Swirls: China’s wine frenzy, Bill Foley’s growing wine empire, what sommeliers like to drink

SWIRL: The New York Times has an interesting piece today on the fast-growing French expat community in China, particularly Hong Kong, which, with its growing wealth and hunger for luxury goods, is drawing more and more wine and other entrepreneurs eager to bring their products to the Chinese market.

SWIRL: Speaking of China, Bloomberg reports that at least a dozen Chinese investors have recently bought wine estates in Bordeaux, mostly small and sometimes distressed  properties.

SWIRL: New York is planning to increase its wine presence in China. The Watertown Daily Times says hundreds of small New York wineries will have a better chance of getting exposure for their wines in China at a New York state wine outlet at the free trade zone in Shanghai. The aim will be to sell New York wines at Chinese chain stores, supermarkets and hotels.

SWIRL: In case you missed it, Jay McInerney’s weekend WSJ column on the increasing importance of sommeliers was notable for, among other things, pointing out that most sommeliers favor leaner, lower-alcohol wines because they match better with foods.

SWIRL: Bloomberg has a good read on the fast-expanding wine empire of Bill Foley, the former mortgage title executive who is buying up wineries in California and beyond.

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Swirls: BYOB? A tale of 2 restaurants, including one that brushes off a well-known NY retailer on a special night out

A couple of weeks ago, I was delighted with a dinner at our neighborhood bistro, Café du Soleil, on New York’s Upper West Side. The reason? For one thing, it perfectly satisfied the carnivorous cravings of our family of four, including hangar steak and leg of lamb for the parents, a steak au poivre for the 12-year-old and a good old hamburger for the 16-year-old (all with some of New York’s best French fries). Beyond the food was the price of a high-end bottle of California cab -- $20. This was not some special wine offer but the very modest (by New York standards) corkage fee the restaurant charges, which permitted us to enjoy  Hawk and Horse’s excellent 2007 Lake County Cabernet Sauvignon, which retails for $65 and which I had received as a press sample. Clearly the owners want to bring in business, and with good food and an encouraging bring-your-own-wine policy, I look forward to our next dinner there.

For Jamie Wolff, a partner at New York’s Chambers Street Wines, it was a far different experience when he and some friends sat down at a restaurant on New Year’s Eve. Jamie began to relate the experience the other day when I stopped by the store (one of the country’s leading retailers of artisanal, small-production wines) and told him about a piece I had written about ridiculous wine markups. I asked Jamie to send me an email about his experience, and here is some of what he wrote:

Swirls: Restaurant wine follow-up – some perspective from a venerable New York establishment that does the right thing

Once a week or so, I make it a point to sneak out of my office for a quick lunch, which inevitably leads me on a 10-minute walk to the famed Oyster Bar & Restaurant at Grand Central Station. There, I almost always order one of New York’s great cheap meals – an overflowing bowl of New England clam chowder, which goes for $6.25 (a tomato-based Manhattan chowder is $5.75). The price includes a homemade roll and all the crackers you can eat. I never order wine at lunch, but yesterday I left with one of the Oyster Bar’s menus, which, on the reverse side of the large single page, features the  extensive wine list.

In light of my post last week that was critical of a downtown Manhattan restaurant that seemed to be marking up its wines exorbitantly even by New York standards and offering exactly two wines under $40, I wanted to refresh my memory about the Oyster Bar’s wines and their prices. A quick glance surprised me: not only does this New York institution, which is frequented by as many tourists as business people, offer reasonably priced wines, but it does so with a vengeance. On my way home last night on the subway, I actually counted the number of wines and then added up those priced under $40. Out of 183 full-sized bottles, both red and white, fully 46 of them were priced between $30 and $38. I’ll repeat it: one quarter of the wines were $38 or less.

Of the 46, 11 of these wines were sauvignon blancs --quintessential fish and shellfish wines with examples from Chile, Washington, the Loire Valley and Gascony in France, Spain’s Rueda, South Africa, Austria, Long Island and Sonoma.  Other under-$40 selections included a couple of sparkling wines, a few chardonnays and examples of  riesling, viognier, chenin blanc, pinot grigio, gewürztraminer, gruner veltliner, soave, orvieto, grillo and assorted other whites. Talk about a variety of reasonably priced wines! Though more limited, there were also a number of reds priced at between $32 and $38.

The point here is that many if not most diners would like to order wine, but at a price they they consider fair. Not only does the Oyster Bar offer dozens of reasonably priced wines, but the higher the price the less the markup seems to be, which conforms to a  favorable practice by some restaurants that a number or readers of last week’s story pointed to. The Oyster  Bar is a big restaurant and, with its volume, is clearly in a position to offer more relatively inexpensive wines. Smaller  restaurants should be offering reasonably priced wines in droves, especially in this persistently tough economy. I have no doubt that more patrons would order more wine, which would be good for everyone.

del.icio.us Tags: Edward Deitch,Restaurant wines,Restaurant wine prices,Oyster Bar & Restauarant,Wine lists,Restauarant wine markups,Wine markups

Eats: What may be the best $2 meal in NYC (or the country)

Over the holidays I found myself a couple of times in New York's Chinatown, a place that, despite its fame and familiarity, remains a largely separate world. Whenever I'm there, I make a point of stopping by the hole-in-the-wall restaurant simply called "Fried Dumpling" on Mosco Street, a one-block lane you'll have to search for. The name is pedestrian but says it all. They make their own fried pork dumplings here and that's it. They are crispy and delicious. Five for $1, 10 for $2, which is about enough for two people to split on a walk through the neighborhood on a brisk January day. With a squeeze or two of chili sauce, they warm the body and the spirit. Fried Dumpling may just be the ultimate cheap meal. Wine? Not served here. Beer? Ditto. A ginger ale will do just fine. (Photos: Vint-ed.com)

As you can see, Fried Dumpling earned an "A" rating from the city's Health Department. The place is immaculate, including the closet-size restroom.

A woman, presumably the owner, does the cooking and serving and takes your payment (cash only), while a young man, who didn't want to be photographed, works to the side assembling the dumplings.

Perhaps the ultimate $2 meal.

     

Swirls: In a restaurant, feeling like a prisoner of excessive wine markups

How often, when enjoying an evening out, are you distracted by annoying wine issues? For us, a case in point came the other night when friends invited us to dinner at a restaurant in New York’s Greenwich Village. In these budget-conscious times, don’t we all want to believe we’re getting good value when eating out in both food and wine?

But that was hard at this restaurant, where the least expensive white wine on the list was a vidal blanc from the Finger Lakes at $42 and where I ended up choosing a sauvignon blanc from France’s Loire Valley, Domaine de la Chaises’s 2010 Touraine, a wine I had enjoyed not long ago and reviewed here. On one hand, I was glad to see a wine on the list I was familiar with and had recommended, but I winced, then laughed in astonishment, when I saw the price. This very good (but hardly sensational) wine, available at retail for $13, was $48.

When the sommelier, an imposing young man who might have been an actor or model in another life, returned with our bottle, he announced rather ceremoniously in his baritone voice, “The 2009 Domaine de la Chaise.” I wanted to chuckle again. The formality -- and the price – were at odds with the way I thought of this wine, as a fresh and delightful sauvignon that would pair well with a variety of appetizers and lighter main courses, which it did on this evening. When I told the sommelier that I knew the retail price of this wine, he smiled knowingly but withheld comment.

He did, of course, make sure that our glasses were always topped off, even though (in our minds at least) we were certainly going to order a second bottle because we were enjoying it, despite the high price for a relatively cheap wine. And when we did, that brought the tab for two bottles of Domaine de la Chaise to $96. Which takes me once again to the issue of restaurant and wine economics and The Markup. I am keenly aware that restaurants make much of their profit from wine, and I have come to expect the price of wine in restaurants to be about three times retail, which would have put the Domaine de la Chaise at around $39 instead of $48 and would have made the selection more palatable (yes, $9 makes a difference to me).

It’s worth noting as well that the standard markup from wholesale to retail is 50 percent, which means that the cost of this wine to a store or a restaurant is under $10 – and probably even less depending on how many cases are ordered. So the markup (not necessarily the profit) on each bottle of the sauvignon blanc we ordered is around 400 percent, which seems excessive even by New York standards. (The least expensive red, by the way, was a Montepulicano d’Abruzzo from Italy at $44.)

I can’t help but think that if the markups came down a bit and a few more relatively inexpensive wines were offered at this and other restaurants, profit from wine would be the same or even greater. And most of us would feel at least a little more as though we were getting our money’s worth. What do you think? Please share your recent experiences and observations on wine in restaurants.

del.icio.us Tags: Wine in restaurants,Wine markups,Edward Deitch,Restaurant wine,Wine news,Wine sales,Wine lists,Wine prices in restaurants

Swirls: My proposal for Starbucks wine, Chinese Lafite counterfeits, weighing in on wine bottles

SWIRL: Let’s face it. Finding a casual and convenient place for a quick glass of wine or beer can sometimes be a challenge. So Starbucks is expanding its reach into alcoholic beverages with plans to offer them in seven stores in the Chicago area by the end of next year, the Chicago Tribune reports. Beer and wine are currently served at five stores in the Seattle area and one in Portland, Ore. No doubt, the big commercial wine brands are already setting their sites on these re-imagined Starbucks stores. But consider this: how cool would it be if Starbucks were to take a refreshingly un-corporate approach to its wine offerings? Instead of some  marketing committee in Seattle deciding on the wines based on lobbying from the big wine companies, why not offer a sampling of artisanal or lesser-known wines from around the world that changes each week? How about a grüner veltliner from Austria, a cru Beaujolais, or a sparkling Crémant from the Loire Valley with an emphasis on organic and biodynamic growing? Might take a little training of the staff but I have a hunch that many Starbucks customers might be open to a little adventure and smaller-production, sustainable offerings when it comes to wine.

SWIRL: It’s not surprising to hear that in Bordeaux-crazed China, counterfeit bottles of Château Lafite are making the  rounds.  China Digital Times reports that “curiously, China appears to consume far more of the top foreign wines than it actually imports, with counterfeiting rising alongside the legitimate trade. Empty Château Lafite bottles are salvaged from restaurants to be illicitly refilled, and rumours speak of a floating wine factory hidden aboard a cargo ship.” Here’s the full story.

SWIRL: We’ve all received them, those extra-heavy bottles intended to signal a wine’s stature and status, meant to distinguish, say, a reserve wine from a regular bottling. But in this eco-conscious era in the wine industry and beyond, are these bottle behemoths really necessary? Paul Gregutt in the Seattle Times thinks not, and I agree. He cites the growing use of the heavy bottles among wineries in Oregon, a state that, paradoxically, has often led the way on environmental concerns. This story is long overdue.

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SWIRLS: wine as top investment, iPad wine lists, iPhone bottle opener, Long Island wine in China, Joe Bastianich

SWIRL: As an investment, fine wine, as in top  Bordeaux, has  outperformed all other asset classes for a second straight year, beating out gold, oil and stocks. Decanter.com has the full story.

SWIRL: A Chicago steakhouse is among the latest restaurants to offer iPad wine lists – 40 of them at a cost of $700 each, according to an AP article. Let’s see: that comes to $28,000 in technology. How do you feel about this emerging trend? Will it be good or bad for ambience to see people all over a restaurant stroking their iPads in search of that perfect bottle of wine?

SWIRL: We saw this first with certain brands of sneakers – a bottle opener built into the soles that would do the trick in a  pinch. Well now, you can buy a protective case for your iPhone 4 with its very own bottle and can opener. There’s a picture of it on NewsFactor.com.

SWIRL:  Newsday reports that wine-crazed China has started to  import small quantities of wines from a number of Long Island wineries, including Peconic Bay Winery. It didn’t hurt that the importer spent weekends in the Hamptons while living in New York for the last four years before moving back to China. Read the full story here.

SWIRL: Joe Bastianich, the wine and restaurant impresario,  discusses his life in food and wine (plus weight loss and marathon running) in an interesting Q & A with Bloomberg’s John Mariani.

Technorati Tags: iPads wine lists,iPad,Wine in cans,Chilean wine,Chilean wine in cans,Paul Gregutt,Seattle Times,Edward Deitch,iPhone,iPhone bottle opener,iPhone can opener,NewsFactor.com,Newsday,Long Island wine,China wine,Long Island wine in China,Joe Bastianich,Bloomberg,Wine as investment,Bordeaux,Decanter.com

Swirls: “When my glass of wine arrived, it smelled like pesticide and tasted pretty much the same.”

The other day a reader, “Bro. Dave,” related a story about his experience ordering a glass of wine in a restaurant and asked for some advice.

“It was one listed on the menu as the manager's recommendation and was one of the higher-priced wines by the glass,” Dave wrote. “When my glass of wine arrived, it smelled like pesticide and tasted pretty much the same. I was not pleased.

“But how does one send back a glass of wine? I know wine tastes vary from person to person, even region to region. Perhaps the people around there enjoy wine that tastes like RAID! When my steak is over-cooked, that's simple to identify. But with a (bad) glass of wine, what does one do?”

It’s a question that countless wine drinkers must ask themselves, and several thoughts come to mind. First and foremost, it is perfectly acceptable to tell your server that the wine has an off taste. You would do this, obviously, if you were tasting a wine before accepting a bottle, and I think it’s appropriate to do the same with wine served by the glass. In fact, it is fine to ask for a small taste of a wine even before ordering a glass.

Swirls: wine in restaurants – some help in navigating the shoals

For the average restaurant patron, ordering wine can be a daunting affair; wine lists are full of extremes, on one end offering exhaustive lists with no clues on where to begin, at least not for the novice; on the other hand there are those cookie-cutter wine lists that offer few choices but with exhaustive descriptions and tasting notes that make every wine seem wonderful and experienced wine drinkers wince.

The more I think about this, I like the idea, embraced by a few  restaurants, of suggesting an appropriate wine or two with their dishes, giving customers at least a point of departure. As an alternative to specific wines, restaurants might propose specific varieties and regions with their dishes. Then, in consultation with a knowledgeable waiter or a sommelier, the choices could be narrowed down. All of this is just the beginning of the restaurant wine challenge.

Alan Richman of GQ has a useful and entertaining list of 15 tips on ordering wine in restaurants. Among those I like: letting you have a taste before ordering a wine by the glass (restaurants, he points out, aim to recoup their cost of a bottle with the first glass they pour, so a quarter-inch of wine, for those who ask for it, will hardly put a dent in profits, at least in my view);  other tips include making sure your wine arrives before your food, having your server pours you enough for your taste so you can actually get a sense of the wine, and frowning on the widely used practice of filling your glass almost to the brim in hopes that you’ll drink up and order another bottle.

Sips: a lucky find on the wine list – a gewürztraminer with a little age

Gewurztraminer, the highly aromatic variety found in Alsace, Germany, northern Italy and beyond, deserves far more attention that it gets. When you hit the right example, almost nothing beats it in terms of interest and complexity. It can also be a problem solver – for example, when four people order very different appetizers, as we did not long ago at The Chanticleer, the venerable restaurant on Nantucket. That’s because gewürztraminer is one of the ultimate food wines, able to match well with any number of dishes, especially highly seasoned and spicy foods. And so, when the four of us ordered everything from tuna tartare to various salads, I was pleased to see a gewürztraminer or two on the list and chose Domaines Schlumberger’s 2004 “Fleur” Gewurztraminer from France’s Alsace.

Now this is one of Schlumberger’s basic offerings, a wine that retails for about $22 or so (I think we paid about double that in the restaurant), and I knew from the start that it would not be the profound wine that I might expect with a grand cru offering. But I appreciated the fact that the wine had a few years or so of bottle age, and I tip my hat to the restaurant both for including the variety and offering a wine that has benefited from some time. That benefit was clear in the lovely fruit, which included ripe pear, peach and dried apricot. But that was only half the story. The fruit was accompanied by the floral and herbal notes that are gewürztraminer's signature and, at this point in the wine’s life, they were in just the right proportion, accenting instead of dominating, which can be the case with very young gewürztraminer. The match was splendid with my tuna tartare and its piquant chili mayo sauce. One cautionary note: we should have stuck with gewürz for our main courses; after the powerful tastes of the Schlumberger, a white Burgundy (a Montlouis) was just too delicate.

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Swirls: A Clinton wedding and a Clinton winery; an iPad wine list, and a ‘Nat Decants’ app

SWIRL:  The wines of Clinton Vineyards in Clinton Corners, N.Y. are getting the kind of attention this weekend that money alone can’t buy but that money and a Clinton wedding certainly can.  Though the wall of silence remains on details of Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to Marc Mezvinsky in Rhinebeck, N.Y., Wine Spectator has a juicy little tidbit on guests receiving a bottle of the winery’s Tribute, a seyval blanc.

SWIRL: While most people might consider it downright rude to break out an iPad in a restaurant (the iPod and iPhone are much easier to conceal in one’s lap), at least one high-end restaurant in  New York, South Gate, is using the iPad to feature its wine list, along with label images and other photographs. Seems like a cool idea indeed, although the iPad’s cost, starting at $499, might give “expensive wine list” new meaning. Read more at geek.com.

 

SWIRL: And speaking of apps, the Canadian wine journalist Natalie MacLean, who is something of a one-woman wine  information industry, has a new mobile app that culls a great deal from her Nat Decants Web site, including 380,000 wine and food pairings (can there possibly be that many?) and thousands of wine reviews and recipes, among other things.

 

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Swirls: rolling the dice on a restaurant wine list

Some restaurants continue to take their customers for granted when it comes to the wine end of the equation. Take the experience I had the other night at a beachfront restaurant at a  resort town that will go unnamed because the point here is to illustrate an issue rather than to point a finger at any specific establishment. This was a “family style” restaurant in a great location with  standard fare, ranging from pizzas and pastas to burgers and lobster rolls, steamed mussels and various salads -- you get the idea. The wine list was standard as well, with maybe 15 bottles, most of them familiar names at somewhat inflated resort prices.

I settled on the 2008 Sycamore Lane Chardonnay. The wine caught my interest because, at $30 and with a “Santa Barbara, California” appellation listed, it seemed like a potentially good value. Or so I thought. Our friendly server appeared with the bottle and announced, “Here’s your wine.” But, in reality it wasn’t “our wine.” I noticed as she held the bottle that the vintage was 2009 not 2008. Strike one, as as a sinking feeling started to come over me. For one thing, I realized that any chance of at least a little bottle age in our chardonnay was gone. Then, as I tasted it, I noted that this was a pretty generic wine – drinkable but undistinguished. Strike two. Still, I nodded to our young server that it was okay, deciding that it wasn’t worth rocking the boat in front of our friends and children. On closer inspection, the label revealed a “California” appellation, the broadest and most generic, so the grapes really could have been from anywhere in the state. Strike three. In any event, as our food came and we settled in, the wine seemed, well, fine. And that may be the point. Most people may not realize the difference or care, but for those of us who do, is it too much to ask that the information on the wine list reflect what’s on the label and in the bottle? For $30 or potentially much more, I think not.

del.icio.us Tags: Wine lists,Wine in restaurants,Restaurant wines,Edward Deitch,California wine,Restaurant wine prices