A good article from the Wall Street Journal food and drink section on what to look for on the wine label. The advice? Be sure the wine isn’t too old, doesn’t have too much alcohol, and stay away from what they call “critter labels.” Read it here…
An interesting article, which mentions wine marketing, at Courant.com includes this paragraph about the power of Yellowtail’s label.
Anand Palani, owner of Gillette Ridge Wines in Bloomfield, says Yellow Tail customers are loyal enough that he can tuck the wine toward the back of his store. Yellow Tail fans will take the time to find it, and in the process, eyeball several other wines that they might purchase on impulse.
Interesting. Click here for the full article
Quotes, like wine, are all about context. Remove the context, and you’re left with nothing. With wine, if it’s good enough, lack of context might not matter. With words, sometimes it’s damn funny. You be the judge– here are the quaffable quotes from the month of November with links to their original context.
“get ye to a winery” was a playful reference to Hamlet…
“there’s more to wine than kangaroos” poked fun at the Yellow Tail community…
“Thanksgiving is not a time to compress, it is a time to de-compress” just came out like that…
“when you send Aunt Rabbina to the liquor store, tell her to look for penguins” another poke…
“I purchased the Chardonnay, because the label has a tandem on it. (Oh, like you’ve never bought a bottle of wine based on the label, c’mon).” labels are fun, so what if they’re not high brow…
“The sport of bicycling is, after all, a social activity wherein one connoisseur meets with another and they “expert” with each other for a while about their expertise.” looping words like this in formal arguments is known as begging the question…
“Any one up for a contest of first empty glass? I’ll be the guy on the bike.” when we discovered a wine company with the word tandem in it…
“Knob Stoppers (does that sound dirty?)” in the write-up of wine stoppers made of vintage door knobs…
The brilliant part of the Thanksgiving meal is that it is… well … the Thanksgiving meal. Think buffet: the word buffet originally refers to a piece of furniture, and is currently taken up to signify a meal served on that same long piece of furniture — the buffet line. Thanksgiving is great because you might just need an extra piece of furniture to hold all your dishes of mashed potatoes and pumpkin pies. If you’re hosting Thanksgiving, you might even need another table for your wines.
Yes, that was wines, plural. Wine.com has a page recommending bubbles for toasts, a red for the main course, and some overpriced dessert wine. Nope. It’s Thanksgiving, sure you’ll want to put a modicum of thought into your wine and food pairing, but you’ll be with your family, friends, fireplace, cat, television; Thanksgiving is not a time to impress. It’s a time to de-compress.
Comfy loafers, warm house, good company. Use this coming holiday to re-acquaint yourself with some old standbys when it comes to your wine selections. We will make one recommendation here at Wine and Wheels: get the same number of bottles as the amount of guests you plan on having, and vary the selection. (Because, as Mark Oldman says, “running out of wine is the cardinal sin of entertaining”). Other than that, your traditional or non-traditional Turkey, Tofurkey, or Quorn Roast with all the fixins’ will have enough variety and choices that — gasp — any wine will work.
Print this list, and take it with you to the local wine shop:
Reds
Whites
Other
Be adventurous! Despite what your Uncle Jimmy thinks, there’s more to wine than kangaroos.
Well the weekend is here and we will all, hopefully, have our fun, our sun, and our projects. What’s that? You need something to do? Bring out the power tools, here’s your first project:
Over at the Blue Collar Mountain Biking site, they have a great post from a little over a year ago on how to build your very own ‘blue collar bicycle stand.’ I modified the support structure a bit, and added a few more bolts here an there, and that’s it. It should be enough to hold a light-weight tandem for some simple tuning of brakes and spokes. And, most of all, it was fun. You may download the plans for this project here, or view them as a full resolution image. What’s that you say? You need a wine to accompany your build-a-tandem-bicycle-stand project?
Might I recommend the politically-savvy and well-branded 2004 Red Bicyclette Chardonnay? Chill it deeply, that is, deeper than you normally would because you’ll be in the sunshine, out doors, working on this bike stand. Fitting and apt for your project is the wine label, although this time we here at wineandwheels.com did not purchase the bottle because we have a bad habit of prejudging a wine by its label. Nope. This time we bought it because, well, we’re American and it has the word “bicyclette!”
Gerry Glasgow, the vice president of marketing for E & J Gallo Winery, upon traveling to France with other Gallo executives comments on the almost 5,000 photos they returned with:
Red bicycles seemed to recur in the pictures [...] but red bikes sounded American, so it became Red Bicyclette. French, but easily translatable (emphasis added).
Baguettes in a handlebar basket, a bicyclist in a beret, and a little dog (with a baguette in its mouth, how bone-afied!) were added and a brand image was born. Finally, as Frank Prial, no stranger to the catch phrase wrote last year for the New York Times:
Studies have shown that 90 percent of all wine drunk in this country is consumed within 30 days after it is purchased, indicating that aging and cellaring are irrelevant for most consumers. Like Yellow Tail, the new Gallo line of French wines, Red Bicyclette, counts on a catchy name and clever packaging – not wine snobbery – to make sales.
So fear not if this isn’t in your cellar; get ye to a nunnery winery and pick up a bottle for the weekend.
