The Hospices de Beaune wine auction is still in full swing. It opened with great enthusiasm this afternoon, just as the sun peeked through the incessant clouds that have been sprinkling the Cote d’Or all week. For the first two hours, all of the auction lots were selling at 10 to 20% higher than their auction estimates. This bodes well for Burgundy, and perhaps the wine world as a whole.

The highlight of the day so far, however, must be the sale of the annual President’s lot, a special wine, made even more special at this, the 150th Anniversary of the Hospices de Beaune wine auction, as it is being offered as a single, specially made tonneau, the oversize 500-liter oak barrel. The wine inside is a 2010 Beaune Premier Cru, and the wine’s official name is Cuvée Nicolas Rolin, after the Chancellor of the Duke of Burgundy, who founded the Hospice de Beaune in 1443.

Here’s a short video of the guest President of the auction, French actor Fabrice Luchini, taking the final bid and bringing down the hammer. Final price for the single tonneau of wine: 400,000 Euros.

For anyone looking to do mental calculations, that’s $548,320, about $822 for each of the 666 bottles you’d get out of such a barrel. And, that’s not the end of the cost for such things, because as a buyer you must pay someone to keep the barrel for you until the wine is ready, and then pay to have it bottled, and shipped. An experienced buyer I spoke to told me that the best rule of thumb, once you figure the aforementioned costs in addition to your buyer’s premium paid to the auction house was about twice the price you bid.

But like all such charity auctions, the proceeds go to a very good cause, and they should really demonstrate generosity rather than market prices. More to come on the auction as I get the time.

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Spotted very prominently displayed in a bookstore in Beaune, France:

I first learned of the book from Parker himself on twitter a few months back:

I don’t read French well, unfortunately, so I can’t validate Mr. Parker’s assessment of the book, but it certainly didn’t seem to be excoriating. But then again it all depends on the point of view you bring to the book. Fans may see pure satire, while foes may find vindication for their enmity.

It certainly did look funny.

Looks like it’s available from Amazon France for anyone who really wants a copy.

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There are wine revelations to share, for sure, but tonight, I am in a reverie simply about the landscape. The day was punctuated with wonderful moments that had nothing to do with wine, and everything to do with the simple beauty of Burgundy. Getting out of the car to stretch my legs next to the freshly mowed field, whose pungent scent wafted over me in a wave of delicious greenness. From the top of a hill, watching the storm system play out, shafts of sunlight moving across the deep green and brown of the checkerboard landscape of vines and their farms.

The drive from Prisse to Buxy on back roads was a fantastic zig-zag of country roads that took me from one little village to another, the green spaces between punctuated with gorgeous old stone houses, and a castle or two.

And the vines. Thick legged, old-vine Chardonnay, mostly. Though occasionally a patch of head-pruned, ancient Gamay would appear around a bend, the gnarled black fingers reaching up out of the soil with no surrounding supports, and sometimes in anything but orderly rows.

It’s been a year or two since I’ve been to the Old World of wine, and I’m basking in the reminder of how much soul it has, how much history of human labor its landscape betrays. I’m settling into the groove of Burgundy, and it’s a very nice one.

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My journey began with a series of comical errors, starting with me settling into my seat on the plane only to find, right when I wanted to go to sleep, that it was broken and wouldn’t recline. A prompt upgrade to first class fixed that problem (please, may I always be this unlucky?), and left me only slightly less bleary eyed than normal at Charles du Galle at 6 the next morning, before sunrise.

For the first time in my life, the Non-EU passport line was shorter and faster than the residents’, and I emerged into the terminal looking for someone who was supposed to be holding a sign reading “Burgundy.” After casting a glance back and forth, I noticed a man holding a sign that read “MMe. Burgunby” and had a quick hunch that this was perhaps just a chance misspelling. But the “Mademoiselle” bit threw me.

I approached anyway, and determining quickly that the man spoke no English, I told him, with the tiniest bit of French I possess, my name, to which he appeared confused and pointed to his sign, saying that he was waiting for a Mademoiselle Burgunby. So not the right guy.

But after waiting for 30 minutes, I called my Paris contact, who called the taxi driver, who complained about waiting for half an hour, and the very poor translation got sorted. Turns out I was Mademoiselle Burgunby after all.

We get my luggage out to the taxi and then the driver turns to me and asks me where I’m going. The comedy of errors continues. I had no idea. And neither did he. My itinerary only said, “The taxi driver will take you to the train station where you will be met by a representative from Fleischmann Hillard [the PR agency co-coordinating my trip].” Never mind that there are 19 train stations within 30 kilometers.

Another cell phone call later (where WOULD we be without them?), and I was off to la Gare du Lyon, for a pain au chocolate, and a relaxing 1.5 hr TGV ride through the countryside to Macon. The last leaves of gold were still clinging to the wispy branches of poplar and elm, but the fields were bare stubble. Winter was hard on the heels of Autumn.

As we approached Macon, I heard faint music, and was surprised to hear the melody line of “the wheels on the bus go round and round.” It sounded like it was faintly coming from the train speakers.

“That’s funny,” I thought to myself, “the music that the train plays before it arrives at the station sounds JUST like the music for the iPad game that I bought my daughter.” The last high speed train I rode was in Japan, and they played music before every stop.

Fifteen minutes later I realized it WAS the iPad game I had bought my daughter. My neighbors on the train were apparently too polite to yell “someone turn off that damn music!” I guess. But then again, if the didn’t yell it, maybe they were all talking about it and I just didn’t notice. My French is all but nonexistent at this point.

A short taxi ride later (this time with a man who knew my name AND where we were going) I found myself wandering the little streets of Fuissé and its golden cobble houses, vineyards stretching up to the limestone escarpment that marks the end of the fabled terroir of Burgundy. In search of the only restaurant open in this little town on a Sunday.

Two hours of a four course lunch would drive anyone to a nap, even without the jet lag.

I woke to rain and the sweet mineral smell of wet leaves and wet stone. The town smells like the wine. Or is it the other way around?

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I read with some dismay this morning, a news article in Decanter Magazine about sixty growers in the Loire Valley’s Muscadet appellation going bankrupt in the past few months, and the imminent danger of perhaps hundreds more following suit.

It’s never nice to hear about folks in the wine industry suffering calamities such as this, but I have to wonder if there isn’t a certain amount of inevitability about it.

Like every major economic incident these days, this one has its roots in globalization, and the complexities it adds to market operations.

Some folks might say that the Muscadet region has just made too much wine for a long time, and that government subsidies have encouraged growers to overproduce, leading to too much mediocre wine on the market and not enough demand.

On the other hand, producers will point to the fact that the main export market for these wines is the UK, and in the past five years, the British Pound has weakened against the Euro while at the same time import duties and VAT taxes have gone up, resulting in a net combined increase of nearly 60% in taxes on every bottle, according to Charles and Philippa Sydney, who recently wrote a report on this year’s Loire harvest for The UK’s Wine Detective Blog.

Add to all that the global economic crisis, and you’ve got what amounts to a slump in demand translating to a 50% drop in the price of Muscadet according to the web site Just-Drinks.Com. Such a collapse in prices so quickly means that the market has had no time to adjust the other prices like labor, equipment, etc, and so growers have been left holding the bag, with grapes that have cost them the same as last year to produce, but which are fetching half as much in price this year. It doesn’t take a degree in accounting to understand why these farmers might find themselves somewhere up shit creek without a paddle, as the saying goes.

I’ve never understood why, in such situations, the French vignerons turn to vandalism and rioting, but much like past events in France where winegrowers have lost subsidies due to such new economic realities, they are busy destroying tanks of wine here and there. Such behavior is infantile.

I have a certain amount of ambivalence to news like this. As I said, it’s tough to hear about so many families in dire straits because of changes in the market like this, but that’s just what happens when things go haywire in the global economy, and I don’t agree with those who say that the Government has some responsibility to intervene, or those who would shut their eyes tight, put their hands over their ears, and believe we can somehow wish our way back to an economy like we had 40 years ago.

But if you did want to do something, for yourself as well as the growers in the Loire, I’d suggest a dozen oysters and a couple bottles of Muscadet on your next sunny Fall afternoon.

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I’m sure most of us would love to be in the position of the Japanese government, who recently discovered that they had too much expensive wine on their hands.

Apparently entertaining with wine is serious business if you’re a Japanese diplomat. At least, that is, if you’re in France or New York. Apparently the Japanese mission in France kept 7896 bottles on hand at the Ambassador’s residence “just in case.” Official embassy records show them serving only 289 bottles to guests last year, according to Japan Today.

Having too many bottles of wine is really only a problem if you can’t drink them, which apparently was true for their New York Ambassador, who had to get rid of 198 bottles (for which they paid $24,000) because of their “deteriorated condition.”

Now I don’t know about you, but if I had the means to buy $24k worth of wine, I’d damn well make sure I had a wine fridge to put it in. No wonder the government auditors who discovered all this were pissed.

Of course, things could be worse. You could be (accidentally?) killing your guests with the wine you serve them.

Apparently 14 Cambodian celebrants at a spiritual ceremony to ask for protection for their children were killed after drinking rice wine tainted with toxic chemicals. Apparently the homemade wine was poured into bottles that had previously contained a poisonous herbicide. Twenty more are in the hospital. Awful.

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OK, all you marketing and PR folks, listen up. This article is for you. Specifically for those of you that haven’t quite figured out how to deal with us wine bloggers yet when it comes to wine samples. And there are clearly a lot of you.

I wouldn’t ordinarily have thought to write such an article, but it appears that

a) a set of reasonable guidelines doesn’t seem to be readily available out there

b) there is such incredible variability in my own experience working with you folks in the wine business around this specific domain, that everyone might benefit from this getting out in the open.

As with everything on Vinography, this is just my opinion, seasoned with an above average dose of dogma. This isn’t an article written out of frustration, but you can expect me to express some in the process, as I continually have less than sane interactions when it comes to this stuff.

If you have to ask…
Perhaps the most common question I get with regards to wine bloggers and wine samples I am not going to address now or ever, because it’s the most important question of all, and answering it is sort of like doing your job for you.

I’m not going to tell you which wine bloggers you should send samples to. Go figure it out and then come back here and read what I think you should do next.

Great. Welcome back. Now that you have a list of wine bloggers you want to send samples to, don’t. That is, don’t just send samples.

Do they even want your samples?
The first thing to do is to reach out to the blogger via e-mail and ask them if they’d like to receive wine samples from you. Not once, but every time you’d like to ship them. Don’t waste your money and wine sending samples to bloggers that don’t review samples or don’t want your samples, or who are drowning in samples and would rather not have yours added to the stack right at the moment.

Make sure before you do this that you’ve actually bothered to poke around the blogger’s web site to see if they publish some sort of policy about wine samples that can save you (and them) some time if you actually read it first. Such content is often available on some sort of “About this blog” page and/or from some link in the footer of the page.

What should you send?
Provided that you haven’t learned the answer by reading the aforementioned content on their site, here’s the questions you want to ask the blogger in your e-mail:

1. Would they be interested in receiving any of the following samples from you?:

Wine name
Wine name
Wine name

Tell them what you’re hoping to send them and let them decline some if they don’t want them.

2. Presuming they would like samples, ask them if they would like you to include any marketing materials about the wines or the winery with the shipment. If they say no, don’t ship them any brochures.

I personally prefer to save trees, carbon, and the winery’s money by having no such materials included whenever anyone ships me wine, as 98% of the time I just recycle the stuff. However, I don’t presume the same is true for all bloggers.

What I DO strongly recommend is that every bottle have a sticker affixed to it with the following information written or printed on it:

- Your name, e-mail address, and telephone number with a sentence encouraging contact for more information.

- The case production of the wine (if it’s not on the bottle) and suggested retail price

- The URL of the winery

3. Ask them what address they would like the wine shipped to and if there are any special shipping instructions you should provide the carrier.

What carrier to use?
It used to not matter very much which shipping company you used, but now it really does, in my opinion. FedEx has gotten militant about their shipping of alcohol, and using them increases the likelihood that your shipment will get sent back to you. Most of the time you’ll be shipping your wine to the blogger’s home. And unless they’ve got someone there during the day to receive packages, chances are the delivery will be made when they’re not around. UPS and other carriers will leave packages out of view on a porch, or with a neighbor if there is a note on the door, but FedEx will not. This has personally meant wine being sent back to wineries several times this year, which is a pain in everyone’s rear, not to mention costly.

How to pack your wine samples
Styrofoam is the work of the Devil. ’nuff said. There are a million better ways to pack your wine than with styrofoam. Don’t use it. If your excuse is that you’re worried about heat, then that means you shouldn’t be shipping wine at all that time of year.

What to do after you’ve sent the wine?
Nothing. Except maybe read the blog every day to see if the blogger reviews your wine. If you’re lazy, set up a Google Alert for your wine’s name so that you’ll get an e-mail when the blogger publishes their review.

But most definitely, do not do any of the following:

- e-mail or call to find out if the blogger has received the wine. That’s what tracking numbers are for.

- e-mail or call to find out “if the blogger has tasted the wine and what the blogger thought of it”

- e-mail or call to find out “if the blogger will be publishing a review” or “if they need any more information for their review.”

Such practices are annoying and childish. Either you trust the professionalism of the blogger to review it if they liked it, or you shouldn’t have sent them the wine in the first place. Assume they know what they’re doing and spend your energy on something else more productive than following up with them.

Evil practices that you PR people just need to stop
Apart from the styrofoam thing above, which is more the domain of the winery or shipping company than you PR folks, please listen carefully to this request. Do not “get creative” and dream up fun little packages to send to bloggers along with the wine. No yo-yos, bits of film, books, wine glasses, wooden wine crates, viewmaster toys, whistles, vials of soil, picnic baskets, bandanas, corkscrews, squishy toys, matchboxes, microwave popcorn, pieces of art, cheese, or any other crap that you mistakenly believe will somehow positively influence the reception that your wine gets when it is opened by the recipient.

I have received every single one of the above, and I can tell you without exception, and without a moments hesitation, they have all gone into the trash, accompanied by an amount of swearing under my breath proportionate to how messy, difficult, or otherwise annoying your little package made it to pull the wine out of the box and put it in the stack next to the other press samples.

Such efforts are a phenomenal waste of your or your clients’ money and for the good of everyone involved, they cannot die a quick enough death as far as I am concerned.

And as long as we’re on the subject of evil practices, let’s make another thing clear, just because you got a business card from someone that doesn’t mean they gave you permission to add them to your mailing list. This isn’t particular to bloggers or journalists, it’s true for everyone. Call it 21st century ethics, as well as, incidentally, federal law.

Finally, about that web site of yours…
Remember that URL you were supposed to put on the bottles? Make sure there’s actually something there for the blogger to look at. More to the point, and this is Alder wearing his customer experience day job hat as well, your web site should have the following things on it at a minimum:

- HTML or PDF downloadable tech sheets for every wine you just sent as a sample
- downloadable images of every wine, preferably bottle silhouettes on a white backdrop
- downloadable logo image(s) for the winery
- the name of your marketing or PR firm (if you have one) and the appropriate contact there

But of course, you also want all sorts of beautifully written content and images telling your story for the world to read, as well. Keep it all up to date, which means making changes when your winemaker changes, your PR firm changes, when you release new wines, etc.

Questions?
Fire away. I’m happy to justify (or defend) any of the above opinions, as well as comment on anything you think I’ve missed.

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Now is a wonderful, if slightly manic time to be wandering around wine country. Harvest is, for some, complete, and wines are bubbling and burbling their way through fermentations. For others, any day now they will be making mad dashes into the vineyards to get the fruit in before the first major rains. Either way, it’s the time of year that wine country really becomes wine country. As the afternoon sun angles low, life gets pretty idyllic around Sonoma, and the timing is good to relax with friends and a nice glass of wine. Which is why, I suppose, around this time of year we are treated to the opportunity to attend The Pinot on The River Festival , one of the more placid and enjoyable wine events held all year.

Now in its seventh year of providing an intimate and casual way to enjoy some of the best Pinot Noirs from Sonoma county and around the state, this festival is a great way to spend a weekend or even just a Sunday afternoon.

Held at Rodney Strong Vineyards in Healdsburg, the festival begins with a dinner on Saturday, October 23rd, and concludes on Sunday with the walk-around Grand Tasting, where for four hours (or five, if you have a VIP ticket) you can sample a wide variety of small production Pinot Noirs and chat with the winemakers and winery owners in a relaxed setting.

If you’re interested in the wines that are poured at the event, here’s the list of wineries scheduled to attend.

Pinot on The River Festival 2010
Saturday Oct. 23rd - Sunday Oct. 24th
Rodney Strong Vineyards
11455 Old Redwood Highway
Healdsburg, CA 95448

Tickets for the dinners and seminars can be purchased on an a-la-carte basis. Tickets to the Sunday tasting are $75. Buy them online here.

The last couple of years the weather has been absolutely beautiful for the tasting, which meant walking around in shirtsleeves, but it has the potential to be chilly, so if you’re going, make sure to bring something to keep you warm if the fog sets in. Dress for the event is casual, and my usual tips for public tastings apply: wear dark clothes, come with a full stomach, drink lots of water, and spit if you really want to enjoy the tasting.

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