My two year old was very interested in my Syrah at dinner tonight. It’s a red wine, I told her helpfully.

“No!” she thundered back, scowling and scrunching her little face into a mask that might indicate smiling for the camera and might indicate great displeasure.

“No?” I asked.

“It’s purple,” she explained. “In a green bottle.”

“It’s purple?”

“Purple. In a green bottle.” She swept off to destroy the living room.

And you know what? She was right. It was a very purple wine. As she trundled away I considered that even if she’s the only one who feels emboldened to call the Emperor on his New Clothes, I’ll have done good work on earth.

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I had a Chardonnay round-up fall through recently and so have been drinking my research materials. My conclusion: There are many, many beautiful Chardonnays out there, but hardly a one under $15 or so retail. Are there good cheap whites under $15? Lots, and especially European country wines like Portugese Vinho Verde, and Sauvignon Blanc from all over. But the under-$15 Chardonnays I’m tasting are equal parts overly acidic and watery, fruity in a sort of shallow and thin way, and bitterly oaked. I’m not quite ready to declare out-and-out despair with the whole category, but I’m getting closer.

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When news broke this morning that Gourmet, the best food magazine ever (to which I contributed now and then) was being brought back as Gourmet Live, not a magazine, but a holy meeting point of Foursquare, Facebook, Ipads/Ipods, Twitter, and Gourmet’s back-catalog I felt sad. It wasn’t just that the concept was pathetic, though it is: Gourmet is now going to be a community of registered users who look at recipes and food ideas and earn points the more their friends look at them. It’s pathetic on many levels. For one thing, it’s so obviously buzz-word and Internet marketing firm driven (the future is social media! kids love Foursquare because they earn points! your greatest fans are your greatest marketers!) And yet on another pathetic level: It’s so two months ago: Foursquare is already waning, Twitter is too, and Facebook has something that Gourmet never will: Your friends. So it’s just pathetic on every level: Condé Nast cheated of their money, future, and their very own assets by fast-talking internet marketing firms.

But you know what’s even worse? Si Newhouse used to know what made his properties valuable: Voice. Personality. Point of View. That’s why he hired Anna Wintour, Ruth Reichl, and all. And voice, personality, and point of view are what have been eating his lunch for a decade. To wit you know what these people all have in common?:

Oprah
Martha Stewart
Paula Deen
Rachel Ray

They have in common that they’ve got a strong voice, a strong personality, and a strong point of view and they’ve been using that voice and putting out their favorite cupcake recipes. But you know what everyone has? Cupcake recipes. Here’s another list:

Better Homes & Gardens
Google
Bing
The back of the flour package

You know what they have? Cupcake recipes. You know how many cupcake recipes there are? Millions. The thing people need in life, the thing people will pay for is: Connection, validation, community. The way you create those things is through: Voice.

Here’s another list. You know what’s succeeded the past few years?
New York Magazine
Rush Limbaugh
Barack Obama
Saveur
Sarah Palin
Blogs
Aziz Ansari

You know why? Voice! Point of view! That’s what people connect to! And voice comes from people. So Gourmet got rid of their biggest asset: Their people. Ruth Reichl and all. And replaced them with the thing everyone has: The best idea of two weeks ago, and recipes.

As I said, when the news broke this morning I felt: Sad. Now I just feel sick.

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What are you doing Wednesday night? Come drink wine with the chef de cuisine of Minnesota’s finest white tablecloth restaurant, La Belle Vie, and me. Tickets are $25 for two, and you get two Riedel glasses to take home, wine, and food for your trouble, as well as that warm fuzzy feeling that comes from doing good deeds, as all proceeds go to WAMSO, the volunteer organization that supports the Minnesota Orchestra. Come!

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I was a big fan of Gazela vinho verde last summer: Refreshing, zippy, zingy, lemony, with just enough weight to balance the zip and zing and make it feel like wine and not carbonated water. And cheap! What’s not to like? I bought a case. But the bottle I tried a few weeks ago was a pale version of its former self, merely zingy, without the weight or lemony liveliness. Then this week I found a stack of Gazela rosé, and decided to give it a second chance and: Ick. Tastes like Perrier with a sprinkle of citric acid. And it’s such a pretty, lively pink color! I feel sad. I also feel like dumping some Campari in this stuff, so, toodles!

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Dinner tonight: A whole chicken on the grill, sugar snap peas from the farmer’s market, grilled bread, and 2008 Beringer Private Reserve 2008 Napa Valley Chardonnay. What a pretty, lithesome, charming wine. Just one of those bottles that you open up and suddenly your backyard dinner into something polished and memorable. The wine was really beautiful, tropically fruity, so silky it practically shimmered, with a bit of warm hazlenut and smoky oak setting it off like a gilded frame. Not too thin, not too big, not too unctuous and not too nothing, this is a wine that made me: Happy.

Thanks Beringer! Thanks winemaker Laurie Hook! You made my night. It cost $35 at release (and typically retails for around $30), and while that’s more than I typically spend I’d gladly splash out for it again, especially on restaurant wine lists, where I expect it to dwell for many years to come. Yum.

Now my only question: Drink the last glass or save it? Think I know where this one is going…

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Amusing item in Decanter quoting Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger, chief executive of the esteemed old Champagne house Taittinger (and a guy who’s probably never had a bad day of drinking in his life.)

Quoth Taittinger, the guy (not the company):

“China is the new United States. There is no doubt that it will be a strong market in 15 years. It will be much better than the US.”

Dang! And here we invented bottle service. And honeymoon suites in the Poconos with Champagne coupes for baths!

How soon they forget.

Oh, and the Viagra quote must have come in response to a question from the audience: Champagne’s only competition? “Viagra” Furthermore, said Taittinger: “We will always have the time to make love and drink Champagne, and we will do it even more.”

Indeed. I assume he means the royal we, because all us United States-types are going to be so depressed about not being the United States anymore we’ll just be drinking beer on the stoops of our sheriff-repossessed homes and waiting for The Rapture.

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Decanter reports that a pub in England has debuted the world’s first all-British wine list. I imagined this was coming, the same calciferous geographical ridge that makes the best-in-the-world wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy also underlies Britain, and comes up here and there. No really! A few months ago a British sparkling wine in the style of Champagne was awarded a prize as the best Champagne-like-wine in the world. (The world! The world!) So why hasn’t England made great wine before? Just their pesky northerly climate. Which is now heating right up, due to global warming! And now I see Salon has weighed in with a report saying France will be too hot to grow Pinot Noir, the classic grape of great red Burgundy, in 20 or 30 years. So what’s a gloomy, well read wine lover to do? I guess buy a bottle of something you love and appreciate the hell out of it—because you may well be celebrating your retirement with a Champagne flute of something unexpectedly Norwegian.

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This Sunset magazine wine-pairing feature is a great example of something that must have a stake driven into its heart.

Yeah, Moroccan barbecued lamb chops with Cabernet Franc. That’s needlessly intimidating. First of all, who makes Moroccan barbecued lamb chops? And if you did, I can think of a dozen things that would go well with them, like Syrah. Second of all, Cabernet Franc? Who but the geekiest wine geeks is going to have that on hand? At which point they don’t need Sunset Magazine to tell them what to do with their Cabernet Franc, they’ve been fretting over it for days.

But regular non-wine people read this and get the message loud and clear: Wine is super-complicated, kind of effete, and requires knowing lots and lots of foreign stuff. (What are the leading spices in Morocco, again?)

I’ve seen worse wine pairing suggestions. But not lately.

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My Wine Spectator all-access subscription is worth the hundred million dollars a year I pay for it if only so I can read gems like this from Matt Kramer, the esteemed wine critic, who took it upon himself recently to expound upon the essential “truths” of wine. Such as:

You can never understand a wine until you’ve seen where it’s grown. I mentioned this recently in a column about wines from Argentina. But it bears repeating, and expanding upon, if only because this particular truth has taken me a long time to recognize and accept.

And that’s why everyone hates wine writers. Really? A prerequisite of my drinking and enjoying wine is tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars in international travel? I mean, I know that this proposition puts Matt Kramer in an enviable, unassailable position along the lines of Matt Kramer = smart/understanding; everyone else who hasn’t taken millions of junkets = dumb/incomprehending, but why not take this to its logical end-point? How about we tell all the winemakers in all the Châteaux in France that all the Americans who haven’t been there will stop buying their wine. How would that be? I think they would rise up and pelt Matt Kramer with triaged, moldy grape clusters until he found a less pretentious, less alienating position.

Poor wine. With friends like this, who needs enemies?

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