The Wine for Newbies Podcast™ Blog

I know it’s not wine, but a good number of wine enthusiasts also enjoy single malt Scotch as well. If you’ve ever wondered about the science behind making single malts, Popular Science has a quick primer.

Listeners of the podcast know that I have taught a wine appreciation course at Indiana University South Bend for a few years now. I’ve always looked forward to teaching the class and introducing people to the world of wine that is out there.

Sadly, this teaching has come to an end. The powers that be at IU South Bend have decided to no longer offer the class, along with a good number of other personal enrichment courses. Why? Because they don’t make any money. While I wonder what a non-profit state university is doing making decisions about course offerings based upon profitability, I sense that the sagging economy did not help. Enrollment was down the last couple of times, and, indeed, we had to cancel the 101 class for the last two semesters due to insufficient enrollment.

Will IU South Bend ever offer the wine classes again? Who knows? It will be at least a year before the administration reviews the issue.

What’s ironic is that for these last several years I have dealt with complying with Indiana’s arcane alcoholic beverage laws and its resulting restrictions. With the efforts of a good friend who is also a state legislator, I managed to get a small amendment to our alcohol laws passed that removed almost all of the restrictions for a wine tasting course through an accredited university or college. Now I can’t even enjoy the fruits of his labor.

The host for the last few classes, a local gourmet shop called Cooking With Class, is interested in having me teach wine classes directly for it. I’m very interested as well, but there may be problems since the shop does not have an alcoholic beverage license that would be required for me to dispense wine for the classes. My research continues, but I’m not going to hold my breath that I will find any loopholes or other solutions.

It’s all enough to drive one nuts. Or at least to get a second glass of wine.

It seems like it has been months since I participated in WBW–and it has. It’s also good to be doing this once again. I really like the WBW events as they push me to try wines that I might not have considered before. It was WBW that gave me my first taste of Sicilian red wines–who knew great reds come from outside Tuscany?

Friend and fellow wine blogger/podcaster Tim Elliott at Winecast is this month’s host, and with this installment Tim becomes a member of an elite group of bloggers to host three times. (I think it’s akin to having hosted Saturday Night Live five times, but probably without the cool jacket.) For this month, Tim asked us to find an Old World Riesling. I dug through my cellar moments ago and found a few, and decided to go with a classic: Dr. H. Thanisch Bernkasteler Badstube Riesling Kabinett 2004.

Even though the wine is a few years old, it still has a nice greenish tint to it. The wine’s primary shade, however, is a beautiful pale gold. The aromas hint at some slate and green apple, and it’s the green apple that comes through on the palate. There is plenty of zingy acidity to this light/medium weight wine with a nice long finish. I believe this bottle was priced in the US $40 range, so it’s definitely not your typical Wednesday wine. (Ah, the sacrifices we make for Wine Blogging Wednesday.

In looking for more information about this wine, I ran across this article that gives a nice overview of some of the Riesling vineyards in Germany.

My hat goes off to Tim for an excellent–yes, excellent–topic, and I’m sure there will be many entries that I will look forward to reading.

I had hoped to be writing posts a little more regularly, but obviously didn’t get to do that. For the last several weeks (since March 17, actually), my elderly grandmother had been in and out of the hospital and rehab facility as she battled back from her second “silent” heart attack (the first was back in 2006). Unfortunately, when one is 94 years old, the body can override the mind’s desire. Increasing muscle weakness, various infections, and other things seemed to conspire against her. This past Wednesday, my grandmother decided that the time had come, and she passed away on Thursday night.

While I am very sad, I am also very grateful that my brother and I were lucky enough to have her around for so long. After my mother died unexpectedly back in 2000, we kind of figured that my grandmother might not make it. With simple and dignified determination, she proved us wrong. She underwent a hip replacement surgery in 2002. While it relieved her of a lot of pain, it also made it necessary for her to use a walker to get around. She had to move out of her second-story condominium into a retirement community. That was actually a great move for her because she met with and interacted with so many people that it kept her mind sharp.

After her first heart attack in 2006, my brother–a neurologist in Indianapolis–felt she’d be lucky to survive six months. Grandma again proved us wrong, going two full years without much trouble. Well, maybe that’s putting it mildly. She largely lost her eyesight as macular degeneration did a number on her. Her knees became a source of daily pain as arthritis took its toll.

In November of last year, my grandmother surprised me by agreeing that she should have her hearing examined. She was surprised to learn that she had a rather severe hearing loss across all frequencies, but she agreed to spend the $2,000+ on a set of good hearing aids. She once asked me if it was foolish since she didn’t know how long she would live. Having lived through the Great Depression, my grandmother was not one to spend money foolishly (would that her wisdom had somehow gotten through to me!). I told her that she might as well be able to hear clearly for however much time she might have left. She nodded and told me to write the check. I was damn proud of her then, and I still am today.

Grandma was a tough cookie. Her husband was killed in World War II in 1945. My grandmother was a single parent before the term was even coined. She worked as a registered nurse and raised a daughter by herself. My brother and I, along with his two children, are all that are left of her lineage. We hope we’re worthy of that privilege.

We will bury Ann Duffy on Monday, May 5, after a celebration of a funeral Mass at Little Flower Catholic Church. We’ll miss her terribly, but we take comfort in knowing that she’s with the God that she had an unshakable faith in (another quality I wish had somehow been passed along to me) and with my mother as well). We also know her passing is a relief for her, and we know she was ready to go. We have no regrets about anything.

This post turned into one far longer than I expected, and it’s probably more personal than is appropriate here. Oh well, if it offends, sue me.

Anyway, my next post will be about an interesting experiment coming up (assuming I remember to write about it). In a nutshell: no wine (or any other alcohol) for two months. Stay tuned.

In my world, cell phones are an occasionally useful annoying device. I hate the darn things, to be blunt. People go through the world talking on the cell phone while driving (and thus not paying attention to the road), while walking through the mall, and they ring at inappropriate times (church services, in the movie theater, etc.).

Cell phones are useful, however, when it comes to learning about wine. As you probably know, you have to search far and wide to find a cell phone without a built-in camera. I always thought that I’d have no use whatsoever for a cell phone with a camera built in, but I’ve changed my view on that topic.

I can use the cell phone’s camera to snap pictures of wine labels.

I’ve always advised people (sometimes repeatedly) that when they find a wine they like in a restaurant or someplace, write it down! Wine details are tough to recall, so write the information down on a card or something and stick it in your wallet.

Of course, if you don’t have a pencil or something to write on, it’s a problem. But the odds are that you do have your cell phone with you, so use its camera to snap a picture of the label. You can show the picture to the salesperson in your local wine shop, or you can transfer the photo to your computer to begin collecting digital wine labels (so much easier than getting the labels off of the bottles!).

Now, I wonder if Catherine will let me get an iPhone (with its wonderful connectivity to iPhoto) before our trip to Epcot’s annual Food and Wine Festival in October.

Good morning!

I think I’ve found all of the posts where the spammers had snuck their, um, “wares” into the post. It looks like for a while it was mostly the prescription drug spam, but then it took a decidedly negative turn recently as the porn pushers got in on the game. 

I’m not entirely sure how it happened, but I discovered that somehow the spammers had created a couple of user accounts for themselves. Whether they exploited some hole in the WordPress software (which I’ve since updated to the very latest release) or they cracked the account password, I don’t know. Either way, those user accounts have been deleted, and the account password issue is being worked on. (For some reason this release of WP won’t let me update the password on accounts…strange…I may have to rebuild a database somewhere.)

Anyway, please rest assured that this podcast and blog are about wine, and only wine. I don’t push drugs, nor do I push porn.

Finally, one commenter asked about the podcast episodes and possibly illegitimate links. Anything you get from the iTunes Store is legit. Also, the links you see that include “podtrac” or “libsyn” are legitimate. The podcast episodes live on libsyn.com’s servers, and podtrac is a service that offers the player as well as stats tracking. 

So, get back to your homework!

I owe readers and subscribers a huge apology. And I didn’t even know about it.

A reader alerted me this morning to the fact that some porn and other spammers have been inserting, well, crap into the blog posts. They wouldn’t show up on the blog, but they were in the FeedBlitz emails.

Ugh.

So, I’m working on this immediately.

Lousy spammers.

Again, I apologize.

Wine Spectator online has a good rundown on the problem of wine-caused headaches (and not the morning after you knock down a double magnum by yourself type of headache).

The question comes from left field: “I know why you drink wine, but why do you drink wine that way?” The questioner, of course, refers to the looking, swirling, sniffing, and several other “things” that we wine enthusiasts do when enjoying our favorite beverage. Clearly, we can all learn how to taste wine, but rarely do we give much thought to why we taste wine.

Perhaps we engage in swirling and sniffing before sipping because it’s what all of the other wine enthusiasts do. After all, no one wants to look like an obvious amateur at a wine tasting or in the company of a wine aficionado. This answer seems to be fair enough, but it leaves something to be desired. The “everyone else does it too” explanation amounts to little more than an excuse, and does not provide a good reason for doing what we do. In other words, why do we swirl and sniff when enjoying wine at home, with no one else around?

After giving the question some thought, I think I’ve come upon a real answer: why not? This response is not meant to be flip, although it might appear that way. In life, there are some things that are worth doing—somewhat akin to the principle that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. We could certainly drink wine without giving it a second thought, and there are plenty of people who do. For those of this mindset, wine is just another beverage, no more special than water, soft drinks, or coffee. But to drink wine in this manner is to miss so much of what the wine has to offer.

Would we think of visiting the Louvre without spending a bit of time in front of the Mona Lisa, trying to read the expression on her face? Would we be satisfied with listening to a twenty-second clip of Mozart’s Requiem? Of course not. When presented with the opportunity to study something great, we spend moments, minutes, or maybe even hours in the process. It’s part of what makes us human, it’s part of what it means to be alive.

A plaque hung near the back door of one of my parents’ houses many years ago that reminded the viewer to stop and smell the flowers. All of us rush around each day, chasing after kids, doing household chores, meeting billable hour requirements, and more. Rarely do we have the chance to sit and simply live. When we have a glass of wine in front of us, we could gulp it down like a common glass of iced tea, or we could slow down and actually enjoy it.

This, friends, is the answer I’ve come up with: we partake in the wine tasting ritual of looking, swirling, smelling, sipping, and then describing the wine because by doing so, for those brief moments, we live. We savor the gift given to us by the workers in the vineyard, the winemakers, the bottlers, the drivers who deliver the cases to our local wine shops, and everyone in between. To do any less is to share the attitude of the archetype American tourist who passes by the Mona Lisa and says, “Let’s keep moving. I’ve seen it on a postcard.”

Your homework assignment for this week is to simply live, and you get extra credit if you persuade another person to begin living as well. In the meantime, share your ideas about why we taste wine the way we do in the comments.

As regular readers know, I’ve taken quite a bit of time off here to enjoy a bit of a sabbatical from the blog and things related to WFN. I’ve enjoyed the time off, and I think it’s time to get back into being a hardcore wine enthusiast again.

With that in mind, I plan to do a few things. First, I plan to get back into regular participation in Wine Blogging Wednesday events. Second, I plan to start a series of articles to accompany the podcast episodes–not necessarily show for show, but a logical progression of topics that hopefully can evolve into a book.

As for the podcast…I’m not sure what to do with that yet. Maybe we’ll start up Volume Two and cover topics that we haven’t touched upon so far (which would be mostly about different wine regions). Maybe we’ll go back and re-record the episodes to eliminate certain annoyances. I still believe firmly that podcasting has a role in wine education, and given that some 44,000 episodes were downloaded in the month of March, 2008, alone, obviously a lot of people agree.

Look for the first article in the near future. I’m working on it (and revising it) even as you read this.

This is simply beyond the pale.

As regular readers know, interstate shipment of wine is a crazy mess. Now it appears that Wine.com is tattling on sellers who are bending the rules a bit or working their way around the rules.

Vinography has the details. They should be read.

From my perspective, Wine.com is being a bully on the playground. And I’m going to spread the word about their tactics so consumers know who they are dealing with.

I should also note that I’ve no use for Wine.com anyway since they apparently feel Indiana is not a market worth getting into.

The Wine For Newbies Forums are alive, once again.

Spammers, stay away.

I’ve received some emails over the last couple of weeks encouraging me to continue podcasting. There’s nothing like people asking for more to boost one’s self-esteem a bit!

I’m certainly open to the idea, but I’m not sure I want to do some random, unfocused, rambling podcast.

One idea that occurred to me would be to create a series of screencasts (and enhanced podcasts for iPod users). What I would do is create a lecture on a particular topic and have it presented along with a PowerPoint-type presentation. Basically, between the voice track and the slides, it would be like attending a class. You wouldn’t be able to listen to it in your car, of course (well, you could, but you’d miss out on the visuals if you’re driving).

The length of each episode would have to be fairly short, maybe 20 minutes, because I would anticipate that lots of people don’t have an hour that they want to spend sitting in front of their computer or staring at their iPod screen. I figure it’s easier for people to find 15 or 20 minute chunks of time.

Alternatively, I could do an 45-minute or hour-long episode with chapter markers or something so people could stop and return to it as their time permits. That might be a better solution.

Would this be of interest to people?

I’ve also had various emails over the time of the podcast telling me that I’m crazy for giving the podcast away for free. Probably so–but I was doing the podcast more for my own entertainment and as a hobby, so making money wasn’t a priority. (Plus, it was fun to beg annoyingly during some of those earlier episodes!) But, as I think about this screencast idea, it seems to me that there would be a lot more work involved, and I’d want to take the time to make sure it was done right. So, I think it would be reasonable to charge some small amount, maybe two bucks for an hour’s worth of material. This issue opens up all sorts of questions about e-commerce, and I don’t know the first thing about implementing that, but that will be something I need to explore.

Finally, the infamous WFN forums. I hope to re-open those this weekend and see if they live or die. I’ll give them a month or two and evaluate the situation then. There’s no cost in having them there, but if no one is using them, I think it looks bad to have them sitting there with no activity for several months.

Anyway, I hope your 2008 has started off well and you’re enjoying some good wines so far. We had a terrific Pine Ridge Cabernet Sauvignon Rutherford 1997 last night that was at least a 95 point wine. Unfortunately, the bottle didn’t last long enough.

I like the idea Tim has here. As you may recall, I’ve bounced the idea of writing a book around, and I’m feeling inclined to pursue that a bit further. One of the comments to Tim’s post comes from someone with connections to the publishing world, and he had a couple of good tips that are inspiring.

So, we’ll see where this project goes. If nothing else, it will be a good experience, I’m sure.

It’s the evening of Thursday, December 20, and this will probably be my last post of 2007. On Saturday Catherine and I pack up the car and Molly to drive to spend Christmas in Georgia with her mom and sister. I don’t know what kind of internet access I’ll have down there (they live in a good sized city, it’s not like we’re going to a cabin in the woods–but I don’t know if her mom’s place has DSL or a cable modem), so I figured just in case, I’d offer a few thoughts.

First, 2007 has been a great year. I know the podcast sort of pod-faded before I formally announced its end–not one of my prouder moments, but I’m proud of what WFN as a podcast has done and what it *continues* to do. I had some great wine experiences in 2007, and although I lost track, I’m estimating that I enjoyed or otherwise sampled over 800 wines, and I think that’s a low estimate.

Second, it looks like we’re closing in quickly on the $60,000 figure for the Menu For Hope fundraiser. You all are simply amazing, no matter how big or small your donation. I plan to participate in this event for many years to come.

Anyway, for my loyal readers who celebrate Christmas, I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas. I missed Hanukkah, so I owe folks a big apology for that. And don’t forget to have a happy Festivus!

If I get the chance to blog between now and when I return to Indiana, I will. If not, we’ll catch you next year!

Cheers to all and best wishes for an outstanding 2008.

As I write this, we’re $60 shy of hitting the $50,000 mark. Fifty thousand dollars–it’s amazing. In the next 36 to 48 hours I’m hopeful we’ll see another $10,000 or more come in so we can at least match last year’s figure.

There are a lot of wonderful prizes out there for you to bid on, and I hope you will. Even if you’ve already bid, think about tossing in another $10 or $20–every little bit will help the children in Lesotho.

We wine and food people tend to be fortunate–those living near the poverty line just don’t have the money to spend on good wine and great food. In a religious context, I’m reminded of U2’s Bono, who used to offer a prayer before launching into Where The Streets Have No Name–”What can I give back to God for the blessings He’s poured out on me?” (It comes from Psalm 116.) Whether you believe in God or not, the principle is a good one. This year, forego that extra restaurant meal or bottle of wine and give. It WILL make a difference.

The wine labels confront us all the time: spätlese, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and so on. Not being fluent in any languages besides English (as listeners well know!), I often have some difficulty in pronouncing certain wine names and other information on the labels.

Today I ran across an interesting web site: Mango Languages. With this site, you can study about a dozen languages for free, and it’s really well done. The lessons are slow, repetitive, and the audio is clear–the perfect combination for making sure you learn the material, not just gloss over it so you can forget it later.

Did I mention it’s FREE?

Mango has some premium features, such as downloadable mp3 files, but there’s a lot here for free. You may not become fluent in a language, but you’ll be more comfortable with pronunciation.

The good folks over at Fork & Bottle are the hosts for WBW 41. The first theme for 2008 will be white wines from the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia region of Italy. Outstanding!

Jack and Joanne have put together a great primer on the qualifying wines, and I hope to supply more information in the next few days.

In the meantime, head out to your favorite Italian-savvy wine store and grab a bottle of two. These are not the easiest wines to find, so you’d be wise to get started now–January 16 will be here before you know it!