Hey, I know we’ve had some technical difficulties with the ticketing for the book party, but knock wood, I think we’ve got them all ironed out now. And we’ll be officially closing the ticket window at noon Tuesday December 1st. So if you want to come to the book party, now’s your last chance! We’ll be drinking wine, eating an 8 course meal designed by Tim McKee, reading from the book, getting a copy of the book, and so on. I’m planning on it being a great night. So come!

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I love to death this story in the Philadelphia Citypaper by Felicia D’Ambrosio that investigates whether this dumb looking egg-flute-spaceship thing called the Vinturi Wine Aerator is worth $40. Theoretically you pour wine through it and it aerates it better than any mere pitcher or decanter. But the expert D’Ambrosio found said nope, not even close.

Here’s D’Ambrosio’s money-quote, from Keith Wallace, founder of Philadelphia’s The Wine School:

“It works, but no better than pouring the wine into a carafe and sloshing it about for a few minutes. Personally, I use a $4 glass Ikea pitcher. However, most folks into wine LOVE to spend money on gadgets. Their is a new one every three or four years. One year, it was a glass straw you drank from, another was a mini decanter you put on the top of the bottle, another year it was a magnet you placed under the bottle. This one has been out since ‘06, so I expect its about to jump the shark and a new one will captivate the wine drinking audience. Who knows? Maybe next year everyone will be hooking up jumper cables to their bottles of wine and supercharging the tannins.”

Keith Wallace, my new hero. As I say in my book on the topic of decanters: Save your money or drink it, decanters and similar gadgets are just devised to part you from your money. But I didn’t have space to get a quote on each one. Go D’Ambrosio! Go Wallace! Hooray for suspicion.

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I didn’t catch the news earlier this week that a leading way to battle cavity creeps is simply to drink red wine, but I can’t say I’m surprised. In a lot of ways wine is really European folk-medicine: It prevents cancer, helps digestion, is packed with anti-oxidants, phytochemicals, micronutrients, etc. etc. etc. In this case the likely good actors are compounds called proanthocyanidins. Which is hard to pronounce so I’m going to mentally file this one under: You lose, rum & coke!

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A few weeks ago Jim Norton, editor of the Heavy Table, which I admire tremendously, and I hatched an idea to host Q&A’s for one another’s books. Unfortunately I don’t think either of us realized what that meant: Doing anything for another human being is sort of impossible the week your book comes out… which is my admittedly lame excuse for not blogging about Jim and Becca’s event tonight, Sunday, at 4:30 p.m. 4:30! I just read on Heavy Table it’s at 4:30. I thought it was at 7. Shoot me. Anyway, my oversight has nothing to do with the excellence of Jim & Becca’s worthy book, “Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin”, a really well written, deeply researched, gorgeously photographed in-detail look at some of the personalities that make Wisconsin cheese the idiosyncratic and excellent world that it is. One of the things I admire most about Jim & Becca’s book is the seriousness with which they treat the subject, especially in light of how strongly the deck is stacked against all us Midwesterners: You’ll sooner get a New York editor to pierce his eye with a lobster fork than admit that anything in the Midwest is newsworthy or cutting-edge. Well, to heck with those New York editors, Wisconsin cheesemakers are some of the best in the country, and Jim and Becca have done an amazing job of capturing the excellence of this moment. If you come down to the reading tonight there will be a slideshow, a Q&A led my yours truly and lots of cheese! And if you want a one-on-one time to talk to me this might be a good one, this is Jim and Becca’s show, and while I’ll be delighted to sign books I’m definitely planning to fade away when the time is right and let these two bask in their much deserved glory.

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One of my greatest anxieties in writing my book was that I’d be a magnet for what I think of as the Gotcha-Squad of Wine Weenies. Who are wine weenies? They’re those baseball-stat-nerd-like people intent on making wine as confusing and elite as possible, because it makes them feel good. They started coming out of the woodwork today in response to my Star Tribune article.

So I feel I should just get this out on the table: Look Wine Weenies, you and I are not going to be friends. You want to be right, and I want to help the people you went to high school with have less stress in their lives when they bring wine to your house. The battle is on!

The particular salvo launched my way tonight was about Wikipedia (tech nerd + wine nerd = aaaahhh! Or the mirror…) and whether you can learn about wine from it. I say no. In my interview with Bill Ward I mentioned that you could read about Champagne on Wikipedia and come away knowing less than you did before you showed up there. I wish I had said that a little more clearly, I should have said not ‘knowing less’ but ‘unhelped and fearful’ — do wine people even know what a series of Wine encyclopaedia entries look like to regular people? They look intimidating, confusing, and like unreadable jargon.

People new to wine need to know a few basic things about Champagne: What it is, why it’s like that, and whether they like the taste of it in their mouth.

So, what is Champagne? It’s sparkling wine that’s made of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Meunier grapes grown in a cold part of France where the grapes never get very ripe and sweet. Because they never got ripe and sweet, local winemakers developed a way of adding actual sugar and more yeast to the wines in the bottle, which evened out the alcohol and had the added benefit of creating phenomenal flavors. There are a few different types of French Champagne you’ll typically run in to: Grower Champagne (made by a single estate, this will hopefully be unique and express something about the place they’re grown), vintage Champagne (made in a very good year, these tend to be the most expensive), non-vintage Champagne (made by blending off years together, this tends to be what you’ll mostly see). You’ll sometimes see Champagne called blanc de blancs, this is made only with white grapes, Chardonnay, it will be a little toastier than most, and blanc de noirs, made only with the other two, it will be a little more flowery than most. Try one of each of these styles over the next year and you will know what you like!

That, in case you were wondering, is 195 words about Champagne. That’s all you need to know until you put some in your mouth and taste it. On the main Wikipedia page the word Chardonnay doesn’t appear until, by my count and as of today, word 2,744! Word 2,744? Are you kidding me? Are you aware that people have jobs, and kids, and lives? Dishwashers to load? Health care benefit help-lines to battle?

Trying to learn about wine on Wikipedia is like asking a friend if they could give you a ride to the grocery store, and in reply that person hands you the manual to their Saab and drives away.

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There’s a chef I’ve reviewed sometimes who has been keeping a blog, on it this week he took issue with my assertion that wine priced over $80 costs so much because of issues of social status.

Says this chef: “Of course a person can always argue that to paying blah blah blah for blah blah blah is ridiculous, my grandfather used to make that same point about coffee, “paying a dollar for coffee is highway robbery!” We have all heard it a thousand times, it’s tired, and frankly to each his/her own.”

Which is nonsense. The difference between bottom shelf coffee, like, say, Maxwell House, which as of this writing goes for around $6 a pound and the best coffee in the world, say Kona at $30 a pound is a a factor of 5. (We’ll ignore weasel poop coffee because it needs ignoring.) The difference between bottom shelf wine, say Euro-a-liter jug wine and a top shelf one like Bryant Family Vineyards Cabernet is a factor of 450, and D.R.C. La Tache is what, a factor of 1,500? Maybe Kona is 5 times better than Maxwell House, but Bryant Family Cabernet is not 400 times better than table wine — not even close.

The chef continues: “In my travels I have been lucky enough to be around some bottles that were up there in price and status, a few I have even paid for out of my own pocket. At times I have cursed some of those wines as being over priced and over hyped. In other instances I have had experiences that were near heavenly, exquisite, and worth twice the price for the extraordinary memories and experiences on the palate, the nose, and the head.”

To which I responded at length, but the most relevant point I made to him is this: “I’m awfully suspicious of restaurant-insiders takes on wine price. You note you only paid for “a few” of your over-$80 bottles out of your own pocket. All chefs and restaurant people dwell in a world of non-retail prices for wine, you get samples, you know someone, you taste out of your inventory. The average American earns $45k a year and doesn’t need to feel bad about their $8 wine.”

So, why do I reprint this little spat here? Because I just remembered I’m going to hear this from chefs and servers far and wide: Because they don’t actually pay for wine with their money! They get it for free with a side of salesmanship and have to jockey in their own restaurants for social status.

Drink what you like, and don’t be bossed around by the social-prestige of price!

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I will be on the gruffly lovable sports-and-life guy Patrick Reusse’s show for a whole hour tomorrow morning, taking calls and doing I don’t know what. It’s a huge honor that they’d do this for me, as the gruffly lovable Reusse generally doesn’t do stuff like that. I’m beyond tickled. I’ll never forget the first time I did Reusse’s show, because I was so confused: Does he hate me? Is he a cro-magnon? I think it took till the third show for me to really fall for him, now every conversation seems like I’m back in my old neighborhood in Queens talking to the cop-dads of my friends, the ones who bust your balls for an hour every time you see them but would run headlong through a fire to save a stranger. Well, that’s probably too romantic, but I’m looking forward to this tremendously. 8 – 9 a.m. tomorrow, November 25th. It should be ridiculous. Oh, and proof of the running-through-a-fire thing: He’s having me on for an hour to talk about wine and he doesn’t even drink.

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Here’s the skinny on my book party — $80 ($75 for MPR members) gets you a copy of the book, an 8 course tasting menu designed by Tim McKee, and 2 glasses of Tempranillo. I remain embarrassed about how much it costs, but it costs that much because we wanted to keep a bright ethical line between Solera and me, the restaurant critic, so it’s all being done for cash. That said, if you’ve ever wondered what a James Beard Award winning chef cooks when he has a month of forewarning that a restaurant critic will be in the house, here’s your chance to know. The ticket thing was a little wonky earlier, but as of this afternoon it seems to have gotten fixed. So click away!

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I’m so excited, I’m taping my interview for Marketplace in an hour. What will we talk about? The Market for Lemons? How to drink cheap over the holidays?

I am resolved to try not to answer questions requesting specific wine recommendations, because I think when non-wine people hear “Premier Cru Chablis” it sounds like the Charlie Brown grown-up noise: “mwah mwah mwah mwah mwah” and they get nothing from it. Specific wine recommendations also violate my mission to teach people to fish instead of giving them a fish. But everyone wants them! Must stay strong…

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Looks like Amazon has given up on ever trying to sell wine to all Americans. Says Wine Spectator: “after exploring the hurdles with the long-established regulatory barriers against shipping alcoholic beverages within the United States, Amazon decided that its time and money were best spent on other projects.” Other projects like not fighting regulatory lawsuits. This doesn’t surprise me at all, though it does suck. The 3-tier, 50-state system put in place after Prohibition benefits no one except state coffers and distributors. And you could say that benefiting state coffers benefits us all — except it’s such an opaque and baroque system it leads to lots of consumers not getting access to wines they’d like and paying too much to boot. It’s not fair — and it’s forever! I’d like to end this on an up note, but can’t think of what it would be. Oh wait, I remembered. On the up-side, kittens are still snuggly!

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