The Vinorati Blog

By an unexpected turn of events Frédéric and I are in Vienna for the weekend. Since it was so last minute I have no idea what we should go see and do while we were here, but I do know that I will try to pick up a few bottles of Austrian Gruner Veltliner. A few years ago in San Francisco we had a bottle of Schloss Gobelsburg Grüner Veltliner Renner 2002 which really marked me so I will probably look for a more recent vintage of this wine.

On the plane on the way here I read an article about the 2006 vintage in Burgenland (Lower Austria). I’ll share it here in an abbreviated and less enthusiatically marketing form…

After an extremely hot June and July, August was marked by small amounts of rainfall and cooler temperatures allowing the vegetative growth process to take place more gradually. The extraordinary [!?] September made it possible to select optimal harvest dates. Ideal weather conditions lasting until October 20th (18 - 20 C ) allowed for perfect grape selection.

The first young wines for the vintage were already available on the market at the end of September.

Features of this vintage are the full-ripe fruity flavours in the Chardonnay and Pinot Blanc wines, as well as the intensive aromas among the bouquet varieties such as Muskat, Sauvignon Blanc and Traminer. Zweigelt grapes ripened unevenly depending on particular vineyard sites and therefore had to be harvested very selectively. St. Laurent and Pinot Noir display good colour depth and intensity. However, Blaufränkisch appears to be the “star” of the vintage. Due to its good concentration and high degree of aromatic and tannin ripeness, the first tastings have been very promising.

Lake Neusiedl (Neusiedlersee)

“I believe that Blaufränkisch is very, very good. At the moment Blaufränkisch is the highlight of the vintage: the lowest pH-levels for a long time and a very good ripening. I don’t dare to predict whether it will be a great vintage, we must wait and see how it develops. In any case it is not an opulent vintage but rather one which displays fruit, finesse, delicacy and precision. “(John Nittnaus, Gols)

Mittelburgenland (Central Burgenland)
“2006 is going to be a great Blaufränkisch year. The main harvest took place around mid-October; from the very beginning, it was possible to discern the excellent grape quality. Overall the 2006 will be a very, very good vintage.” (Wolfgang Reisner from the Hans Igler Winery, Deutschkreuz)

“There exists the justified hope that an excellent vintage will develop, certainly with regard to Blaufränkisch.”
“I am guessing the style is similar to that of 2004, though increased by one degree, that is to say more ripe.
“Phantastic physiological ripeness, a lot of finesse.” (Roland Velich, Moric, Lutzmannsburg, Neckenmarkt)

Südburgenland (South Burgenland)

“I don’t remember having ever seen such a balanced grape quality for Blaufränkisch and Zweigelt.” (Reinhold Krutzler, Deutsch-Schützen/Eisenberg)

Online Fandom is a blog with a sociological perspective on popular culture and the phenomenon of “fandom”. It is authored, in a creative and professional manner, by Nancy Baym. Nancy recently discovered Vinorati and was intrigued by the idea that wine amateurs could be considered wine “fans”. Of course some of my friends immediately leap to mind as perfect examples of vinous fanatics, so the concept seemed particularly apt to me.

Nancy wrote a nice post on her blog about Vinorati and she and I exchanged some e-mails. She eventually proposed doing a Vinorati interview and sent me a list of thoughtful questions about Vinorati and wine tasting in general. She sent me this great list of questions and I procrastinated and stumbled over them for weeks before finally getting back to her. Nancy, on the other hand was ever gracious and appreciative of my responses.

You can find the full text of the interview on the Online Fandom blog here and here (published over two days).

Vinorati is still in it’s infancy at 1-month-4-days of age, so I’m still excited by strangers writing about the site. This afternoon when I looked at our logs I noticed redirects from some new sites so I had to go check them out…

You can see our beautiful logo on Go2Web20. OK, so the site description is slightly misspelled, but beggars absolutely cannot be choosers. A bunch of people found it interesting enough to come and have a look anyway.

Also Cyberfrancis wrote a very nice article in Spanish about Vinorati at Genbeta, which is a “weblog collective dedicated to software and the services via Internet, with all present time and the best tricks.” Thank goodness for babelfish. A fellow UC Davis enologist is going to work on translating Vinorati into Spanish in the next couple of weeks so it should be much easier to use for those Spanish-speaking folks.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention those closer to home who have made earlier reference to Vinorati. The first that I found was Wilfried Robert author of the beautiful and informative French wine blog Oenoline. The second Frenchie who found us was Laurent Baraou of Parlons bien, parlons vin (Let’s talk well, let’s talk wine - it sounds better in French). Laurent has become a regular at Vinorati and I told him recently that he’s going to ruin me because he keeps adding all of these fantastic wine reviews that make me want to run out and buy these wines from the Loire Valley!

Thank you to everyone for all of the positive attention!