Off the rack

What to read when you're not reading this column

by David Marglin

UNCORKED

Click here for a rundown of wine tastings, dinners, and events.

After much soul-searching, we at "Uncorked" are coming to grips with the possibility that we may not be your sole source of wine information. Sure, we always encourage you to talk to your local wine sellers and read wine books, but we also realize that -- yes -- you probably read other wine publications too. Unless you're a fanatic, though, you probably don't have time to read them all. So here's a look at some of the sources I turn to for wine information.

When it comes to weekly wine news, you may have noticed that Boston doesn't offer much beyond this column. The Boston Globe runs occasional articles and a weekly paragraph on a single wine on Wednesdays. A far more substantial column on wine can be found in the New York Times. Each Wednesday's Dining In/Dining Out section includes a dispatch from Frank J. Prial, who has been writing "Wine Talk" for 25 years. Prial delivers good in-depth stories about winemakers, but you wouldn't turn to him for practical information: a recent column, for instance, focused on a wine called Osar, which he explicitly states is essentially unavailable outside the Valpolicella region of Italy! Prial was recognized as a master of human narrative earlier in his career, but he is definitely living in an Ivory LaTour at this stage.

Far more populist in tone are the wine columnists for the Wall Street Journal, Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher, whose "Tastings" column comes out every Friday in that paper's Weekend Journal section. Brecher and Gaiter write exclusively about wines that are available in stores and rarely focus on anything other than their own opinions, and they write quite well. Their influence has become such that wine retailers read their column first thing on Friday and scramble to order the wines they've written about. According to one prominent Boston retailer, "folks come in here with the Journal folded under their arms on Friday afternoons and demand, 'Do you have any of this?' "

A lot of the best wine information can be found in magazines. By far the largest wine publication in the world is the Wine Spectator, an oversize glossy with a circulation of roughly 250,000. The Spectator has many fine writers, and a lot of the articles are informative, timely, and interesting. It focuses on wine but includes lifestyle pieces about food, travel, and the like. The magazine also runs a highly influential section in every issue that rates hundreds of wines on a numerical scale of 50 through 100 -- and although the Spectator gets my praise for its articles, I'm far less enthusiastic about its ratings. These ratings have a big effect on wine sales, and a wine that breaks the coveted 90 can sell out almost overnight. But the system used for tasting is a poor one -- it involves trying the wines only once, unless the bottle is off, with tasting notes penned by individual editors. (Some editors at the Spectator have great palates, but others are more suspect.) Tastings tend to involve many wines at a time, making it a lot harder to gauge quality. Plus, numbers are a bad way to compare the relative merits of wines. And many people in the wine industry contend that there is an unusual correlation between advertising dollars spent and the scores of certain marginal wines.

After the Spectator, the most prominent East Coast magazine for people in the industry is the Wine Enthusiast. It tends to focus more exclusively on wine and spirits, and the articles are of the same depth and quality as those in the Spectator. In its Buying Guide, the Enthusiast uses a 20-point system to score wines (from 80 to 100); although a single editor is responsible for each score and note, other editors often taste the wines to ensure consistency. On the whole, these scores are fairly reliable, and you will appreciate the many good wines rated.

In the same in-depth vein is the Quarterly Wine Review, published locally, whose four issues every year are packed with superb articles by a veritable who's who of world wine authorities, including Serena Sutcliffe, Clive Coates, and publisher Richard Elia. Some insiders think the publication is somewhat fluffy, an impression perhaps enhanced by the absence of numerical ratings, to which Elia & company are philosophically and vociferously opposed. The QWR is available at major newsstands all over Massachusetts, and in most good bookstores. You can also find the Wine News, which is published six times a year, at these locations. It's informative, but it tends to come across as a tad slick and glossy.

Speaking of slick and glossy, you may want to think twice before picking up the latest copy of Wine X, a mag targeted at the twentysomething demographic with its catchy tag line "Wine, Food, and an Intelligent Slice of Vice." No doubt you'll be drawn to the article about cover boy Jason Priestley, who likes "big, fat, aggressive, thick, chewy wine." My favorite section -- like, for sure -- is called "Sex, Wine, and Rock N Roll," by S. Duda, and though I cannot figure out what sex has to do with anything, I love the pretension of pairing certain wines with musical albums -- who would've guessed that the perfect pairing with Duke Ellington's The Centennial Edition is a 1997 Chappellet chardonnay? At times Wine X verges on self-parody, but the 20 or so minutes I give it are every bit as rewarding as watching an episode of Friends.

Given that wine was invented to be paired with food, it's not surprising that some of the best wine writing can be found in food magazines. In addition to Food & Wine, an exquisite monthly whose underappreciated wine editor, Lettie Teague, does a fabulous job getting good stories, there is Gourmet, with infrequent articles by noted wine writer Gerald Asher; Bon Appétit, which has Anthony Dias Blue as its wine columnist; and Epicurean, a "Magazine for Food and Wine Lovers," which you can pick up at Bread & Circus. These magazines always have at least one article on wine and wine alone, and they often provide a unique perspective both on tasting wine and on how it fits into our daily dietary habit.

And finally, of course, there's our own "Uncorked" archive on the Web. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to e-mail us. We'll get back to you.

David Marglin can be reached at wine[a]phx.com.

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The Uncorked archive

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