Snooth’s introduction of the iPhone Wine Pro app gives wine lovers a fun tool that simultaneously permits Snooth to amplify its serious content marketing strategy by expanding crowd sourced wine content to drive search traffic and wine sales revenue.  Snooth’s wide network of wine retailers benefit from the site’s consumer traffic of wine review readers and writers and Snooth takes a cut of the wine sold through it’s platform.  More than half of their roughly 200k monthly unique visitors show up through organic search, so Snooth has lots to gain to make it fun and easy for consumers to search and add reviews, always expanding the site’s content.

With the app, you can snap a photo of the wine bottle, enter the vintage and type of wine, and quickly get to the reviews and network of sellers of that wine.  You can easily add your own review too.  Sound like fun?  I snap a lot of photos of wine bottles for the WineZag blog, but never as organic search criteria.  Will more consumers access Snooth and its sellers to search, review, and buy wine because they have been enabled to skip half the keyboard entry process and replace it with the cool new TinEye image recognition technology?

I am just not sure.  But Snooth has a lot to gain, since the power of their crowd sourced content strategy is central to their audience creation and revenue model.  More content, more visitors, more fees on the wine sales generated for retailers.  For now the app will be interesting to play with, but it remains to be seen whether it is little more than a one week wonder, demoted off my iPhone screen for not adding value to the process cycle of searching, buying, and reviewing fine wine.  If successful, Snooth will have pulled off just one more example of the power of creating and using content to drive positive business outcomes.

Bernard Fouquet is an accomplished and quality Vouvray producer, focused on Chenin Blanc across 25 hectares and and seven vineyards that make up Domaine des Aubuisieres’ fruit sources.  All of unique character and terroir, they split into two primary soil types including clay/limestone or clay/flint.  His portfolio includes soil specific blends and vineyard specific bottlings.  On a recent field trip to Bin Ends in Braintree I snagged a few bottles of the dry 2008 demi-sec Les Girardières bottling for $18.  I have promoted the wine into my personal category of “Summer House White Wine for Serious Food Moments”.

Every year I try to find two or three white wines that I can stock my summer home with to accommodate our massive flow of visitors’ requirements for easy large group quaffing, serious small group tasting, and serious food accompaniment wines.  The 2008 Domaine des Aubuisieres Les Girardières will serve the latter.  It is a manageable 12.5% alcohol level, and as usual for a dry Chenin, it has kept its acidity level despite elevated ripeness and 25 grams of residual sugar, with the bonus of aging potential.   It will be hard to resist drinking my entire stock now though as an aperitif, with fish, chicken, pork, and charcuterie.

The wine has floral tones with earthy hints and (I might be imagining or romanticizing this) an inferred presence of the wet stone that is indigenous in its vineyard.  There is a full peachy toned flavor, mouthfeel, and richness to the wine that is so amazingly impressive, all the while buffeted by strong citric qualities of pure grapefruit.  Adding to an impeccably balanced wine is an immense follow through and finish.  The seriousness in the wine’s weight and its fullness in the mouth is impressive as it imparts fruit and acidity in gorgeous balance. The entire tasting experience was simply impressive and kept us shaking our heads in awe of its beauty.

I will be adding on and topping off the already good stock that I assembled last week to insure that even our Labor Day guests will get to experience Fouquet’s work.

I am guilty of choosing and patronizing restaurants with quality wine lists first, great food second.  Preferring  a reasonable level of symbiosis, my restaurant choices are disproportionately weighted by wine programs.  If this resonates and you are more jazzed by contents of a subterranean cellar than walk-in refrigeration, or you just need a dose of expert wine list advice before you leave for dinner, then you should check out WineChap.

I stumbled across winechap.com doing some research for a spot to celebrate my 25th wedding anniversary.  The current emphasis is on New York, London, and Hong Kong restaurant wine lists, with hints of future market expansion.  It’s an amazing service of experienced sommeliers, trade pros, and some other wino types offering insightful, competent guidance on the overall list and specific recommendations:

WineChap fearlessly delivers news and reviews of restaurant wine lists in an independent quest for value, variety, and character. We spend our time poring over lists, so the only pouring you need to do is in your glass.

WineChap is a unique online resource. We provide you with access to real-time wine lists, reviews, and recommendations, and our selections cover a range of different budgets and occasions.

I really like WineChap’s sensibility.  You can search by city, neighborhood, restaurant name, regional strengths, value orientation, style of wine making, etc.  Lists are reviewed based on range of wines, list personality, and value for money.  The reviews appear to be almost real time and extremely current.  For example, here is the New York Balthazar’s rating:

List review date: February 23, 2010

Ratings Breakdown

Range of Wines: 16 / 20

Personality: 20 / 20

Value for money: 10 / 10

Rating total: 46 / 50

Glossary

By the Glass

Most interesting white / red available by the glass

Value Option

Our selection of the best wines in the bottom 20% of the list OR a particular bargain at any price point.

1st date

Impressive but not too showy:  circa $80 – but a wine that shows one’s connoisseurship rather than just size of wallet/expense account.

Off the Beaten Track

Unusual indigenous varietals/blends

Old School Classic

Classic (usually French or Italian – depending on dominant cuisine), from the middle of the list – a good wine, with age to stick on expenses and impress crusty wine bores/board members

Treat Yourself

Remember when you used to get a bonus?  not necessarily most expensive – but a real treat, rare, particularly good vintage etc

Crowd Pleaser

A guaranteed winner – nothing too challenging.  A solidly performing comfort wine which you are always happy to drink, even hungover.

Infanticide

Wines being sold too young, and a prime indicator of sommelier’s integrity.  Usually found towards the expensive end of a list with big names thrown in for several or more hundred dollars despite being years off drinking to that price.

Over the Hill

Old Dogs (knackered, well past their prime)

Oh the Shame!

An idiotic overpriced bottle of nonsense

House Wine Stats

Number of House wines available by the glass & the mean price

Krug Index

Price of a bottle of Krug NV

I consider myself “wine fortunate”, acquiring wine and friends over the years that fuel hedonistic and intellectual wine passions.  One of those friends is Malcolm.  I don’t see Malcolm regularly, yet each year for the last 15 we manage to find opportunities to get really silly and drink ridiculously excellent wine together.  It was great to see Malcolm at the tasting last Saturday night at my home, and his token gift of appreciation was no less thrilling; a bottle of 1982 Vieux Chateau Certan.  Don’t your friends stop in for a cup of coffee or a quick visit and leave behind some 1982 Bordeaux as well?

Here’s the story.  Living less than two miles from my home, Malcolm is mostly a full-time musician, serious student of the keyboard, and accomplished player.  Malcolm’s wife, Kathleen, is a talented painter and supporter of the arts in Boston, helping to pioneer the Thayer Street/SOWA district in Boston’s South End in 2001 by co-founding the OHT Gallery (recently morphed to OHT Projects ).  I’m a media executive, my wife’s a physician, Malcolm’s summer home south and east of Boston, and mine on a northern lake in New Hampshire.  His daughter and my son were close friends and appreciated each others’ inquiring minds until the age of eight when they enrolled in separate schools and made new friends.  So, Malcolm and I have to force our worlds to meet, and when we do, we celebrate in a big way with wines that never escape our memories.

When Malcolm was younger in the early to mid-eighties, he worked in a Boston wine shop and stashed away a serious Bordeaux, Rhone, and Alsace collection.  Without a formal cellar of his own back then, he squirreled away his wines around town, and one of those places was his mother’s home, lacking any of the usual temperature and humidity characteristics associated with reliable cellaring .  As such, Malcolm never trusts his wines’ fitness and has a need to constantly test their progress.  As a willing and lucky lab partner, I can attest that most of Malcolm’s wines are progressing just fine in his now state of the art cellar he constructed years ago.

Which brings us back to the 1982 Vieux Chateau Certan with an offer and retrospective look at Robert Parker’s fickle opinions of the wine spanning 16 years of bottle life.  First; my offer.  I am happy to open this wine with any reader that would like to taste it with me.  As fair trade, I am requesting the venue be Eleven Madison Park in New York City, on a mutually acceptable date, where I will gladly pay the corkage fee and supply the wine in exchange for you hosting the meal. Please don’t interpret the EMP venue suggestion as anything other than an interest in getting back to a favorite top spot to eat and drink in New York (which you can read here in a past WineZag post).  I have another bottle of the same wine in case you are interested in expanding the group a bit larger or the response to this offer is robust.  Remember, Malcolm does not trust his cellaring, but I can vouch that he has less to worry about than his innate cellaring paranoia allows.  Just leave a comment here, or contact me at awjapko@gmail.com, if you are interested.  Depending on response, I will either be drinking this alone in my cellar with a slice of pizza or trying to figure out how to arrange a common date for up to eight people at Eleven Madison Park.

There is something interesting going on with this wine.  It is either the wine or the continual complexities of tasting and reviewing a product that evolves and changes over years in a bottle, and minutes in a glass.  Robert Parker recently revisited some 1982 Bordeaux back in June 2009, and he rated the Vieux Chateau Certan 93 points saying this:

Not yet fully mature, this wine reveals some amber at the edge as well as a complex, intoxicating nose of cedar, licorice, spice box, black currants, and cherries. While medium to full-bodied with sweet tannins, and beautiful concentration, it appears to me that more recent vintages are stronger and denser than the 1982. Nevertheless, it is a beauty that can be drunk now and over the next 15-16 years. Release price: ($175.00/case) (current price: $223-$290/bottle)

Not yet fully mature?  Well, what about these past review snippets by Parker?  He reviewed the wine in 1993  giving the wine 89 points and writing:

I have rated this wine higher, but recently it is revealing considerable amber and rust at the edge, and evolving rapidly. It exhibits a sweet, cedary, jammy nose with a meaty, soy sauce component. Fleshy and full-bodied, with low acidity, copious amounts of ripe, rich fruit, and high alcohol in the satiny smooth finish, this fully mature, chewy wine is capable of lasting 10-15 more years.

And then in the third edition of his Bordeaux book in 1998 he rated the wine 88 points and said:

Regular 750 ml. formats are soft and herbaceous, wonderfully delicious and round, but not that complex or concentrated…. The color is a healthy dark ruby with some amber.  The wine possesses a peppery, herb, olive, and vanillin-scented nose, and jammy black cherry fruit. Lush and succulent, with medium to full body, excellent concentration, and a low acid finish with no real tannin, this is a fully mature wine that begs to be drunk over the next 7-8 years.

And in June of 2000 Parker bumped his rating back up to 89 points saying:

An herbaceous, cedary, spice, and fruitcake-scented bouquet jumps from the glass of this medium ruby/garnet-colored wine. More complex aromatically than on the palate, this supple, velvety-textured effort exhibits abundant glycerin, an open-knit, expansive mouth-feel, but not the depth, power, or density of the vintage’s finest efforts. Fully mature, it requires consumption over the next 5-7 years.

So in 1998 he gave the wine a sub 90-point rating and suggested not holding past 2005.  In 1998 the Wine Spectator gave the wine 91 points saying:

A lovely and harmonious red. Beautiful cherry, floral and berry character. Full-bodied, with velvety tannins and long, focused berry and milk chocolate flavors. Drink now or hold.–1982 Bordeaux horizontal

With Parker bumping his rating based on a 2009  tasting all the way to 93 points and giving the wine a life extension until 2025, are you now as curious as I am?  Just leave a comment here or send me an email at awjapko@gmail.com and let’s find out together at Eleven Madsion Park, and maybe I can even convince Malcolm to join us.