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Return to Poil Rouge!
Denyse and I are off on Sunday to beautiful Poil Rouge. Poil Rouge is a hamlet in charming St-Gengoux-de-Scissé, strategically located in the Northern Mâconnais. The locals describe the Poil Rougien life style as being awesome!
The Famous Louis/Dressner Compound in Poil Rouge Sud
It always takes us a while to get set-up. There are cobwebs (in French, they call this toiles d'araignée, mouse nests (in French, they call this un nid de souris, dust (in French, they call this poussiére), house repairs (bricolage) and lots of mosquitoes (moustiques) to keep us busy during the first few days.
We have to set up home and then go to Vinexpo and rub shoulders with all the wine industry bigshots who convene in Bordeaux every two years.
It is kind of like leading a double life. The French countryside remains IPOD free and there is a whole other culture there. Believe it or not, I'm the only person in Poil Rouge with a Blog!
Vinexpo Fever!
Vinexpo is coming!
This enormous wine exhibition will be held on June 17th through June 22nd in Bordeaux and tens of thousands of wine industry bigshots will be attending.
I plan on joining them, although this year I will go to Vinexpo but manage not to enter the grounds of the show even once. There are a range of satellite tastings with real wines and real vignerons going on nearly every day. Denyse Louis will be joining me, but unfortunately we will have to leave our dog Buster in a kennel in Messey-sur-Grosne, which is conveniently located near our family compound in Poil Rouge.
My e-mail box is sagging with the hundreds of solicitations from wine industry bigshots to come meet them in Bordeaux and to taste their wines. My spam filters are working overtime.
For instance, I just received the following solicitation:
These nice people, who look to be having the time of their lives, are looking for distributors. They offer a compelling package:
"We seek distributors who realize that a family history and a brand name that is easy to pronounce and remember is thus easier to promote and sell. We offer a full service export and marketing department with all promotional items....We want to work with people who will distribute a brand that can grow with their clients needs while supporting the traditional sector.”
Frankly, it is a tempting offer.
Wine Subversion!
Eric Asimov of The New York Times just wrote an article on wine geeks which is truthful, mentions many of my good friends and is personally flattering.
What will be next....a Lettie Teague feature in Food & Wine Magazine?
It is an indication of how far all our marginal chattering has gone that this article made its way into print. The David Lillies and Mike Wheelers and Arnaud Erharts and SF Joes and Robert Callahans and Eddie Wrinkermans and a whole cast of supporting characters have gotten a range of delicious wines into the hands of so many people thirsting for authenticity and so tired of spoofdom. And while Eric Asimov cannot credit himself, his column and blog have been a great aid to the entire movement.
I suggest we all go out today and buy a bottle of crappy industrial wine and celebrate all the choice we now have! Alternatively, we could buy something which is smoky, with vanilla overtones and is redolent of something-or-other.
A Tasting Note!
One of the wines our company sells recently received a wonderful review from a major wine publication. The wine also got good points!
The reviewer wrote:
Bold aromas of ginger, cardamom and honey, but the palate is bone-dry and bracingly firm, with dried papaya, peach and apricot fruit followed by a long, fine, minerally finish.
I can't say I would have written the same note. What I find odd is no one else has written an even approximatively close description of this wine.
How can this be? If this tasting note methodology, finding evocative traces in fruits and foods, is helpful, then certainly it would be repetitively reproduced by competent tasters.
This never seems to be the case unless the wine is so obviously manipulated that it only presents monolithic aromas and flavours (I should note, I enjoy using British spellings whenever possible).
A much more useful form of wine criticism, it seems to me, would be to ask Lyle Fass at Chambers Street to put together a 12 pack for you.
Don't Miss the 2008 Polaner Trade Tasting!
Twenty-One of our growers will be attending at this trade-only event.
The projected date is April 15th.
Don't Miss Exciting Surprise Guest at Chambers Street Tasting Tomorrow, June 2nd!
You'll be shocked to find out who will be there when the tasting begins at 4 pm!
There will also be a great range of new wines you'll want to sample. Why buy them when we are pouring them for free?
Behind the Scenes at the Wine Importer's Blog!
A lot of readers contact me to find out how they can get into the glamorous Wine Importer Blogging profession.
I've decided to put together an instructional video which shows all the painstaking work that makes this site work.
Just click to:
You Too Can Become a Wine Importer Blogger!
A Big Thank You to Dr. Aubrey Claudius Galloway
It seems like only yesterday, but seven years ago today I had quadruple bypass surgery under the skilled hands of New York University Medical Center's Dr. Aubrey Claudius Gallloway.
Since then, our firm has imported 4.732 cases of Romorantin, 3,272 cases of Pineau d'Aunis, 338 cases of Grignolino, 462 cases of Poulsard and 84,323 cases of Les Hérétiques (made from the Carignan grape in the Minervois).
The surgery was rather traumatic but things turned out well afterward. I had several spiritual revelations before, during and immediately after the surgery which have greatly changed my life. Since this is not a spiritual blog, I will not go into detail here, but readers might want to consult my spiritual blog for more information:
Discovering Our Lord and Becoming a Better Wine Importer Through Quadruple Bypass Surgery
Pictured below is the actual surgery:
I had hoped to have a live cam cast, but the NYU administration reneged on a prior commitment as I was being wheeled into the surgical theater. What a lost opportunity!
Of course, in those days we didn't have podcasts and my heart is filled with regret when I think of the marvelous podcast I could have made out of my surgery. All told, I was on the operating table for five hours and thirty-eight minutes and I would have had to find capable compression software to get the entire surgery on an IPOD, but I'm sure it could have been done without sacrificing the graphics quality.
I need to thank some people. Foremost, my wife Denyse Louis and my kids (who wish to be anonymous because there is nothing more embarassing than having a father who writes a blog) and my parents, Sam and Irene Dressner. I'd also like to thank Kevin McKenna, my partner, who kept our business running during and after my convalescence (and who wrote a bitter letter to NYU complaining about the thwarted cam cast of the surgery). I'd also like to thank my dog Buster who went out of his mind with joy when I finally returned from the hospital. Lastly, I'd like to thank Céline Mantovani, my niece in France, who took care of me in Poil Rouge as I recovered.
This is an embarrassing column to write, but try having quadruple bypass surgery and you'll see....every so often you get sentimental.
The other advantage of having had quadruple bypass surgery is that I milk my surgery for every little advantage I can get. In particular, I ask to board airplanes with passengers needing special assistance, given my heart condition, so that I can get on the flight before the teeming masses fight to get to their seats and stuff their oversized luggage into the overhead storage bins.
I'd be able to afford business class if only we sold more Poulsard.
Eric Texier
Our company is on our second round of importing Eric Texier.
We first worked with him for about 1/2 of the country. At that time Eric had an ambitious growth plan and was making ambitious wines that sometimes tried too hard.
For a variety of business reasons we stopped working with Eric for a couple of years and then started up again in September 2005. We had stayed in touch and were delighted that Eric had found new partners, scaled down and was making wines more to our taste -- eccentric with finesse and charm.
The Louis/Dressner site is currently featuring a write-up from Eric on his new bottlings. Some interesting stuff there and go take a look at:
Louis/Dressner Site Where I Do Have a Financial Interest (Unlike this Site, where I Lose Lots of Money
Eric has recently written some interesting comments at Wine therapy, a wine board moderated by Chris Coad and Brad Kane, which gives an interesting glimpse of how a winemaker evolves and improves. Eric writes:
99 Mise tardive : first attempt to make a Vieilles Vignes.
I kept a few barrels of VV from la Rolière (purchased grapes - 50 years old syrah from Saint Joseph Saint Epine) and of a blend of young and old syrahs from Coteau du Brézème (my vineyard, supposingly local petite serine selected by the Pouchoulin familly over the years, obviously not 100% syrah).
00 and 01 VV Blend of VV only, from Rolière and Coteau (production around 20 barrels)
Pergault - 03, 04 and 05 (released last week...) Only VV from the Coteau (production between 4 and 8 barrels - 100% my grapes).
There is a 06 Pergault Blanc : 100% old "roussette" - local name for roussanne. Again, obviously at least 3 different grapes here. Could be altesse and mondeuse blanche.
The winemaking is a very traditional Burgundian method for the Pergault, no more pigeage, whole cluster, 8-10 days of cuvaison.
The VV was a much more interventionist winemaking : destemming, a lot of pigeage and remontage, 5-6 weeks of cuvaison. Tough winemaking, tough wines. I now believe that this kind of winemaking is ok for very overripe grapes.
Could be ok in Chateauneuf for those who like the cough syrup style. Brezeme is not the place for this.
The plain cuvée is some kind of personnal interpretation of Chauvet method. Partialy carbonic under dry ice at low temperature.
That is why I am not sure it will improve with age.
Of course this is probably wrong. As all truthes about wine.
Note that the best terroirs on the coteau are not replanted yet. I am working on it but it is a huge and long work. If any of you plan to become a "propriétaire de vignoble", contact me...
No pigeage mainly because my feeling is that Brezeme syrah doesn't need it.
I don't use any sulfur before bottling.
Oxydation is welcome for syrah which is a very reductive grape...
More than anything burgundian winemaking means for me : small low and wide open vats (70 hl max, 2m wide, 1.8m deep), no commercial yeast, naturally occuring cold soak, low extraction.
Wine concentration should be in the grapes not in the extraction techniques.
Help!
I'm being held hostage in Las Vegas!
Absolutely!
I'm writing this from a plane going from Chicago to Portland.
Maverick Wines, our distributor in Chicago, had a wonderful tasting yesterday and I had a thoroughly productive and enjoyable time.
One thing I learned is the importance of communicating with young buyers in the market. Although I get older every year, the buyers out there are constantly 27-years-old. I don't know how they manage to do this, but their average age never advances.
Many of these 27-year-olds like our selection of wines, but they are naturally put off by my age, conservative manner and my distance from their 27-year-old culture. After all, my children are almost their age!
I see these 27-year-olds facing me across the table at trade tastings as they taste a range of interesting wines made by 27-year-old hipster vignerons. The look of disgust and dismay in their faces is unmistakeable. They are wondering, as 27-year-old somelliers, what hole I happened to crawl out from. I overheard one Chicago 27-year-old sommelier saying to another: "Tasting with Dressner is like landing in one of of those tropical islands, exploring the forest and being attacked by giant Gila monsters." Another star somellier started a betting pool where the winner had to guess how many years older than Leo Fox I am.
So there's the dilmena....for whatever reason we're importing cutting edge, dynamic and youthful wines, but the vehicle for this importation is a broken down cast-off from the liquor industry whose idea of dressing fashionably is buying black button-down dress shirts from Eddie Bauer and not tucking them into his pants.
I've attended an Arcade Fire concert (18 months ago) in a vain effort to update and upgrade my personna. I bought an IPOD today at the O'Hare airport but wound up returning it before my flight took off. Those silly earbuds were just so uncomfortable in my ears.
I've posted some podcasts on this site to appeal to the youth market but the web log reports of my blog activity indicate that the podcasts are principally downloaded by IP addresses originating in Southern Florida or Phoenix. Even the addresses smack of gated communities.
I don't want to say "cool" at the end of all my sentences, I don't want to shave my head, I don't want to give hearty bear hugs to all my male friends after shaking their hands as if we were former members of the Black Panther Party. I find the HBO hit series Entourage to be repulsive and have had terrifying nightmares of being forced to attend Hollywood parties filled with beautiful, scantily-clad women eagerily succumbing to Dharma and Turtle.
The only gesture and concession I feel I can make to the youth wine buying public is to promiscuously and inappropriately use the word Absolutely! in daily conversation in exactly the same way all the 27-year-olds out there use the word.
I ate yesterday at a trendy wine bar in Chicago filled with 27-year-olds. At one point during the meal I asked our server (a young woman) to fill my water glass. Her reply -- Absolutely! Later, I asked for salt. Her immediate and unwavering response -- Absolutely!.
Both times, the Absolutely! was delivered with total certainty, in great haste and the server immediately took care of me and went on to her next urgent task. I thought to myself, how wonderful to be so young and in control of the world! What determination, what power!
Apparently, the word is only used as a response to a trivial or inconsequential request. Later during the meal, I was served a Linguini with Shrimp which had been generously seasoned with tarragon. Long-time readers of this blog will recall I am incapable of eating tarragon. It is all part of my grumpy old man routine.
After one quick smell and bite of the plate, I asked the waitress if there was tarragon in the linguini and instead of that happy Absolutely! which met my requests for water and salt, my server took a deep breath. To the best of her knowledge, she informed me, there was no tarragon in the dish. Nevertheless, she offered to consult with the chef to find out if my fears were correct, that is if I felt it was necessary.
Five minutes later she returned to the table and told me that the chef would be willing to redo the dish without tarragon for me but that it would take some time. There was no admission to my tarragon appraisal, just a grudging and only implicit admission that the dish had been herbed to my discontent. I gladly agreed and had a glorious tarragon-free linguini some five minutes later.
The whole exchange was disagreeable, alienating and it was clear that our party had been downgraded from elite Absolutely! status to just another group of grumpy customers who hopefully would never return to the place. Our table, which had been animated in its pre-tarragon phase was now dispirited and unglued. We were hesitantly served our final plates of cheese and dessert, ate it quickly and rushed out to get our cars from the ever-present Chicago Valet Parking guys.
So, I have resolved in the next week to limit myself to situations where I and the people around me can confidentally and without hesitation exclaim: Absolutely! My hope is that this will get me back in grace with all the 27-year-olds who are the natural market for our natural wines. It is going to be a lot of work and I am going to need to rethink my every thought, action and gesture.
But for the sake of Olivier Lemasson, I'm willing to give it a go!
Natural Wine
There are all sorts of wine buzzwords running around these days. Some are only buzzwords and some, though seemingly vague, correspond to actual movements populated by actual wine producers.
While the term Natural Wine means organic production to an American, in France there is an actual Natural Wine movement with many wonderful producers. The distinction between organic producers, biodynamic producers and terroir-driven producers is often vague and often the same producers overlap into several categories. There are lots of small vigneron grouplets out there and there will be more in the near future. Many of the grouplets, seemingly natural allies, speak badly of their colleagues in other grouplets and there is plenty of animosity between these movements in France. The same splintering between grouplets is now going on in Italy!
The natural wine movement is actually kind of organized, has a web site, has leaders and has several shows around France during the year. Sometimes they are referred to as the sans soufristes, since many of them vinify without using sulphur and some bottle without using any sulphur whatsoever. They also tend to be people who like to laugh, drink, argue, and sometimes brawl, with a little less personal seriousness than the Nicolas Joly contingent in the biodynamic crowd, although many of the natural wine growers are actually in biodynamie. Many of the growers in the Natural Wine Movement seem to know each other, at least in the core group, and much of the association seems to be one of spirit and friendship and good times, rather that a formal codification. This ambiance suits me well, because I'm always wary of organizations with too many codes, too many pretensions, too many rules and too many secret handshakes.
As an importer, I don't want to get involved in the personality and sectarian disputes between these various movements.But though our company works with growers across all these movements, we do have a large concentration in the French Natural Wine grouping. They include (in random order):
- Pierre Overnoy
- Dard et Ribo
- Antoine Arena
- Marcel Richaud
- Pierre Breton
- Thierry et Jean-Marie Puzelat
- Clos Roche Blanche
- Les Vins Contés
- Larmandier-Bernier
- Mouthes le Bihan
- Château Moulin Pey-Labrie
- Georges Descombes
- Claude Maréchal
- Domaine le Briseau
- Agnès et René Mosse
- Philippe Pacalet
- Jean-Marc Brignot
- Bera, Vittorio & Figli
At the same time, I would not want Louis/Dressner Selections to become the American branch of the French Natural Wine Movement. I try to avoid using the term natural wine because everyone thinks I'm only talking organic and you can be organic and machine harvest, you can be organic and overcrop, you can be organic and use innoculated yeasts and enzymes. You can also be organic, natural, biodynamic or terroir-driven and make just bad wine. All these visions are simply too limited. Instead, I use the phrase "real wine" which is perhaps meaningless, but which I think is closer to the spirit of the type of unspoofulated (another vague term) wines I like.
Perhaps you can argue that we don't need another cliché. True enough. But go explain Marc Ollivier and the Domaine de la Pépière in the Muscadet. These are thrilling dry white wines that come uniquely from seléctions massales vines -- no clones here. Everything is picked by hand, done at low yields, vinified without spoof and the vines are old, expressive and complex. That's right the vines!
Ollivier is a modest guy who is not part of any movement. He is in a transition to organic certification and is now plowing his vineyards. Others in the AOC have done this work for years, but to me Marc makes the greatest wines of the Muscadet. Maybe it is because he only has massale, maybe it is because his vineyards are in granite rather than the predominant schist and gneiss of the region or maybe it is the age of the vines. There are many things going on here and even though he has not been lauded or stamped by any of the French natural, organic, biodynamique, terroirist movements, I'm proud and delighted that our firm imports his wines.
To me, Marc Ollivier is one of the heroes of Natural Wine and he is virtually unknown in France and is certainly unrecognized by the leaders of the Natural Wine Movement. We work with another thirty or so growers who do incredible work bringing their vineyards alive and into your glass. Their wines have a purity and definition that industrial techniques simply cannot replicate. Some of those thirty are members of movements, some are not not, but at Louis/Dressner, we are never going to limit ourself to an authorized list of what is good and correct. We go out, see the vineyards, see the cellar, get to know the grower and taste comprehensively. We make judgments and take risks rather than market a branded concept.
I'm skeptical of movements, slogans and catch-all phrases which try to make simple what is actually terribly complex. Our firm has avoided selling wine on the basis that it doesn't have sulphur, is organic, is this or that. Finally, all these ways of working in the vineyards and in the cellar have the goal of making great wine. We do not look for producers who are making natural products or biodynamique products or organic products -- we are looking for producers who make great wines from great terroirs. Eighteen years importing wine has taught us that working naturally is the only way to do make great wines, but what interests us is the goal of great wine, not the slogan or cliché.
This might make me eccentric, but as a veteran of the late 60s, who remains sentimentally both left-wing and left-wine, I've learned to distrust movements. Talk to Chaussard, Mosse, Puzelat and many veterans of the sans-soufre movement and they will tell you that there were too many excesses in the name of san-soufre. Perhaps these extremes moved everyone to rethinking the use of sulphur and moved the level of winemaking forward. But there have been too many examples, and new ones pop up all the time, of new estates whose goal is simply making sans-souffre.
Doing a quick cold carbonic maceration without sulphur and popping reduced wine in autolyse into the bottle is not my idea of natural winemaking. But that telltale reductive odor is almost a desired effect by a whole range of neophyte producers as are white wines which quickly referment in bottle. It is viewed as the guarantee of "natural" winemaking, but finally it is the triumph of method winemaking over terroir. It is a Michel Rolland of another sort....formulaic winemaking which makes different terroir from all over France taste the same. To my mind, great wine still requires intelligent and careful élevage and Jules Chauvet turns in his grave when his name is used in the name of flawed winemaking.
So what's the simple answer to guide the trade and consumers? Unfortunately, there is none. Everything is a tentative judgment based on too many variables and wine remains confounding and difficult
Go buy a sample case of wine, like Eric Asimov suggests, and have some fun. Navigating through the thicket of producers, AOCs, grape varieties, vintages, critics, bloggers, importers, frauds and visionaries is all part of the fun.
Joe Dressner
West Coast Schedule
Apparently, the link to my West Coast podcast schedule does not work, so here is the actual schedule:
May 3 Thursday
Portland Oregon
Seminar and Wine Tasting E&R
Open to Consumers and Presbyterians, but only by reservation
7:00pm
6141 SW Macadam Ave # 104
Portland
(503) 246-6101
May 4 Friday in Seattle
Pike and Western-“Back Room Tasting” Consumer event
7:00pm
Open to Consumers and Episcopalians
www.pikeandwestern.com
1934 Pike Pl
Seattle, WA 98101
(206) 441-1307
May 5 Saturday in Seattle
Two Tastings at Two McCarthy and Schiering
McCarthy and Schiering Ravena
Consumers and Baptists
11:30-2:00
6500 Ravenna Ave NE
Seattle, WA 98115
ravenna@mccarthyandschiering.com
McCarthy and Schiering Queen Anne
Consumers and Disciples of Christ
2:30-5:00
2401 B Queen Anne Ave N
206-282-8500
queenanne@mccarthyandschiering.com
May 7 Monday in Seattle
Triage Tasting for the Wine Trade
Le Pichet Dinner in Seattle
www.lepichetseattle.com
Consumers and Lutherans
1933 1st Ave
Seattle
(206) 256-1499
Call for a reservation
May 9 Wednesday in San Francisco
12:00-4:00 Wine Trade Industry Tasting at Cav
Open Only to Wine Industrialists and Methodists in The Wine Trade
1666 Market St
San Francisco,
K&L Tasting
Open to Consumers and Seventh-Day-Adventists
4:30- 6:60
K&L - San Francisco
638 4th Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
Phone: (800) 437-7421 or
(415) 896-1734
Citizen Cake Dinner Sponsored with K&L Wines
8;00 pm
www.citizencake.com and www.klwines.com
Open to Pentescostals, Jews and Congregationalists
399 Grove St
San Francisco
(415) 861-2228
Reservations for the K&L Dinner at Citizen Cake!
May 10 Thursday
Cav Wine Bar
5-7
Open to Consumers and Members of the Assemblies of God
1666 Market St
San Francisco,
(415) 437-1770
www.cavewinebar.com
I'm Going to Chicago and The West Coast!
I'm going to be doing a bunch of exciting public events where you can meet me and taste delicious wines.
Net week, I'll start in Montreal, where Alice Feiring, Evan Spingarn and I will be meeting consumers at the Lionel Groux Metro Station at 3 pm on Tuesday. We will be holding a roundtable discussion on the future of the SAQ, the Québec state monopoly.
Wine Journalist Alice Feiring
From there, I'll be going to Chicago, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and Las Vegas.
This is going to be a very exciting trip for me and I hope to meet you, yes you, at one of the public get-togethers. There will also be various trade events for those of you who are lucky enough to be in the glamorous wine trade.
I've put together a podcast which details the various stops along the trip and how you can participate. Just click on the link below:
Meet the Wine Importer!
Family Album 1!
I'm in a sentimental mood these days and I've been thinking of all the wonderful Dressners out there!
As far as I know, I'm the only Dressner carrying Romorantin from multiple producers. None of the rest seem to be in the wine business.
Take Roy Dressner, for instance.
Roy Dressner is an MD at the Meridan Health Center in Shrewsbury, New Jersey. There are lots of Dressners in New Jersey, which next to New York, may be the state with the largest concentration of Dressners in America.
Dr. Dressner's proud subspecialty is colon and rectal Surgery and he was board certified way back in 1999.
Roy M. Dressner completed his general surgical training at Monmouth Medical Center in 1997, where he was honored with the John C. Borden Memorial Surgical Award for Proficiency and Outstanding Service in the Field of Surgery. He then completed a fellowship in Colon and Rectal Surgery at St. Lukes- Roosevelt Hospital, New York.
A fellow of the American College of Surgeons as well as the American College of Colon and Rectal Surgeons, Dr Dressner’s professional affiliations include American Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons as well as the New York and New Jersey Societies of Colon And Rectal Surgeons.
With a special expertise in the minimally invasive surgical treatment of colon-rectal cancers, diverticular disease and inflammatory bowel disease, Dr Dressner performs advanced laparoscopic procedures for these and other gastro-intestinal disorders. He is also the medical director for the Center of Defecatory Disorders providing diagnostic and treatment modalities (both medical and surgical) for fecal incontinence.
Dr Dressner has also been selected as one of “America’s Top Physicians” (Consumer Research Council) for three consecutive years (2003-2004; 2004-2005 and 2005-2006) and one of "America's Top Surgeons" (Consumer Research Council) for 2007.
Here's a salute to Dr. Roy M. Dressner, one of the many Dressners out there working hard to make our world a better place for you and me!
An Urgent Request from Greg Hill!
Hi Joe,
I just came across your site a couple of weeks ago. Thanks: it's funny and informative. I particularly enjoyed your piece on "real wine". It made sense, or I had agreed in advance of reading it, because I've come to rely on the Louis/Dressner label when my meager knowledge fails me (often) in the wine shop.
This prompts a question on how wine could be uh, marketed.
Have you ever considered marketing wine as Louis/Dressner Selections?
I've always had a really difficult time remembering french chateau/labels in particular, and I even know some French! Despite this failure I've continued to buy French wines. Time and again I'd be in the shop not knowing whether I was about to spend $20 on something quite nice or something i'd immediately forget. But I did eventually detect a pattern; wines with your label on it tended to be good, I tend to read labels. I learned to let you be my guide....
How about this one: you know those hideous black bags with gold flowers or something printed on them some retailers use? You wines probably steer clear of retail partners of that ilk but for the sake of argument imagine bags printed with Louis/Dressner propaganda. Could be an interesting experiment on a targeted basis. Choose two/three shops, supply them for six months, monitor sales.
Regards,
Greg Hill
An Urgent Message from Dara Levine!
I just received the following urgent e-mail:
Dear Joe,
I have seen your wine blog and I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you about an event that I think you might love. This May, Wynn Las Vegas is hosting The Bon Appetit Culinary Focus, the ultimate food and wine event that brings together some of the top vintners in the world.
On Saturday, May 19th, guests at Wynn Las Vegas will enjoy a Winemaker’s luncheon series at 12:30 pm, hosted at Daniel Boulud Brasserie, Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare, Alex and SW Steakhouse with industry leading wine-makers special preset menus.
The highlight of the night will be the Vine and Dine Dinner Gala Event, which will be a true tribute to food and wine. World class chefs will take turns preparing courses in a five-course dinner. Each table will seat amazing vintners, one more impressive than the next, and what better way to top off the night than with the first live auction in the state of Nevada hosted by Zachy’s.
I have attached a brief blurb with more information. I am happy to answer any of your questions. I know you may not want to post this on your blog, just getting the information out there! Thanks.
Best,
______________________
Dara Levine
KB Network News
www.kbnetworknews.com
The 2007 European Wine
Ambassador Will be at Our Office This Afternoon!
Peter Nolis, this year's recipient of the prestigious European Wine Ambassador Award will be at our office this afternoon.
Joining him will be JR Battipaglia, who is a member of the Chevaliers du Porto.
Past European Wine Ambassadors include Michael Goldstein of New York's Park Avenue Wines & Spirits, who has never visited our office.