Warren's Wine World a 100% rating free zone

while camping in the rain ...

There are one or two truly memorable wine-related experiences in my life that have made me happy to be associated with the grape.
One such experience occurred on a canoe trip to the Boundary Water Canoe Area with some pals from college days. As we were packing gear Larry, who's cabin we were to use as a launching spot for our trip, showed me a bottle of wine and asked if I thought we should bring it. My eyes grew large. This was a bottle of Tignanello, an Italian wine from Tuscany, the first of the so-called "Super Tuscans". A number of thoughts ran through my head, lead by the thought, "yes, bring it"

The Chain of Duck Roasters

This past Saturday Jan. 19, I attended a dinner given by the Chaine de Rotisseurs, a gourmand society that traces its origins back to a 13th Century French brotherhood of duck roasters. The modern version has members who are in the food and wine business as well as lay members who simply enjoy good food and wine. The Chaine is not a "brotherhood", there are many female members and it is not a "lodge" in the sense that members are encouraged to include their spouses in the various events and dinners. It's a social club. I was invited as a guest because I write the wine and spirits column for MARQ Magazine, published by the Star Tribune.

This particular meeting was special because it included the awarding of the 2008 Young Chef award which the Chaine sponsors. The competition had taken place that day, set up like an Iron Chef cook-off with each young chef (they have to be under the age of 27) getting an identical basket of "secret ingredients" with which to compose a three course meal.

wine price slaves

OK ... are we all slaves to wine pricing? When we taste a wine do we really objectively evaluate the aroma and flavor to find the wine we like or do we base our judgement of quality upon subjective criteria? Like the wine's pedigree, or price for instance.
A recently released study by the California Institute of Technology reveals that subjects who tasted five wines without knowing anything about them, except their price, consistently rated the more expensive wines as the best. What's more, brain scans revealed that the subjects were actually experiencing more pleasure from the wines identified as more expensive even though the researchers marked one cheap wine artificially high and one prestige wine artificially low. "What this study shows is that the brain's rewards centre takes into account subjective beliefs about the quality of the experience," Professor Antonio Rangel said. "If you believe that the experience is better, even though it's the same wine, (or of lower quality then you've been led to believe) the rewards centre of the brain encodes it as feeling better."
So, inflating the price of a bottle of wine actually improves the taste? Wow. That's a great strategy for some restaurants I know.

fear of wine

I used to work for a very hip restaurant company, one that sells a ton of wine at its various venues, but they were scared of wine. Ultimately, I no longer work for them because of this fear. I sell wine now, to restaurants and retail shops and I encounter this fear everywhere. This fear of wine, of wine lists and labels and of sommeliers is also mentioned quite often in the media of wine.