Goldman Sachs loan backed by 15,000 fine wines

Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs has accepted some 15,000 fine wines as collateral for a loan to a former high-ranking executive.

Intensity, Power, Balance 

Numanthia brings back the history and culture of Spanish winemaking. The town 2000 years ago resisted the siege of the Roman legions who conquered the whole of Europe. Drawing a parallel to the history of the lands, these vineyards in Toro resisted the phylloxera outbreak that affected vines all around the region.

What Wine Means in Mad Men

If one were to think of drinking and Mad Men, you’d think booze. But there’s another side to the drinking too: wine.

Over the course of six seasons, wine has made inroads into Mad Men’s cocktail culture, and Alyssa Vitrano has been tracking it along the way. Vitrano is the proprietor of Grapefriend.com, which tries “to teach people a little bit about wine through what they’re seeing in pop culture,” by tracking everything from what Justin Timberlake served at his wedding to the number of bottles that appear in each season of Mad Men.

[Read more about wine on Mad Men and its impact…]

Interactive Feature - Italy Wine Regions

Learn about each of Italy’s 20 wine producing regions with this interactive feature by OperaWines

OperaWine 2013

Adler writes: “I’ve often said that if forced to choose a single country, I’d drink the wines of Italy for the rest of my life, forsaking all others. It wouldn’t be an easy choice, mind you, but in that proverbial gun-to-the-head scenario, I could certainly face my fate with a certain amount of equanimity, knowing I could range from Lombardy to Sicily for the rest of my life.

Yes, I love Italian wine, and I’m not afraid to admit it.”

The concept of OperaWines2013 is simple: choose the best 100 wineries in Italy, and have them each pour their best wine.

Simple in concept, difficult in execution. This is, after all, Italy.

Wine Spectator is called in to make those tough choices. ”We review twenty thousand wines a year, of which three thousand and growing are Italian,” said Thomas Matthews, Executive Editor for Wine Spectator. “Why would we partner with an entire country to put on a wine tasting event? We’ve never done this before. Americans love Italy. It’s the first destination for American tourists. It’s the #1 most imported wine in the United States. Italian wine and food are in fashion now. I live in Brooklyn and the whole restaurant scene has become Italian there. We’re not just in the good old days of Chianti, every corner of the country is fascinating to Americans.

[Read more on VinItaly & Tasting Notes here…]

Angélus and Pavie ‘Wrong’ to Raise Prices

Saint-Emilion estates Château Angélus and Pavie were wrong to put their prices up this year, according to one of their neighbouring estates.

 Jean-Michel Laporte, director of Château La Conseillante in Pomerol, said he didn’t understand the châteaux’s decision to put their prices up following their dual promotion to “Premier Grands Cru Classé A” status.  

“I disagree with their move to raise their prices this year when everyone else was lowering theirs – Angélus sold but Pavie didn’t, so it backfired on them,” he said.  

Laporte believes the ongoing court battle over the St-Emilion Classification might eventually result in the entire region being declassified.

“It won’t really matter for the top two though, because everyone will remember that Ausone and Cheval Blanc were the original class “A” châteaux.” 

Taking the opposite tack to Angélus and Pavie, Laporte revealed that putting La Conseillante’s 2012 prices down 20% on 2011 helped the wines sell out en primuer this year, while other châteaux struggled to sell.  

“We were very lucky as we were one of the few Bordeaux châteaux to sell all our wine this year, and the wines have already been sold on by the négociants.  “There was a big take up from our key merchants – lowering our prices on 2011 definitely helped,” he said.  

In April, Angélus released its 2012 vintage at €180 a bottle ex-négociant, 30% up on 2011’s €138 bottle price and a staggering 205% up on the 2008 price of €59 p/b.  Pavie also released its 2012 vintage at €180 p/b, a 58% increase on the €114 bottle price asked for in 2011.

Top 10 wines in the UK Press

- 5 being Italian!

Carmenère and Cabernet Sauvignon may steal the headlines, but Chile’s wealth of diverse terroirs is helping to raise the profile of other styles, from old bush vine Carignan to cool climate whites.

[Read on…]

The Different Types of Wine

As Greek as the Sea

Why should anybody who cares about what they eat and drink settle for familiar and icy rather than something full of character? Skip the insipid wines. Go right to good bottles. Discriminate.     

The parallel universe of provocative Greek wines, made primarily from   moschofilero, roditis and assyrtiko, are very much an available reality, offering a wonderful trove of wines that can be stimulating, even riveting, and rarely boring. 

‘Red Obsession’ Documentary Traces China’s Bordeaux Boom

In March 2011, Warwick Ross began shooting “Red Obsession,” his new documentary about China’s impact on the Bordeaux market.

It was good timing, he now acknowledges, having captured the height of the wine boom. “The arc we saw over the rest of the year was Shakespearean in proportions,” he said in an interview. “There was arrogance, greed and hubris among the French. We had no idea it would unravel like that.”

Bordeaux growers, boosted by demand from Chinese wine collectors, were charging higher prices than they ever had, but the buying stopped in 2012. Prices plunged more than 20% and wounded French pride in one of the country’s most iconic industries.

Mr. Ross, who owns a vineyard in Australia, traveled to China five times for the film, visiting both growers and collectors to see how the Chinese were learning how to drink and make wine. “Red Obsession,” narrated by Russell Crowe, screened last month at the Tribeca Film Festival and will open in the U.S. later this year.

Mr. Ross spoke with The Wall Street Journal about China’s influence, the bursting of the Bordeaux bubble and working with Mr. Crowe. 

A Wine For Wall Street This Season, “The Prisoner”

The label of this award winning wine, The Prisoner was named after Goya’s etching, La Petite Prisonier.

Electronic Nose better than Human’s 

A group of Swedish and Spanish engineers have invented an “electronic nose” capable of detecting fruit aromas more effectively than a human.

Using its 32 sensors, the device, which the researchers claim is more sensitive than a human nose, can currently only distinguish between the odors emitted by chopped apples and pears.

“The fruit samples are placed in a chamber into which an air flow is injected that reaches the tower with the sensors, which are metal oxide semiconductors that detect odorous compounds such as methane or butane,” said researcher José Pelegrí Sebastiá.

Software is then used to gather real time data and the information is processed through classification algorithms.

The results can be viewed on a 3D graph that distinguishes between the apple scores and the pear scores.

The study, published in the “Sensors and Actuators A” journal, is the starting point for research the team is involved in to develop multisensory systems that increase the capacity to differentiate complex mixtures of volatile substances.

Sebastiá believes the technology could one day be used in the wine industry to distinguish between grape varieties and recognise a wine’s vintage.

However, the news has been met with skepticism from winemakers.

“The human nose is amazingly sensitive and can detect whether or not something smells good; I’m not sure how you could program a computer to do that,” Daniel Baron, chief winemaker at Silver Oak Cellars in the Napa Valley, told TechNewsDaily.

He did concede however, that the electronic nose might come in useful when winemakers lose their sense of smell through a head cold.

“If I get a cold in January all work stops. Maybe with a mechanical nose I wouldn’t have to worry about it,” he said.