that myself, but then I recalled that most times I have to restrain myself from drinking my wine. Pretty much everything I have is something that I cannot wait to drink, and I hope that it stays that way.

Have you seen this wine?

http://www.penfolds.com.au/collection/special/

I would love to have a bottle each of the Block 42 and Bin 60A, but I cannot find anybody in the Seattle area that can get it. From what I read they sold futures in Australia for the stuff (I don’t know what this means, but I wish I found out).

On the off chance that one of my 3 readers has seen this for sale somewhere (either in Australia or the US) please drop a comment and let me know where. I am prepared to pay around US$200 for it (which I have heard is about the price range, similar to Grange) so dropping 5 bills at an auction is out of my price range.

The big stocktake

Recently I went through and did a complete stocktake of everything that I had. I had been doing some impulse purchases lately, so I wanted to make sure I was tracking everything that I had and that fridge space was being allocated sensibly.

This did not take as long as I thought, and I was very satisfied at the end. I now have a master spreadsheet with everything in it, and it is much easier to sort through the collection and find what I want.

There were some surprises in there, like some bottles that I had more of than I thought. There was some stuff that I have not seen in a while. The real interesting thing was sorting everything by year and seeing the gaps, especially when I limit the price. There are some years where I have very few bottles of anything (2001 is one of these, for example). And there are those where I have oodles of stuff to drink (2005). I think that this is mainy due to two factors – the time I started collecting and the tendency for fancy stuff to be released later than cheaper stuff (I can buy 2005 bin 128 right now, but 2002 Grange is not out yet).

There are still gaps in the recording, though. Ideally I would like to have a rating or two for each wine (or at least all of the stuff above 50 bucks). Tracking this down takes time, though. Having a good drinking range estimate for each wine is another goal. So far biting off a little at a time to do this has been fairly successful, so maybe in a few months I will be closer.

Keeping track of teh collection

Recently I went to Garagiste and picked up some wine, and when I got home I decided to catalog things a little bit better. It took a while, but I finally got all of the invoice information for every order into a spreadsheet and I can now sort by year, purchase date, price per bottle, etc. This is really nice because now when I get the late night craving for vino I can consult the spreadsheet, and sort by price (based on my frugality) and hopefully also pick something that is approaching its prime (more work is needed here – I need to get information from reviews and wineries about drinking dates).

What I would really love is an application that would let me enter all of the disparate bits of information for the stuff in my collection. Things like the invoice from the place I got it (if applicable), PDFs for winery information (if they let me download it), links to winery web pages, links to reviews as well as the normal database stuff to help with searches. Some CSV export will be handy, too, for pushing stuff into Excel for printing stuff out.

Since this sounds like such a good idea I think I will go about writing such an app. It will make a fun project for me, and the result will be very handy for tracking my wine. I will try to keep it simple (stupid).