In analog technologies, form follows failure...
January 10, 2007
It's doing the same job as the screwcap or the glass cap, but in comparison, it's huge. If my math is right, 10,000 corks take up about half a cubic yard in volume alone. With some of these new screwcap systems, which actually machine the closure in real time during bottling, you can get 10,000 of them in a large desk drawer.
Technically, the traditional cork is the size it is because of the pressure it needs to exert over its relatively large surface area in order to maintain its seal. The screwcap, in comparison, focuses its seal on just the very top surface of the mouth of the bottle. In surface area alone, it's a tremendously smaller job, and that makes it much easier to get right closer to 100 percent of the time.
Cork represents the analog solution to closing up a bottle of wine. Although it's sealing only a small opening of about 3/4 of a square inch, it's a critically important seal, so we throw some bulk at it, two or more inches of cork, maybe dip it in wax, just to make sure.
In practical terms, cork is so big for the same reason a baby's head is so big. The newborn brain doesn't really work all that well for the first bit -- just spend some time watching a baby's irregular breathing -- so nature, in its wisdom, made the baby brain freakishly big, and being so big, it manages to work well enough.
Buy! Sell!! Buy!!! Sell!!!!
One of the potential advantages to working for a large multi-national corporation is distance. Should your end of the business hit a little rough patch, the ladies and gentlemen at the home office might never feel it, at least not until you've had a chance to straighten it out. On the flip side, what do you do if you're Constellation -- the largest wine maker in the world, by the way -- your North American sales are up 29 percent, yet Wall Street's calling for your head because a soft UK market and an Aussie wine glut are hurting your international numbers? Selling more wine close to home doesn't seem like the answer, although it so often is. Everyone loves the 29 percent growth rate, but it's unsustainable.
While Constellation as a whole did not do badly, the company fell short of "analyst expectations," a sure sign of vulnerability in any relationship. As of the first week of 2007, the stock is off more than 10 percent and still falling. Constellation Wines U.S. alone is composed of dozens of stellar brands that deserve much more respect than The Street is showing them, like Ravenswood, Columbia, Mondavi, Simi, Leasingham, Santa Carolina, and many others, but that's just business. If you can't make your numbers, fuhgeddabowdit.
Market consolidation always looks delightful on paper, at least to the consolidators. The good news is: we got the freewheeling world wine market we wanted. The bad news is: now live with it.
Wine For The Weather
This has got to be an immensely galling season for people who live in Colorado, but the aftermath here in traditionally snowy New England is our warmest and strangest winter in years. Normally by this time we've long since made the transition to cold weather reds and slow-cooked shanks and crosscut shinbone. We're still drinking white wine and sautéing flaky fish fillets around here like it's springtime.
2005 Clean Slate Riesling (about $10, distributed nationally by Click Wine Group, 800-859-0689)German wine has an image problem. In America, at least, people think it's sweet and sugary, and frankly cheap. Yes, there are $100 half-bottles of something called -- correct my pronunciation, please -- Funky Zeit Mit Ice Wein, or something, but these are just as elusive as a satisfying $10 bottle like the Clean Slate.
This riesling is simultaneously ripe and fruity, but crisp and edgy as well. It has a base of lush, lightly tropical fruit nectar that's set off by a whole citrus component of zippy, bright, and somewhat racy acidity. I guess you can taste the slate from the Rhineland vineyard soils, but it's hard not to after the name so audaciously suggests it. Most of these Mosel wines are dry -- technically without sugar -- and their flavor profile really tends toward earth instead of fruit.
If you follow the Mosel River west, out of Germany and away from the Rhine, it eventually enters France and becomes the exact same river called the Moselle. The food gets better and better the closer to France you get, and the wines get drier, more complicated, and honestly, more contemplative and French. Many of these German white wines possess a level of minerality wine lovers pay two or three times as much for in famous French regions like Burgundy, but right now, they're highly undervalued.
I respect immediately anyone who will attempt to utilize serious foreign idiomatic expressions. Clean Slate, the name itself, invites us to put aside our old ideas, to try riesling anew and forget about all the Schwarze Katz and Liebfraumilch of yesteryear, all just so much plonk under the bridge.
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