Update: Our visual change-over is underway!

Hello to our readers! I just wanted to write a quick note to let you all know that the entire WineEnabler.com site is about to look a lot different. We’ve been working on a redesign that is about to go live.

The site updating may start as early as tonight and will be finished by the weekend (hopefully). We welcome any thoughts you may have on the new layout, and if you have ever wanted to suggest an improvement to our site, go ahead!

Thanks, and see you on the other side.

Continuing our recent trend of food and wine pairing parties, we looked to the sea this time for inspiration, driven by the fresh red snapper found earlier that day at a local farmer’s market. For this wine and food pairing party, we decided to serve:

• Malpaque and Gulf oysters on the half-shell with cocktail sauce
• Sopressa salami
• Dates stuffed with Stilton cheese and wrapped in Serrano ham
• Baby arugula salad
• Red snapper with Provencal sauce
• Quiche with caramelized onion
• Quiche with tomatoes
• Mushroom risotto made with mushroom stock

The oysters were from Central Market on Lamar. The salami and date dishes both came primarily from Phoenicia on Burnet. Both the quiches, as well as the red snapper, were bought that day from the Austin farmer’s market downtown at Republic Square. The arugula came from Neil’s own garden. [click to continue…]

The current economic crisis has many of us cutting back on our expenses. State and local governments are also running short of cash and looking for ways to trim their budgets. So-called non-essential spending is going to be hit the hardest, and wine drinkers need to be prepared for the effect this will have on our favorite beverage.

The Times Union reported Wednesday that New York has removed support for New York Wine and Grape Foundation from its proposed budget. The New York Wine and Grape Foundation is a non-profit, public-private foundation started to “centralize and coordinate the promotion and research programs” associated with grape growing and wine production. Since its inception, the foundation has guided the New York wine industry as it adopted modern production techniques and European grape varietals. The Foundation also helped the individual wineries market their wine and the results are impressive. Today the New York grape/wine industry generates about $3.4 billion dollars per year. [click to continue…]

Michael and I were looking for an inexpensive way to enjoy New Year’s Eve. We wanted to have some fun with friends and family and drink a couple of glasses of wine, so we decided to have a wine pairing party. Our idea went like this, we pick up our newest cookbooks and select a few recipes, then dash to the store to get food and wine. We then prepare the recipes, and finally we try the pairings.

For our New Year’s wine pairing party we decided to serve boiled saltwater shrimp with cocktail sauce, dates stuffed with Stilton cheese wrapped in Serrano ham, mushroom and artichoke escabeche, beef short ribs, and acorn squash risotto.

We decided to save some time and buy the shrimp directly from Central Market on Lamar. We made the mushroom and artichoke escabeche and the beef short ribs from scratch. The recipe for the escabeche was in Paul Gayler’s book, The World in Bite Size: Tapas, Mezze And Other Tasty Morsels. The beef short ribs were prepared using a recipe borrowed largely from The French Laundry Cookbook. We bought the squash risotto at Pasta and Co as a last minute addition for a vegetarian guest. [click to continue…]

Recently at the first annual North American Wine Bloggers Conference, we had the privilege of meeting Alan Kropf of Mutineer Magazine. Mutineer is a nascent publication based out of LA, and it’s a “magazine and website devoted to beverage writing and ideas” that is aimed at a younger generation of wine drinkers.

The third issue just came out, and it largely focuses on the internet wine phenom that is Gary Vaynerchuk, of Wine Library TV. Mutineer points out that Gary is very relevant in today’s wine market, but that he’s largely been ignored by the mainstream wine media. Then, they rightly go on to question how long those at the top of the mainstream media will stay relevant, given their obvious loyalty to the old guard. Very interesting…

But what we’re really excited about is that Mutineer has included the WineEnabler.com blog their list of 12 wine blogs you should be reading. Mutineer writes that we do “a great job offering readers practical posts that they can utilize in their own wine adventures”. Given that this is largely our goal, we feel very good about this recognition. [click to continue…]

One of the challenges that wine lovers face is cellaring their wine. Many wines that are worth collecting are also worth cellaring. Some wines require only a couple of years to reach their full potential. Other wines, like Barolo may require a decade or two of aging to reach their peak. If you do not have a cellar or a couple of decades to wait what are you supposed to do?

Well, The New Scientist is reporting that Chinese researchers have discovered a way to age wine without all the cellaring and waiting. Xin An Zeng, a chemist at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, has developed a device that uses electric fields to accelerate the reactions that would normally happen slowly as a wine ages.

The electric field increases the reaction rates between alcohol and the organic acids in the wine to form esters. These esters make up many of the aromas we associate with wine. The reactions also soften the wine on the palate. Speeding up these reactions offers winemakers a short cut to barrel or bottle aging their wine before distribution, reducing costs. Micro-oxygenation is already used for this purpose, but the Zeng approach appears to be even faster. [click to continue…]

The word is out on the street that Champagne prices are set to drop. Recently, I conducted an internet search and found several vendors offering Dom Perignon for sale at prices that are below the typical wholesale Texas price. When I went to one of the local wine shops to ask about this, they pointed to the current prices on Riunart’s Blanc de Blanc. Last month, Riunart’s Blanc de Blanc was selling for about $65. This week, the same bottle is selling for $50, a price reduction of more than 20%! The price reduction for Riunart appears to be across the board, but shops with the fastest turnover will be offering the lower prices first.

Champagne producers rarely lower their prices. The brand equity maintained by the Champagne region is very strong, and Champagne producers usually manage to weather economic slow downs without much trouble. But recent news stories indicate that Prosecco and Cava are becoming increasingly popular.

I suspect most of the Champagne houses will try to hold the line on prices until after the New Year, but with Ruinart reducing prices, I think the others will have to follow suit. So, if you notice the price on your favorite bottle of bubbles suddenly drop, let us know, because the only thing better than a good bottle of Champagne on New Year’s Eve is a good bottle of Champagne bought on sale.

As the price of oil increased this past year so did interest in finding ways to reduce the cost of transporting wine. Numerous studies have shown that about 50% of the energy and cost of transporting wine in a glass is associated with the bottle.

Recently, we wrote about the appearance of Labouré-Roi’s Beaujolais Nouveau in a plastic bottle and discussed the carbon footprint of plastic wine bottles. But plastic wine bottles are a new comer to the world of alternative wine packaging. By far, the most widely used alternative package for wine is the bag-in-box, or BIB as it is sometimes called. [click to continue…]

Wine Spectator’s list of top 100 wines for 2008 is out, and there are a few surprises. Perhaps the most stunning fact is that you have to look all the way down the list to number 10 before you find an American wine. Seghesio’s Sonoma county Zinfandel placed 10th with a Wine Spectator score of 94 selling for $24.

If you look over the entire list you will find only 19 wines from the US. The US wines on the list sell for an average price of $57.47 while the average price for wines produced outside the US is $50.41.

These numbers are particularly interesting if you compare them to the top 100 from 2007. The 2007 list contained 26 wines from the US with an average price of $39.50. The average price for a wine produced outside the US was about $43.25. Given that in ’08 the dollar suffered greatly against the Euro, New Zealand Dollar and Australian Dollar (it has recovered some lately) the 16.6% increase from ’07 to ’08 in cost for wines from outside the US is somewhat understandably. [click to continue…]

Regular readers may know I’ve been living in West Virginia for the past few months for my day job. When I first moved here, I promised to explore the local wine industry and report back with my findings.

Well, to date, I’ve only written one post on The Forks of Cheat Winery, and my project could easily be reckoned a failure. But I want you to know that my lack of posts on WV wine wasn’t because I was lazy or, even worse, not drinking wine. I just haven’t really found much worth writing about. Most of the wine available in local stores from WV is country wine, made from fruit other than grapes. And I decided long before I came to Morgantown that if I was going to drink alcohol not made from fermented grapes, it was going to be moonshine, dammit. [click to continue…]