The Gray Report

Are you a wine lover who also enjoys fantasy baseball or football? Combine your passions by starting or joining a Fantasy Wine League.

You draft wines, like players in fantasy baseball, and score points based on how many points they get from critics. Whoever gets the most points wins.

It doesn't matter whose roster of wines is actually best; it matters who scores the most points. Just as in fantasy football, you don't have to actually own the wines to score with them.

Test your score-predicting acumen by forming a league with coworkers, friends, or wine geeks you met on the Internet. It's not any less useful than fantasy baseball, and the conversations about your team will be a lot more interesting to people who aren't in your league. I'd much rather discuss your daring pick of Penfolds Grange over Screaming Eagle than listen to you whine about your need for saves.

Here's how it works.

Pre-Draft Decisions

You have to make 4 basic decisions about how to arrange your league.

1) Number of members

Unlike fantasy baseball, where you can't have more players in your league than there are actual teams, the number of players in a fantasy wine league is theoretically unlimited. However, for convenience on draft day I suggest a minimum of 6 and a maximum of 12.

2) Scoring system

I suggest using the Wine Advocate because it reviews the most wines. However, you could also use Wine Spectator, the Wine Enthusiast or Wine & Spirits; any of the 100-point-scale raters. You could also use Decanter and its 20-point scale, or you could use my and my colleagues' scores at Wine Review Online. Whatever you choose, you'll have the fewest complaints about consistency if you pick an organization with fewer tasters.

As a side benefit, you'll learn how winemakers feel when they get a big score, even from a critic they don't respect. Nobody in your league will complain about the Wine Advocate handing out 100-pointers like Halloween candy if they happen to have chosen a syrupy Syrah thus anointed. Perfect score! Match that with your Grand Cru Burgundy, sucka.

One important point: if you go with the Advocate, you have to issue a written decision on how to count a score like "96-98:" lowest, highest or midpoint. Personally I'd take the midpoint, but that's up to you. As for "97+," I never have understood what Parker's trying to say; I think it just means 97 in capital letters (NINETY-SEVEN!) and I'd count it as 97.

3) Which wines are eligible

I love allowing any wine in the world to be drafted. But when I first proposed Fantasy Wine to Mark Golodetz, a Bordeaux expert, he wanted to form a league just based on Bordeaux. That's fine: that's how all fantasy sports work, by agreement of the team owners. You could play an all-Burgundy league based on Allen Meadows' scores, or an all-California Pinot Noir league based on James Laube's scores. Whatever seems most interesting.

Fanzines are an endangered species in the Internet era. Pre-21st century, self-published magazines occasionally had outsize countercultural impact. Punk Magazine, for example, named not just a genre of music but a style of clothing and an attitude. Bettie Page endures as a cultural icon 60 years after Irving Klaw's famous photos of her ran in what were essentially fanzines.

Today, people like me write blogs like this rather than investing the money in printing an actual fanzine. Music, movies, style, all the topics that used to drive folks to self-publish are all on Blogger or Word Press now.

Loam Baby, a Wine Culture Journal, is a throwback. Written and self-published by an author who insists on remaining anonymous -- R.H. Drexel is the pseudonym -- it's a 66-page look at the winemakers of Santa Barbara County from a very cool-kids perspective.

Example: the interview with Greg Brewer, always a fascinating person to talk to, is pretty good, but the photos that accompany it are what really rock, as Brewer, wearing only a blue towel, shows off the giant octopus tattoo on his right arm.

Jeannie Cho Lee speaks to a table of sommeliers.

Jeannie Cho Lee is the author of the book and website "Asian Palate." So where do I get the notion that an Asian palate does not exist?

From her.

Lee was in San Francisco last week with Wines of Germany, trying to show us how well German Rieslings and Pinot Noirs go with the Westernized Japanese food at Ame.

The pairings were a no-brainer: Riesling goes with anything. Most interesting were Lee's observations that there are more differences between Asian diners than between Europeans -- with greater implications for wine than you'd expect.

Take Korean food. The intense spiciness and sourness of the tiny side dishes always leads me to think, first, no wine at all; maybe soju with acerola soda. But if I do have to pair wine with it, my instinct would be a sweet, low-alcohol white, like a German Riesling.

Lee lives in Hong Kong but is ethnically Korean, and her domineering father insisted on Korean food every day at home. She says Korean food has no sweetness at all, and "any kind of sugar is very jarring to our palate."

Lamberto Frescobaldi's family has been making wine for 700 years, yet he is as unabashedly New World as anyone in Tuscany. He went to UC Davis in the 1980s, entered into a partnership (since dissolved) in the Luce winery with the Mondavi family in the early '90s, and is quite thoughtful about why his company's wines today are not -- and should not be -- what they were a couple decades ago.

I spoke with Lamberto by phone recently about what Italians used to want in wine, whether his wines are better than Tim Mondavi's turkey, and other topics. Read on.

WBG: How has your family stayed in the wine business for 700 years?

Frescobaldi: We've been respectful of the next generations. One thing about the heritage, you have to think about the transfer from the previous generation that didn't blow up everything and did something good for the business as well.
You have to keep investing always. The company is the most important thing. Be modest. We don't own boats, airplanes or Ferraris, but we do own 2500 hectares of vineyards. The main focus is to have a healthy company.

WBG: Why did you go to UC Davis?

Frescobaldi: I was interested in viticulture. In an Italian university, you studied agriculture. You learned how to make olive oil, you learned to make oil from beans. The idea came from many years of how Italy was organized. A person would have some olive trees, a little vineyard, some wheat and corn and five or six cows. That was the idea of how agriculture had to be.

The Wine Institute was geared up for a major fight with President Obama before the proposed federal budget was released, because some in the administration advocated eliminating the TTB, the agency that governs alcohol.

When the budget came out, no such major change was included. There was a tiny change proposed, allowing IRS investigators to work on excise tax violations of alcohol law.

The Wine Institute was ready anyway with a letter (at left) signed by seven US Senators opposing the change. I'm not a tax expert, so I decided to look into it and find out why.

Two weeks later, I finally have the answer. I'm going to quote the email I got exactly, which I may only credit to "an administration official on background:" (but really, it's Michelle ... kidding)

"The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) in Treasury currently collects alcohol excise taxes, but they do not have the manpower to initiate enforcement investigations. Last year, both the House and Senate included funding for TTB to hire agents to enforce the collection of these taxes.  Rather than have TTB start a new agent cadre, the Budget proposes to allow existing IRS agents to enforce this provision on the behalf of TTB.  This is not a new tax, just the enforcement of an existing one, and the Budget tries to enforce compliance in the more efficient way."

That makes sense to me and I don't really understand why the Wine Institute and seven US Senators oppose it.


Nor will I. The Wine Institute refused to answer my questions about it, saying only (again "on background," not from a quotable source) that "we don't think the proposal has a chance of being approved." Cocky.

Barrel-aged cocktails are one of the most interesting developments in the nation's bar scene. I wrote about them this month for the trade publication Beverage Media Journal. Mostly, these are drinks you have to go out for, although there's no reason you couldn't make them yourself at home using the instructions for bartenders in the article. You'd just have a heck of a lot of drinking to do.

You can sample the concept by trying High West's barrel-aged Manhattan, made from the company's own rye whiskey, Angostura bitters and sweet vermouth.

The idea of aging a cocktail is to meld the flavors, and it works very well in the "The 36th Vote." The most noticeable characteristic of this drink is the smooth mouthfeel. It's very lightly sweet on the palate, with the vermouth flavor at the fore. The rye, normally a fairly strong taste component, is detectable mainly after the finish, along with a hint of pepperiness. It starts sweet and finishes dry.

People often drink Manhattans as an aperitif, and this would work well, but I have found I like it after dinner, perhaps because digestion makes me lazy. Sure, I could probably round up the ingredients and shake up a fresh Manhattan. Or I can just pour a little of this over ice. It's more complex than sipping whiskey, yet at 37% alcohol, it's almost as potent.

At $57 suggested retail price ($45 at the store I found below), this bottle is not cheap. But consider what the cost of a call-brand Manhattan is, especially with rye from High West, Utah's finest distillery ("the 36th vote" refers to the vote Utah, of all states, cast to end Prohibition.) You'll get about 15 single cocktails from the bottle. In my dreams, an airline would carry this stuff. But then, in my dreams, I can fly. Especially after three of these.

You can order a bottle here.

Read the Beverage Media Journal article here.

Colman Andrews, 67, could be among the old curmudgeon class of food writers.

He could have gone off to pasture with his 6 James Beard Awards for food writing when Gourmet magazine folded in 2009, ending his stint as restaurant critic.

Instead, Andrews is now editorial director of TheDailyMeal.com, a website that is as modern as food media gets -- and I don't mean that as praise.

Like the Huffington Post, the Daily Meal doesn't pay writers, which means it runs a grab bag of mostly crap, often with hidden agendas. I clicked on a wine "story" to discover it was posted by a retailer looking to sell its wares.

It's an interesting change for an interesting man, who co-founded Saveur magazine, is considered an authority on Catalan cuisine, and has written eloquently for just about every publication that runs thoughtful articles about food.

Andrews is coming to Oakland on Sunday to promote his new book, "The Country Cooking of Italy." This is a big deal as cookbooks go because his last book, "The Country Cooking of Ireland," took the James Beard Award in 2010 for Cookbook of the Year.

Andrews will host a dinner at Camino restaurant: four courses with wine for $85. Seats are still available.

I spoke with Andrews by phone on Wednesday about food media, Yelp, and whether he would eat at Sonic or McDonald's if he had no other choice (he brought it up)

WBG: What's the goal of the The Daily Meal?

Andrews: The ambition is to be the clearinghouse for anything you'd want to know about restaurants, wine and spirits, beer, or anything related to those areas. We publish a lot of original material but we also publish a lot of links to other places.

WBG: Do you pay writers?

Andrews: No, in general we don't. The majority of our contributors have their own blogs or websites. We're a high traffic site, with 2 million monthly unique visitors.

WBG: You built your career by being paid to write about food. Don't you feel guilty?