Chickens are this: members of petting zoos, and historical attractions. I believe people used to keep chickens as pets before dogs and cats were domesticated. This tradition is still kept alive in Ethiopia where a dinner quest is twice as likely to meet a chicken roosting above his or her head before he’d find anything that most Westerners would consider edible (although I assure you the wot is good.)

Generally, most Westerners also have a similarly primitive idea of what a chicken is. Pinkish cuts of various geometrical shapes that come shrink wrapped and arrayed in yellow styrofoam trays at the supermarket is the generally accepted theory. So it was with this general perception of the most common fowl on the planet that sent me to the kitchen, knife in hand, prepared to live as deliberately as modern life would allow. (Read more)

So head o’er to Suburbanwino.com to read the rest of the post, and leave some hate mail for yours truly.

This Saturday, 5 February, on Waitangi Day Eve, I’ll be celebrating New Zealand Wine Day at Kenmore Live Studio in Chicago, hosted by Jess from Wine Channel TV and Complexity. There will be 59 different wines from 21 different wineries paired with New Zealand cuisine prepared by Mike from Chicago’s own Sunda.

Master of Wine Alstair  Mailing from Villa Maria will be there, and you can come, too! Sorta, at least you can watch the event live on Facebook.com/NZWineDay and follow the discussion using the hashtag #NZWineDay.

I’ll be live blogging at the event on Facebook.com/Brokewino and on Twitter. I’m looking forward to trying some bitchin’ Sauvignon Blanc, and hopefully some Riesling, Gewurz, Pinot Noir, and maybe even a Bordeaux blend or two. We’ll see what surprises are in store. Hope to see you there, or at the very least, on the interwebz.

There is a lot of talk about “millennials” with the suits.

What do they buy!? Don’t they just download everything off bittorrent? Maybe we make a reality show where kids buy our products, in real time!

So I though I should give my two cents because I am a “millennial,” according the the stodgy textbook definition, and the majority of my day to day interactions are with other “millennials,” so that makes me something of an expert on what “millennials” like, I should assume.

This is what we like: alcohol.

But seriously, in all seriousness, if I were forced to make one assertion it’d be this: we are what we eat.

I grew up listening to punk music and trying to be “punk,” as best as a middle class kid from middle Georgia can. It was about music, and a style, but I think it was much more about belonging. If I went up to Atlanta, I had friends. If I visited family in Chicago, I would find someone to chill with. And we’d be best friends. Punk was a shared backstory: Darby Crash, Kurt, Sid, Anti-Flag, these were our Biblical heroes. We were all on a pilgrimage toward such glorious tragedy.

I only wore chucks, not because I thought they were cool, or because they were the standard in punk footwear, but because they were a part of who I chose to be. It’s lifestyle marketing really. Maybe it’s always been this way. Sorry for the bore.

Here are some links that shouldn’t disappoint:

• Our friend Jess from Wine Channel TV gets some love on Reuters “Jessica Altieri, 25, is a typical millennial: aggressive, adventurous, skeptical and a wine drinker. And as the founder of Wine Channel TV, she is trying to make the snooty world of wine tasting more appealing to her generation.”
• Steve Heimoff on the I-Thou relationship with wine “…when I taste a wine, I’m not looking for anything. I’m opening myself to whatever the wine wants to say to me. I don’t mean to anthropomorphize wine, but wine is a living thing that expresses itself in complex ways.”
• Joe from Suburban Wino praises the virtues of Tequila “It’s sort of like the Biblical story of the loaves and fishes, except in a bar, and you’re there, and you’re drunk. Jesus is probably there too, and he’s disappointed in you. But he forgives you. I’m thinking Jesus is pretty good like that. Or maybe it’s just some biker with long hair and a beard. Yep, just like that, you’ve drank too much tequila. It happens that way every time.”
• RP and Me, a tribute to HST on Lousy Grapes “Last night I had a dream that Robert Parker was a stark-raving mad lunatic, who was hell-bent on killing me using strong drink and hard drugs mixed in with demo-derby style driving, and frankly, now I have way more respect for him.”
• Musings on a January without alcohol on The Awl “I can unequivocally say that having a 22 oz. bone-in ribeye with lobster mac-and-cheese absolutely SUCKS DRY ASS without a martini to start, several glasses of hearty red wine and a nice port to finish.”

If your liver emerges from January victorious, you’ll receive a $25 gift certificate toward the 80 Sips Around the World tasting (making it $50 if you purchase in advance) held in May at the Museum of contemporary Art, and also be entered to win $100 gift certificates to each of the participating restaurants.

The restaurants you’ll be visiting are an interesting smorgasbord of styles from the Michelin adorned Naha, to the eclectically modern Hub 51, to the trendy Gilt Bar and it its brand new sister, Maude’s Liquor Bar. Thank god the Cheesecake Factory didn’t sneak its way in.

Head over to Bottlenotes to sign up, and after (!) tasting your sexy six, inscribe your tasting notes upon thars. There is an app for you i*hone users, and unfortunately no love for those of us with a bitchin’ Android phone. Doesn’t matter.

Anyone planning on making a go at it?

I’m doing this because that shit’s impressive. Especially when I’m tasting wine, and people want to ask me stupid questions like, “How old are you?” and “So you’re a blogger, eh?” Look, bro, I’m just here to get a swig of this Masi right here, and, uh, just gimme a pour of the ’04, please!

The hair serves as a bit of a misdirection. Perhaps people will think I’m homeless and it’s best to leave me alone lest I pull some Gypsy magic on their wallets. So I’m more than willing to offer up 25 gallons or so in the name of beauty and intellectual space.

The Wine Spectator Top 100 = wine pr0n

But in all seriousness, as the trade tasting season begins I get an opportunity to try a lot of wines, some of them that aren’t as available to the average consumer as others. So, naturally, I have begun to think about wine porn. Wine porn is made up of wines that are declared awesome by experienced taste buds, and if the wines weren’t already nigh on impossible to obtain, they most certainly are now that everyone knows how badass they are.

Perusing the new Wine Spectator Top 100 issue, I was pretty interested in the Classic Scoring Releases of 2010 list in the middle. One $400 Riesling in particular, scored 96 points, caught my eye because its production is an infinitesimal 6 cases. The bottles are only 375 mL. That is a total of, since you’re probably American and don’t “get” the metric system, seven gallons. To put it in layman’s terms, about the water usage of a three minute shower.

I’m being completely unfair in this description, I’ll admit. This Riesling made by Gunderloch is a Trockenbeerenauslese, a qualification for extremely ripe grapes that have literally rotted on the vine. The culprit fungus, botrytis cinerea, is a picky mother that only bothers to show up in rare vintages, but in its ashen path it leaves the finest flavors and aromas your olfacto-gustatory could ever hope to experience. It only makes sense, then, that there will barely be any available in the first place, and what is will be damn expensive.

A vinous sweet spot

But it has been heavy on my mind recently about how much attention is payed to wines that a, aren’t really available (ahem, Wine Spectator. cc. James Suckling) or b, aren’t really going to be bought by anyone. Because let’s be honest, how many wines over $40 are really purchased in the U.S.?

What I really think is that there’s a sweet spot in wine pricing, I’ll arbitrarily say $12 to $35 U.S., where you can find juice that even at the high end is within striking distance of most people’s wallets, but still can offer up plenty examples of liquid art. I want to devote my life to that.

So, I guess if you still need a little wine porn to kickstart your evening, go take a 3 minute shower and pretend you’re bathing in the entire world’s supply of delicious Gunderloch Riesling Trockenbeerenauslese Rheinhessen Nackenheim Rothenberg 2008 (hint: once you’re done pronouncing that mouthful, it’s prolly time to get out.)

In a column titled “No, There’s Not An App For That,” Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, author of Drink This: Wine Made Simple, expressed her consternation over always being asked to recommend her favorite iPhone wine apps. She wonders, “Would you rely on a computer program to help you pick out eggs?”

Her argument is that personal experience is the undisputed heavyweight champion in making good wine choices, and there aren’t any shortcuts. You can’t find a fancy computer program to clean your room any more than you can find one that will find one that can tell you exactly what you like. But in all fairness to the American consumer, most people are rarely confronted with more than a handful of egg options, but wine? You have more options at a beer-flinging Chicago Cubs game. And if there’s an official consumer credo about wine, it’s certainly this: “We’re confused as hell.”

Read the rest of this article on the Wine Crush Blog

The path to being a wine rockstar is littered with dead sentences, you literally need to read as much as you drink, and you need to be drinking a hell of a lot. There’s important stuff you gotta learn, like the difference between le Chambertin and simply Chambertin. You don’t want to be the fool making that mistake in a crowded room, geez!

There are the obvious classics: Hugh Johnson’s World Atlas of Wine, Jancis Robinson’s Oxford Companion to Wine, and a personal favorite, Oz Clarke’s Grapes and Wines. Maybe you can throw Steve Brule in there.

But interest in fine wine is burgeoning, and so are the opportunities to fill that need. New school kids like Mark Oldman, Jamie Goode, and Gary V are bringing the thunder in new ways. So I wonder, what are some of your favorite new ways to learn about wine?

The 2008 Bordeaux vintage, for instance, has set new standards in the realm of affluence. Thanks to new Chinese money and the shameless pandering of First Growth Chateau — Mouton-Rothschild tapped Chinese artist Xu Lei to design their label, and the even more banal imprinting of the Chinese character for “8″ above the label of Lafite-Rothschild — prices skyrocketed into the thousands long before the wines could even be physically held.

Stories like these have left the general impression that the only “good” French wine is expensive, and it really doesn’t help that it requires at least an Associate’s to be qualified to decipher an A.O.C. approved label. Le Wine Buff Ward Kadel, alias Dr. Xeno, counterintuitively praises the Q.P.R. (quality/price ratio) of Bordeaux:

“The big classified Growths of Bordeaux get the press, but usually the true quality can be found in the smaller, unclassified producers that would be lovingly called family-run boutique wineries if they were here in the U.S. Zingy and citrusy $8-$15 whites from Entre-Deux-Mers, minerally, balanced and complex reds from the Graves and juicier, fresh tobacco-driven red blends from the newer Pessac-Leognan A.O.C. are all wines that throw down awesome Q.P.R. for any vintage, below $35 and usually less than $20.”

And as with all the iconic mockery of Bordeaux, vintages play a large part in quality, and of course, price. With two recent Bordeaux vintages, 2005 and 2009, making the shortlist for greatest fucking wine year ever, you can only imagine how high the numbers go.

But, “These vintages don’t just mean that the $50-$500 wines are the shizzy…that quality extends all the way down to the $6 wines as well.” Ward reminds.

So the fact is value Bordeaux not only exists, but it is actually good wine. I asked friend and Chicagoan Megan Wiig, also a Le Wine Buff, for a few suggestions on quality value Bordeaux and here are a white and two reds she gave me:

• Chateau Villa Bel Air, Graves AOC, Bordeaux, France, $18 Concentrated quince paste, citrus and grassy notes. On the palate this is so mouthwatering and refreshingly tart, with hyper concentrated lemon and grapefruit peel, dense and almost chewy white!
• Chateau de Ribebon, Bordeaux Superieur AOC, France, $14 Redolent with blueberry and raspberry fruit. A nice background of earthy aromas. Very pretty red berry nose. A ton of mocha as it opens, makes you think of chocolate cake with raspberry coulis. Yum.
• Château La Graviere, Lalande de Pomerol AOC, Bordeaux France ($13) Unique nose combining lilac, lavendar and plum aromas. Rich, with dried fig, tobacco leaf, dried cranberries and grey pepper. Totally delicious! I LOVE BORDEAUX!

So leave the Chinese to make their  expensive Kalimotxos, and let’s enjoy some damn good Bordeaux we can afford.

During last Thursday’s WineChannelTV Wine Chat with Sam the Broke Wino – Jess, the host, made a comment to the effect that New Zealand sauvignon blanc defines the varietal today. The comment stuck with me for a few minutes. I like sauvignon blanc as a wine, dry or sweet. I like New Zealand’s sauvignon blancs as well. Villa Maria was mentioned as a good choice during the chat and I’ll add Kim Crawford as a high quality producer of New Zealand sauvignon blanc as well.

The terms “Old World” and “New World” are used in wine regularly, and I’m an old world guy. Europhile and Francophile, in respect to wine, big time. I use a cork screw with a wire, not some tech wand that shoots the cork out using gas pressure. I decant wine into a decanter if I think it would help the wine taste better, not pour it through some device that makes gurgling burping sounds that seemingly compels an “excuse me” upon completion.

Sancerre is a small town in central France along the Loire river valley region that produces what I believe is the definition of sauvignon blanc. Sancerre is known for elegant white wines that taste of peaches, lemon, and a distinct chalky minerality due to the grape vines being planted on limestone. It’s a wine that is particularly good with sushi in my opinion. Nigiri sushi. The real stuff. You roll people can drink PBR for all I care.

New Zealand sauvignon blanc is Sancerre’s more flamboyant new world cousin. Instead of peach and minerality New Zealand’s wine brings grapefruit flavors. In fact, GRAPEFRUIT, yelling out in all caps. And you get a side order of bracing acidity along with that GRAPEFRUIT.

I like New Zealand wines a great deal, don’t get me wrong. In my list of favorites, New Zealand regularly beats its big neighbor for wine favorites. But I’m not sure about the sauvignon blanc defining thing.

Sauvignon blanc – a parent grape to Cabernet Sauvignon by the way – is old world by birth in Bordeaux. Sancerre and its neighbor, Pouilly Fumé, produce sauvignon blanc based wine that California tried to copy (and named Fumé blanc by Mondavi,) but couldn’t. Thankfully, new world sauvignon blanc stands on its own now and New Zealand redefined the grape to fits its climate and non-conformist character. I’m old world, but I have a great appreciation for revolutionaries.