… but sometimes I think the scenario in a winery must go like this:

Setting: The staff tasting room at a winery. Gathering of senior winemaker, associate winemakers and assistants and so on, tasting the young wine of the newest vintage. Sniffing, snorting, slurping, pondering and then:

Assistant to the assistant winemaker, young guy, wearing rectangular black glasses frames, a goatee and spiky hair, a black t-shirt: “Whoa, that really sucks!”

Long silence. Unobtrusive coughs, a few discreet throat-clearings.

Associate senior winemaker: “We don’t consider ‘that sucks’ to be a reasonable comment in light of the dedication and years of experience that this venerable institution of a winery AND our senior winemaker merit.”

Assistant to the assistant winemaker: “Right, dude, sorry, I guess I forgot myself.”

Associate senior winemaker to the senior winemaker: “Sorry, chief, he forgot himself.”

Senior winemaker (everyone genuflects): “No, no, I appreciate the evaluation, youthful though it may be. I was thinking myself that perhaps this sample doesn’t quite reflect the fine heritage of our historic vineyards and institution. How many cases did we make?”

Profound silence. Much meditation, regret, remorse, misplaced hope.

Assistant to the assistant winemaker: “Uh, chief, we made approximately 548,678 cases of this wine. You know, give or take.”

Senior winemaker: “Whew, that’s a shitload of bad wine. What were we gonna sell this stuff for?”

Associate senior winemaker, snapping fingers: “Price?”

First assistant winemaker: “Um. I believe that this wine was slated for the mid-upper-premium or $15 line-up.”

Senior winemaker: “Well, hell, what’s-a-matter with you boys? Create a new label, put a retail price of $8 on it and we’ll sell the bejesus out of it. Call it, er, Clos de Firefly. You” – pointing to the assistant to the assistant winemaker – “you know anything about fireflies?”

Assistant to the assistant winemaker: “Um, well, I used to collect them in a jar when I was a kid.”

Senior winemaker: “Good enough! Write a back-story for the label. Something cute. Tap into the small-town-nostalgia-chasing-fireflies-in-summer-twilight stuff, you know, the whole Booth Tarkington-Ray Bradbury crock. We can still make a million bucks from this swill. And, hey! who made this frog-gargle anyway? It wasn’t me, was it??!! Ha-ha-ha!!!”

In other words, readers, a few hours ago, on this Sunday, I posted a “Refrigerator Door Wines” page of 12 inexpensive products at KoeppelOnWine, and while some of the wines are terrific examples of their grapes, genre and price, a few left me thinking, “How the hell did these wines get out of the producer’s door?” What were they thinking? The chief culprit? The Crane Lake Sauvignon Blanc 2005, a wine that I used to recommend for people looking for a cheap reliable white to serve at parties and receptions. Not this one, which smells and tastes like a bad blend of riesling and muscat. “Jeeze, F.K.,” you might be saying, “who cares? It’s just a bottle of $6 plonk.” Yes, but the purchaser of a bottle of $6 plonk deserves a clean, well-made, varietally true wine just as much as the person who buys a $60 cabernet.

The best wine of this dozen? The Mirabile Nero d’Avola 2005 from Sicily, at $14 a super-affordable kissing-cousin to an Amarone suited for hearty red meat entrees, like, you know, if you have a haunch of venison in the freezer or a beef brisket. Also don’t miss the Jewel Collection Firma 2004, from Lodi in California, a robust and rustic blend of barbera, sangiovese, cabernet sauvignon and syrah, a real bargain at about $9.

Since former New York Times restaurant reviewer Ruth Reichl took the top editor’s job at Gourmet magazine what now seems like eons ago — the Times is on its second reviewer following her tenure — the venerable magazine for cooks and people who love food and reading about food and cooking and restaurants has evolved into a slick, glossy production that features high-concept color photography, chic typography and giddy, breathless prose for readers with short attention spans, a sort of Cigar Aficionado for foodies. Not that the magazine doesn’t offer interesting stories and great recipes; the January 2007 issue about Italy is a definite keeper.

What bothers me is the magazine’s attitude toward its editorial content. Long gone are the knowledgeable, comprehensive and well-written restaurant reviews, mainly from New York and California, that used to grace the magazine’s front pages. And Gerald Asher, whose thoughtful essays about wine regions and grapes and styles of wine were a monthly highlight of literate good sense, has been reduced to one page of wine recommendations, good recommendations, to be sure, but a task that cannot hope to fulfill his immense talents.

More troubling, though, is the magazine’s deliberate attempt to blur the line between editorial content and advertising. Gourmet increasingly includes in each issue several “Special Advertising Sections” in which the page-formats, typography and photography closely follow the format, typography and photography of “regular” articles. Readers who miss the “Special Advertising Section” notice at the top of each page could easily mistake the ads for editorial copy. Many of the full-page color ads in Gourmet — and these are not necessarily marked “Advertisement” — could pass for the opening pages of a lavishly illustrated article.

Most egregious, however, is a direct link in the November issue — “The Restaurant Issue” — between editorial copy and advertising. Beginning on page 80 is an article titled “The Mouth That Matters,” written by Dab Barber, chef-owner of Blue Hill, the highly regarded restaurant in Manhattan. It’s an amusing account of how the kitchen and dining room staff of the three-week old restaurant dealt with the presence of William Grimes, then the chief dining critic for The New York Times, over several visits. The story is accompanied, of course, by a picture of Barber. O.K., fine.

Not so fine is that a picture of Dan Barber dominates the page on which appear in a prominent place (mid-upper-right) the words “Sustainable Excellence.” The presence of a small Moet & Chandon bottle and logo at the bottom of the page tells us that this contrivance is an advertisement. Yes, that phrase “Special Advertising Section” appears at the top, but the visual and intuitive connection between the Barber’s story and the Moet & Chandon ad is inevitable, and the story itself becomes a form of advertising, the ad an extension of the story

The traditional wall between the business side and the editorial side of journalism began being chipped away at long ago; many newspapers in this country now carry banner advertising on A1, even above the newspaper name. So perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that Gourmet so easily hands its editorial integrity over to the advertising office. O.K., so I’m not surprised. Saddened, though, and disappointed.

Image of Ruth Reichl from brandoneats.typepad.com.

… I don’t pick up a bottle of wine, but so many labels nowadays carry elaborate narratives and back-stories that are supposed to make the wine more “interesting” or “enticing” or “hip” (especially hip) that buying wine is like reading the back of the cereal box at breakfast. I mean, isn’t the idea of marketing the quick sale, rather than bogging down a potential consumer with a chapter of War and Peace (or War + Peace, as it would be today) printed in teeny-weeny type. In the time it takes to read a narrative back-label — and they mainly come from Australia and California — you could pick up three other bottles from the shelf, go to the counter, pay for the wine and be on your merry way. If one of the wines is closed with a screw-cap, you can be standing on the sidewalk outside the store slurping the juice while the poor schmuck inside is still reading the label.

We get something like this, say from the back label of what we’ll call “Capt Jack Mulligan’s Left-Handed Shiraz,” a $16 quaffer from, oh, Barossa Valley. There are a million of these wines, right, inky as midnight, 15.5 percent alcohol, and The Grateful Palate imports most of them.

“Twas a great shark took Capt Jack Mulligan’s right hand in a dawn-to-dusk struggle by the Barrier Reef. Left him with eternal pain and endless thirst, which he slaked with pitchers of red rotgut in North Coast taverns, brought him by the red-lipped wenches who shivered with fear and delight when he ran that wicked hook along their lace bodices. We know these tales because our grandfather sailed with Jack Mulligan when still a lad, and at Capt Jack’s strong left hand the boy learned the lessons of courage and endurance, and our grandfather passed those lesson on to us. We make this wine to honor the tradition of Capt Jack Mulligan and the men like him who look danger in the eye and never flinch. Braving the charge of a Great White Shark? Burying a cow’s horn filled with shit in the vineyard on a scary moonless night when the creepy-crawlies bite? Never fear, Capt Jack is here. Capt Jack Mulligan’s Left-Handed Shiraz. You don’t need two hands to drink it.”

The people who write this kind of copy are wild about tradition and heritage and ancestral pride in the land, the vineyards, the grapes, the mystique, the romance and on and on. Hence — and let’s call this one “Sonoma Vespers Cuvee Orlando Furioso” —

“Three generations ago our grandfather arrived in these rolling verdant hills, unpacked a wad of dollars from his sock, and purchased three rows of vines. By the time our father came along, the name Sonoma Vespers Cuvee Orlando Furioso was synonymous with the forces that have driven our family to the extremities of our questing craft and intelligence: Passion. Precision. Power. That’s what we’re all about. Passion, precision and power give my brothers and me, and our wives and children, and a few cousins and poor Uncle Andy and a lot of Mexicans that come in to pick the grapes, our sense of life and being, and we feed passion, precision and power into our vineyards, our grapes and, above all, our rare, perfectly crafted wines. If you don’t obsess about passion, precision and power as much as we do, if you think anything less than perfection will amount to a hill of beans, then the hell with you. You may be rich enough to buy our wine, but are you good enough to drink it?”

Is there an uglier word that “gastropub”? Yum, I certainly want to eat there. Leave it to the British, heirs to Shakespeare, Milton and P.G. Wodehouse, to invent for categorizing a restaurant a word that sounds like an alien creature that transports itself on its own slime.

… knowing that in Tennessee all beer sales in convenience and grocery stores must be accompanied by the showing of identification. All beer sales in stores. If Methuselah shows up, tottering on two canes and trailing a 10-foot white beard, by cracky, he’ll be carded! Thank goodness, now we’ll be rid of that plague of 16-year-olds trying to buy beer disguised as grandfathers.

The law, effective last Sunday, does not apply to sales of beer in bars or restaurants or to sales of wine and spirits. The law expires in a year, unless the Tennessee legislature decides to renew it. Tennessee is the only state that requires universal carding for store beer sales, but why shouldn’t the Volunteer State be a trend-setter?

Now I can understand why owners, managers and clerks in convenience stores, supermarkets and grocery stores want to cover their backs on underage beer sales. Repeated offenses can result in suspended or revoked licenses to sell beer. And beer sales are big business. According to the National Association of Convenience Stores, in 2005 beer sales in convenience stores alone amounted to $17.7.billion. I mean you could underwrite a couple of weeks of the war in Iraq for that kind of swag. And convenience store sales lag behind beer sales in liquor stores and grocery stores. Adults asked where they “most often” purchase beer — again this is from the NACS — said supermarket/grocery stores 40.2 percent, liquor stores 24.9 percent and convenience stores 23.1 percent.

(To offer some perspective: In Tennessee, grocery stores sell only beer, not wine or spirits. Liquor stores sell wine and spirits and only within the past decade were allowed to sell “big beer” with an alcohol content over about 5 percent, that is, Belgian ales, hand-crafted, small-batch beers and so on, whose alcohol content often rises to double digits.)

Really, though, I think those wimps in the Tennessee legislature didn’t go far enough to protect the population. Why not go the limit and require identification for sales of all alcoholic beverages in all locations? Why shouldn’t the waiter demand ID from the connoisseur ordering a bottle of Silver Oak Cabernet Sauvignon in a fine dining restaurant?

Nothing, you see, will prevent teenagers from acquiring beer the way they have always done: Getting an older person to buy it for them. It’s the time-honored tradition. Carding a white-haired octogenarian in a leisure suit and Tyrolean hat won’t prevent him from making a buck buying beer for thirsty adolescents out for a thrill. In fact, I think I’ll go loiter outside my neighborhood 7/11 and see if I can pick up some lunch money.

Image from csus.edu.

One of the sacred tenets of journalism is the strict separation between the editorial side that reports on the news and expresses opinions and the publishing side that deals with advertising, circulation, marketing and the business aspects of a newspaper or magazine. This wall is more difficult to maintain nowadays; in fact it’s a struggle in editorial to resist the onslaught of what marketing and advertising people call “monetizing the content” — yes, I have heard that depressing term presented not only with a straight face but with the eagerness with which certain people seem to await a bright future.

Anyway, a major breech in the wall between editorial and business occurs in the June 30 issue of The Wine Spectator. On page 10, opposite the magazine’s usual “UpFront: Wine News from Around the World” section, is a full-page color advertisement that features the headline “Lifestyle Collecting,” with the sub-head “Design a wine cellar to match your personal style” and a close-up photograph of a bottle of the Australian iconic wine Penfolds Grange 2001. A paragraph in smaller print discusses the concept of “The Investment Cellar,” followed by “Our Investment Cellar Recommendations.”

There’s no indication who the “our” is, but more is revealed by the choice of other wines for “investment collecting”: Beringer Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, Stags’ Leap “The Leap” Cabernet Sauvignon, Wolf Blass Black Label Shiraz-Cabernet Sauvignon-Malbec and Rosemount Balmoral Syrah. All five wineries — Penfolds, Beringer, Stags’ Leap, Wolf Blass and Rosemount — are owned by the giant Fosters corporation, which seems to own all the wineries in Australia and California that Constellation does not.

So fine, Fosters, or World Wine Estates, its division in Napa that has the ad’s copyright, is promoting five of its flagship wines for collecting. No big deal there.

But look closely at the bottom left corner of the ad, where two Websites are listed for more information. One is www.penfolds.com.

The other is: www.winespectator.com/collecting.

That’s right. The magazine that sold the ad to World Wine Estates lists its own Website on the ad. Follow the link, though, and you don’t find information about collecting or investing in wines; you only get a chance to subscribe to the Wine Spectator Website, as if there are not enough mentions of winespectator.com throughout the print magazine.

Do we have to look up the definitions of “conflict” and “of” and “interest” separately, or do you get the idea that, editorially speaking, this stinks?

First story: We go to a little Greek restaurant, oops, there’s no wine, so back into the car we get and drive about a mile to a good wine store where I shop frequently and know the people and they know me.
Clerks: Hey, Fredric!
Me: Hey, guys!
Clerks: Whaddaya looking for?
Me: Something to go with Greek food. That little restaurant doesn’t have a license.
Clerks: Hey, we love that place! But right, no wine. So, we’re thinking Rhone grapes, maybe grenache, we have this great Spanish grenache, maybe the best grenache in the store, but it’s like $24.
Me: No problem, I’ll take it.
The wine is the Alto Moncayo Veraton 2004, from Spain’s Campo de Borja region. Heavy bottle, deep punt, fancy label, obviously intended as a wine to be taken seriously.
Back to the restaurant, waiter opens the bottle, pours the wine, out comes this stuff that looks like motor oil. The wine is incredibly oaky and toasty and spicy, with super, over-the-top ripe black fruit, strident smoky, spicy and vanilla qualities. It’s like a late-harvest zinfandel channeling an Amarone, with the hotness and faux sweetness of high alcohol. I look at the alcohol content; 16 percent. What the hell does this have to do with grenache? And who in their right mind would make a wine like this monster in Spain?
What’s interesting, or dismaying, or discouraging, is that this model of exaggeration and lack of balance received rave reviews all over the place. Please, ladies and gentlemen, let’s stop the madness.
Second story: I’m in a wine store near my house, everybody there knows me well and knows that I like odd and out-of-the-way wines, I’ll try almost anything. So the clerk, a longtime wine acquaintance, picks up this Battely Sojourn 2003, from Victoria, South Australia and says, “Whoa, now this is really interesting,” which could mean, “Whoa, this is fantastic” or “Whoa, this is weird.” It’s $35, but I take the plunge.
The blend on this wine is 60 percent syrah — ok, shiraz — and 40 percent durif, a hybrid grape created in France in the 1880s by crossing syrah with the obscure peloursin. In the South of France, the grape, while resistant to disease, produced wines of no distinction whatever, though in California, most of what’s called petite sirah is actually durif; in the Golden State, the grape makes wines of rusticity, robustness and exuberance.
Anyway, the Battely Sojourn ‘03 sits around the house for a few weeks, and one day I pick it up and check the alcohol. Get this: 17.5 percent. This is really close to the alcohol content of port. One would open such a table wine with trepidation, but I wait a few weeks and finally pop the cork.
Whoa, like, no joke, this wine takes hyperbolic ripeness and the heat and sweetness of soaring alcohol to ludicrous extension and stridency, though, once again, here’s an Incredible Hulk of a wine, which I found overdone and unbalanced and actually unpleasant, that received all sorts of rave reviews for its “bigness.” Ladies and gentlemen, please, let’s stop the madness.

This just in: According to The New York Times, the European Parliament decided that “traditional vodka can be made only from grain or potatoes.” Countries with a heritage of vodka-producing, including Sweden, Finland and Poland, “had pushed for rules that would have included molasses among the ingredients allowed.” The parliament reached a compromise — which only Poland voted against — that vodka may be made from other ingredients than grain or potatoes “if their composition and origin are clearly indicated on the label,” the implication being that vodka producers in Poland want to use molasses in vodka without indicating it on labels.

Molasses! Think of it. If you ferment molasses and distill it, what do you get? Bad rum! The best rums are made directly from pure cane juice, not cane juice rendered into molasses. Why does Poland want to get into that business? And how are vodka aficionados going to feel when they pick up a highly hyped new vodka named something like “Iconic Snow” or “Icy Freeze” and the label states: “Made from Molasses in Krakow”?

One feels similarly funny about Ciroc, the French vodka made from grapes, and not just grapes but “fine French grapes” (they’re from Gaillac) and not just “fine French grapes” but “snap frost” grapes picked, we are told, just after the first “snap frost.” (What?) But think of it. Vodka made from distilled grapes? Isn’t that, like, you know, grappa? (A highly refined grappa, to be sure.)

Technically speaking, vodka is defined as an odorless, flavorless white spirit. You could make it from rutabagas, but traditionally and practically and now by law in Europe, vodka must be made from potatoes or grain, unless stated otherwise on the label. What’s next for those accommodating madcaps in the EU? A ruling that says that sherry can only be made from real grapes in Jerez unless stated otherwise on the label? That Calvados can be made only from apples in Normandy unless stated otherwise on the label?

Ironically, the EU recently honored the Napa Valley as the only protected American appellation in Europe, unless, I suppose, otherwise indicated on the label.

The picture of grain is a Getty image taken from nattierosewrites.com. The molasses label is from clendening.kumc.edu.