SAQ.com online vendor knows I'm making a wine mistake before I can even buy that bottle

Does someone know something I don't?

Ever since the SAQ launched its crisp newly redesigned site that now permits user accounts, I seem to be persona non grata. I am always making invalid requests. Bad, bad requests. Like beyond Baby Duck, like the other side of YellowTail.

Is this profiling? Can't be. I don't even have an account on their site.

Still I make error after error, though I'm told and I should try again. Hmmm... It started when I was querying white wine in a cute travel-sized minibottle from Celliers des Dauphins. Blank stares. Did the SAQ dump that wine out so the dépanneurs could carry it? How about another Rhône that I know they sell. Perrin Réserve. Still nothing.

OK. Michel Juillot Mercurey... Nope. Allegrini Valpolicella? No. A Château Meunier St-Louis? Not that either. How about the Torus Madiran from Alain Brumont... I just bought it from the SAQ last week so it must be there... please? Denied.

OFFING A FAUX-PAS WINE BEFORE A WINE FAUX-PAS IS IN THE OFFING

This is particularly unfortunate for me because every wine I've reviewed on this site is currently linking to a bad request -- even the great value wines and wines of the year, not just prickly young Portuguese reds that I'd advise are wines to avoid until the next vintages appear.

Furthermore, I've recently redoubled my efforts to link to products from the SAQ online catalogue since the redesign by recoding all my URLs. They previously pointed to bottle listings within the SAQ.com database but when SAQ.com 2.0 was laucnched none of the old links continued to navigate to the right place. I'd like my readers to get to right place, and the new SAQ.com database listing, when you can actually get there is quite a swell place to peruse wine.

But for the third time in the last week, it seems the entire SAQ.com catalogue brings errors, making me think that I may have made more than a few of my own.

If someone knows something about this, let me know now before I finish recoding all my clickable bottle images that are featured in each Weingolb review.

Amaroned (p.p., adv.): Having had the sudden realization, as in a tasting, you're drinking wine with 15% alcohol and it's too late to start spitting

Last night was a dry evening for me, which officially means I got hosed the previous day.

Some insist on the hair of the dog in such cases, but this summer I've learned not to believe old wives' tales. In June, I drank the day after annihilating a Perrin Réserve magnum at a friend's birthday and it was literally sickening. I felt pretty much the same way when I followed up an all access pass at the Wines of New Zealand by barreling headlong into a hasty decision to finish off the remaining half bottles of wine lingering in my fridge.

So this morning, after the benefit of a fully sobering Monday, I present to you Wine with Bill Zacharkiw, the reason I drank 29 bottles of Venetian red wine during a four hour tasting session on Sunday evening.

Well I didn't drink them all myself. I do want to let Bill tell the story in his upcoming Montreal Gazette column (which will be available at the web page linked above), but I should at least say there were three other tasters in addition to Bill. That was reassuring. And a lot was dumped into the spittoon -- also reassuring -- but, ultimately for me, it apparently was not nearly enough.

Bill, ever the gracious host, gave us tasters little reason to leave, bringing out Parmigiano-Reggiano and Pecorino Romano cheeses as well as a tray of cured meats when we had finished rating the wines. At this stage, achieving the discipline to spit that I had been searching for all evening was obviously not in the cards. I should've shown greater willpower earlier on when the wines were cheaper and the delicious food didn't beckon the vino.

Just one of many ways that this event was a learning experience for me.

I've had Valpolicellas and Ripassos before so I immediately found it gratifying to directly compare so many back to back (to back). It was a huge opportunity to decipher everyday wines without the bias of food or the kind of mood you happen to in on a given day. But it wasn't just an illuminating experience because I was exposed to two dozen bottles. Here were four winos with great expertise to guide the tasting. Personally, I found it an amazing opportunity to learn from those more experienced than myself.

We started off with a set consisting of four flights of Valpolicella. When I heard my fellow tasters murmuring something about "phenolics" and "residual sugar" -- terms that I could not use to identify a wine -- I got a bit scared. But when I found I was for the most part singling out the same Valpos as the others, I could increasingly parse the professional lingo, and even jotted down some new French terms I had never heard of.

As the night went on and the set of Ripassos came and went, I not only got a real sense of the Veneto region, but also learned about the differing palates and expectations of those sitting around the table. It turned out agreement wasn't always universal, but honesty and dedication to how one tastes and perceives these reds were.

Finally out came the Amarones. I'd never had Amarone yet there I was one of five votes weighing in on the good, the bad, and the ugly. (Ugly Amarone I now know is how you feel the next morning.)

When the Amarone flights started I was tiring, in part because I was deflated I didn't have any experience in what to look for or expect like I did with the other types of wine. I felt kind of useless. But of course I didn't turn down nine different chances to taste a style of wine that in its most inexpensive expressions retails for about $30 (and up). So I dive in.

My first taste was like taking a sip of Port, a wine I am only slightly more aware of than Amarone. And so I noted it and waited for the others to launch into discussion.

"Porty," said Bill almost immediately. And instantly I thought to myself that I can't wait for the next chance to do this.

Big Apple, big worm

All you have to do to get 50 visitors on your site at once is comment on a New York Times blog -- leave something written in vaguely threatening language and then in the next clause offer important details on personal safety with some subtly prostelyzing text that doubles as a hyperlink, hiding behind it, of course, the URL to your web address.

Let's review.

Foreboding words > promise of salvation > clickable URL . . . hits from NYT!

Of course I am still talking about wine, oftentimes a topic not far from egomania.

Recently, this blog managed to see a record-setting 113 visitors in a single hour because I left a small caveat on Eric Asimov's blog The Pour. He posted how serving wine at cold temperatures can be far from ideal, even in summer, even in a place as searingly hot as New York City. (Just this weekend, New York's inimitable heat was reiterated in the Times in no uncertain terms -- "The average Manhattan midsummer day is hot, rank and long" -- so you get the sense how radical Eric's post is.)

CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE

Me, I wanted to add that when it's rank and hot, sparkling wines are not only quite enjoyable served very cold -- colder than other wines -- but also that uncorking them requires that they be chilled to an icy cold temperature. This is key to avoid a potentially volatile opening with bubbly spurting everywhere. Warmer bottles have a tendency to do this when opened, as I helpfully explained in my comment with a link to this post, blog fodder that taught me a real lesson in how to chill wines appropriately.

I didn't mean to be alarmist. I've left many comments on Eric's blog that refer back to mine and none generated the amount of referrals of a carefully worded caution about how not to have Champagne blow up in your face.

And that either means people read the New York Times because they're savvy drinkers always looking to stay savvy or because they're a real frightful, impressionable bunch that startle easy and always fear the worst.

I need a better stat counter to figure that one out.

200 up: California cost, Chinese interest, and the growing value of the wine blogosphere

This is my 200th post and I've decided to let someone else do the writing. Sort of.

Check out these stimulating posts from the last few days:

• Now That's Cultivating a Market is an interesting piece, and not just for Canadian wine junkies, on the future of wine. It's from Alder Yarrow at Vinography.
• Why Does Good California Wine Cost So Much? is another good read and one generating some intriguing debate in the post comments. Saint Vini runs The Zinquisition.

I have to say that sometimes I wonder whether wine bloggers get their due. These people are doing what they know and love, and offering it free of charge to enquiring minds. And enquiring minds are getting great answers from them, not just reading through rehashes of dinner parties or stumbling through obscure journal entries, which is all that some people think wine blogs are good for.

Wineblogs are so much more than that. And I'm saying this as a wineblog reader, rather than a wineblog writer. After receiving last month's WBW prize, which I won using wine bloggers' notes to determine the origin of 15 different wines, I realized first-hand the quality of wine blogging that's out there. Under the auspices of "Where's Wino?" organizer Basic Juice, WBW participants played a game of blind faith. The idea was to label the origin of wines based on nothing more than bloggers' tasting notes for them. It turned out that nothing more than their notes was more than enough.

Had bloggers' descriptions been inaccurate or imprecise, the results could've been distrastrous -- like a game of broken telephone gone awry. But the fact is wine bloggers demonstrated their worth. They offered reliable and trustworthy notes that helped me and first runner-up Brooklynguy surmise the origin of the vast majority of these wines. That kind of descriptive ability is a valuable service, and that's on top of the great reporting (like the above) that many of these blogs provide.

If you can rely on a blogger's tasting notes to hazard a guess on where a wine is coming from, surely you can rely on those same notes to figure out whether you're likely to enjoy that wine, or whether that wine is going to suit the elaborate dinner you're preparing. And if that isn't reason enough for wine lovers to cuddle up in the blogosphere, I don't know what is.

What's a wine blog good for anyway?

According to Google, which kindly supplies me the majority of this site's visitors, Doktor Weingolb is worth checking out if you're looking for any of the following things:

• driving distance from pauillac france to saint martin la caussade france


• boy lovers québec


• proper temperature for manischewitz blackberry wine


• de state eye doktor


• ass tasters


• what does quiche lorraine, spaghetti marinara, pizza and bread have in common


• Oaked

and, perhaps most instructively of all...

• wedding photos by a lake
  

When I see that I get hits from web searches like these it causes me some wonder. I wonder what my sidebar would look like if I redesigned it. A new design that would emphasize key words like the ones above? Hmmm....


OK bad idea. I'll try not to rely on search engines for the focus and design of Doktor Weingolb in the months to come.

The fact is search engines have got a strange way of funneling Internet surfers to these pages. Perhaps I can imagine some of these search terms -- when taken in a different context of course -- getting Weingolb listed in people's Google results. But I mean really, folks searching for "Oaked" and being sent to my site? That's beyond the pale. Landing here in the hunt for some "ass tasters" -- well, at least that's a notion I can entertain. (I bet Jancis Robinson and her newly redesigned site can only wish that she was getting just a piece of the ass-tasting traffic flowing through these parts.)

BUT WHAT IS A WINE BLOG REALLY GOOD FOR?

Right. About my point. I'll tell you what a wine blog is good for: wine reviews and food pairing profiles.

It's a been a long summer of drinking and eating without much discipline and now I am returning to my journalistic ways. I've got more tasting notes already in the bag plus copious amounts still on the way, all carefully recorded and lovingly typed up to share with the world, including all you boy lovers and ass tasters out there. C'mon, don't be shy, I do know you're out there and want to take a peek at what Weingolb's got.

Stayed tuned.

Wineblogwatch Watch

If you found this post via wineblogwatch, you're one of the first to do so in a long while. Welcome!

And welcome back wineblogwatch. You've been greatly missed. It's nice to know that the wineblogwatch watch is finally over.

Since I like wine blogs, I love the wineblogwatch listing. I don't think that I'm alone on this. Lots of other people love it too. Too many people. I think all of us swarmed around and broke it earlier this week. But as of this late this morning, those 238 links to posting blogs were back up and running.

I wonder what happened and whether it's related to eWineCentral's frequent crashes during the week (at post time, this attractive aggregate webpage built to look like a broadsheet newspaper was again unavailable but it has been showing flickers of life).

You would think that there would be some mention regarding the absence of these sites somewhere in the blogosphere, but as far as I know, I am the only one to note its disappearance. No conspiracy theories here, just best wishes for a happy clicking weekend ahead.

It's a blog blog world

I know it's not news that the New York Times is now syndicating the biggest wine blog in the blogosphere, The Pour by Eric Asimov. Only five posts into Mr. Asimov's new gig and some 250 reader comments have already been recorded.

To me, the news generated by The Pour is that the Times has a new-found awareness of the blog. Their new wine blog is friendly and fun, in contrast to their foray into food blogs six weeks ago, which was not exactly true to the basic blogger ideals.

Personally, I find there's nothing worse than following along on a blog, finally entering that first well-meaning comment, and then seeing your comment removed during moderation. I got that experience from the Times' other blog on the "Dining & Wine" pages. On that blog, readers' comments are edited (read: cut) more than they are moderated (read: monitored).

NEW JOURNALISM FOR NYT

I don't see that same heavy hand at work on The Pour. If Mr. Asimov is managing all the moderation and comment responses himself, then he definitely has a deft touch. If a team of moderators are required -- and with 118 published comments on the initial post you kind of think they would be -- then it's a team that chooses not to rule like a ruthless desk editor.

It seems the idea that a blog is more than just a web log is coming into focus at Times. After all, it's an online discourse too: A forum for its author but also for that author's readership. (When you ignore this last point, the Pour blog would really be no different than the online version of Mr. Asimov's weekly column, also called The Pour.)

And while I still may not consider this new practice over on the NYT site a proper wine blog (exactly who is moderating all those comments?), it certainly is a welcome addition to the Internet wine community.

Living in a Bordeaux state of mind

Up until very recently, I've been publishing all these posts directly from Bordeaux. Yet there was not one mention of cabernet sauvignon or merlot the entire time. So what gives?

Last week, as soon as I launched this wine blog, a minor December miracle happened. Montreal became Bordeaux, most fabled land of wine! Hard to believe but true. Just check out this visitor log, which records the location of Internet surfers.

Upon further analysis, not all visitors located in Montreal were recorded as stationed in Bordeaux. Only certain special IP addresses went from a Montrealais designation to a Bordelais one, i.e. IPs like mine. Lucky me. I wonder if this means that IP locations will become the new status symbol that personalized license plates and customized ring tones once were. Will only the hippest bloggers to manage to garner that sought-after IP location and add extra credibility to their posts?

Backwash
My credibility is definitely running out -- a look at the latest tracking reports make it apparent that the location of my IP is once again in Montreal, and without so much as me setting foot on the sloping plains of Pomerol. And there's more deflating news. I lied yesterday when I said Salice Salentino was made from Primitivo grapes. The reserva blend from Taurino is actually a mix of Negroamaro and Malvasia Nera. Had I not been such a lazy linker, I could have avoided the mistake. Next time I promise to provide more links to topical information.