By Julia Van der Vink

Summer rolled into Boston slowly this year, and although many of you have been dining al fresco, slurping oysters, and sipping your Chablis for weeks, I am just now retiring my dirty Syrahs and beginning to think about the best wines of summer. When the weather gets hot, the basic suggestions are fairly intuitive: aim for wines that are light, crisp, and low-alcohol. After all, it is the time of year when people are allowed to tout their sparkling wines, rosés, sangrias and spritzers unabashedly. However, there is a fundamental tension inherent to the summer wine search—while the summertime gives us the excuse to embrace frivolous fizz and fun, there is still important eating and drinking to do; and we need wines that can hold their own. Fortunately, there are many inexpensive and high-quality summer wines that can be as serious or as playful as you want them to be.

When people think of the wines classically associated with summer, they might think of Chablis, Champagne, Sancerre, dry Rosé, or in my mother’s case, anything handed to her that looks white and tastes acidic. However, although it is clear that these wines are popular for a reason, some of the best summer wines come in many different styles, and from many different grapes. The search for summer wines therefore provides a terrific opportunity for one to venture outside their usual drinking repertoire. My favorite summer wines are frisky and refreshing, with clean fruit and nuanced minerality, to help cut through the heat. Here are some fantastic summer varietals that are certainly worth putting on your search list.

1) Muscadet. Produced in the Pays Nantais subregion of the Loire that reaches toward the Atlantic Ocean, Muscadet wines are versatile and food-friendly, but have only recently started to be taken seriously. The wines are dry, delicate, and fresh, with a perfume of green apples and grass, as well as a distinctive saline note that makes them a famous companion for seafood (especially oysters). With many excellent bottles between $10-$20, Muscadet wines are a great summer value.

2) Riesling. Although many people are already firmly seated on the Riesling train, it is still worth dutifully advocating for Riesling as one of the quintessential wines of summer. Frequently accompanied by the adjective “sexy,” or “sumptuous,” look for dry, low-alcohol German Rieslings from both the Mosel and the Rheingau, which can be characterized by their refreshing acidity, minerality, and bright notes of peach.

3) Albariño.  Quite simply, the world would be a happier place if people drank more Albariño. Check out wines from the Rías Biaxes (pronounced Ree-uss By-Shuss) region of Spain just above Portugal. Albariño wines share some of the structure and fresh acidity of a dry Riesling, but with a less oily mouth-feel. They are light, crisp, and aromatic, with attractive notes of citrus, and a beach-like minerality that makes them phenomenal wines for the summer. (As an aside, if you get on a Spanish kick, additionally look out for Torrontés and Verdejo, which are also stunning summer varietals).

4) Grüner Veltliner.  As a grape that is capable of displaying complex layers, and a broad variety of flavors, Grüner Veltliner is said to produce some of the most exciting white wines in the world. In fact, in addition to being recently referred to as the “Arnold Schwarzenegger of wine,” it is a little known fact that many of the Grüner Veltliner wines coming out of Austria compare in quality with the top white Burgundies. Capable of expressing itself in many different forms, assertive fruit aromas characterize wines from the Wachau region, while wines from the Kemptal region maintain more of a mineral focus. Overall, however, Grüner Veltliner wines have a lush mouth-feel, scintillating acidity, and a unique versatility that make them a top consideration for the summer wine adventurer.

Ultimately, while there is nothing wrong with staying faithful to Chablis, if you do step out, you should be prepared for the scope of stylistic diversity that can be found amongst the many great summer wines waiting to be discovered. This starter list of varietals is by no means a comprehensive account of the many wines worth looking into. Finally, while these four varietals are a few of my current favorites, I would love to hear about some of yours. I, too, am always looking for new summer wine romances.

By Julia van der Vink

Carignan(e), is a grape that is usually either vehemently criticized or alternatively, just ignored. Presumed to have originated in the Aragon region of Spain, Carignan has established a diaspora within France, Italy, Algeria, California, Australia, and other parts of the new world. Gaining the humble reputation as a “workhorse” grape, Carignan is a late-ripening, warm-climate variety that is popular for its high yields. Carignan was, somewhat surprisingly, the most popularly planted grape in France during the 20^th century, but it has recently been overtaken by Merlot, Syrah, Grenache, Mourvédre, and a host of other varieties that have since been deemed more “promising.” Those who are familiar with Carignan might know it best as a blending agent, and most notably, as the base of many wines of Languedoc-Roussillon, (think Côteaux du Languedoc, Corbiéres, Fitou, and Côtes du Roussillon). However, as I have discovered over the past few weeks of hunting, Carignan is elusive in its pure varietal form.

As a wine, Carignan has been criticized for being “tough.” Deep colored, rustic, and high in tannins and acidity, even Jancis Robinson has historically discounted many Carignan wines for their unripe flavors and allegedly characteristic “rank bitterness.” Producing approximately four times as many hectoliters per hectare as a grape like Cabernet Sauvignon, many Carignan wines are fairly inexpensive, and frequently subjected to carbonic maceration to become more palatable. As a result, Carignan has acquired a sort of Nicolas Cage reputation; overly-gritty, low-budget, and with a road-kill haircut. However, to sum up this superfluous introduction, I will get to my point: Carignan is misunderstood.

It is necessary to begin with the disclaimer that not all Carignan is good. Quite simply, most new vine Carignan is bad. But despite the grape’s indiscriminatingly harsh reputation, old vine Carignan can be excellent. With a structure similar to Syrah, Carignan has fresh acidity and a dry, herbal, spiciness. Furthermore, although Carignan does not display Syrah’s obvious fruit, it couples delightfully sarcastic notes of cherry, with a broad mouthfeel, and a unique terroir-driven twang that plays on the palate. Carignan wines can additionally be characterized by their lingering finishes, capturing notes of leather, cigar, and earth.

When I had the opportunity to ask Randall Grahm what he thought about Carignan, he described it as a litmus test for wine drinkers. “It’s like cilantro, or Cabernet Franc. Some love it, and some don’t.” Carignan certainly has more funk than your average Cabernet Sauvignon, and so it is clearly not for everybody. However as Randall says, “once you abandon the set of indicators that you might use to determine what wine ought to taste like, Carignan can be fantastic.”

If you are looking for Carignan in blends, I would recommend wines from Languedoc-Roussillon, or Randall Grahm’s 60% Carignan Bonny Doon Contra. However, although they have proven to be more difficult to find, I have enormously enjoyed Carignan in its varietal form. Some of the best old vine Carignan comes from the rustic Mediterranean corners of Sardinia, (I recently appreciated the 100% Carignan Rosso Jaunnisolu), and great Carignan is still grown in Priorat, just West of the grape’s origin. Finally, in terms of pairings, Carignan is a great meat wine, especially with grilled sausage, lamb, or roast duck.

Ultimately, in light of Carignan’s legacy of bad press, I felt the need protest on its behalf. Old vine Carignan is no brute. It can make brilliant wines that are edgy, and seductive, and if you give them a chance, they will dance with you. Therefore, whether you end up liking cilantro, or you don’t, I hope you track down some Carignan, and give it an openhearted try.

By Julia van der Vink

Today I am thrilled to present Lagrein as the first of a long list of underrated grape varieties. There are thousands of grapes that are used around the world to make wine, but much to my chagrin, I am probably only close enough to about twenty of them to feel comfortable snuggling. Through my parents’ influence, much of my experience with wine revolved around an obsession with a few Bordeaux varieties, and their corresponding California transplants. But the waves of change are upon us! My quest to better understand some of these so-called “underrated grapes” has opened my eyes to the new limits of what wine can and should be, and I feel compelled to share the wealth. As they say, once you go Hárslevelu or Királyleányka, you never go back.

Lagrein, (pronounced La-grine), is considered one of the up and coming flagship wines of the Italian Alps and Dolomites. It is a true mountain wine, indigenous to one of Italy’s smallest wine producing regions, Alto Adige, (pronounced Ah-dee-jay), which also bears the Germanic name Südtirol, (don’t be confused by labels that use these names interchangeably). The snowcapped Alps of Alto Adige lie right on the border of Italy and Austria, and although linguistically German, the area reflects a climate that seductively synthesizes elements of the Mediterranean South and the Germanic North. Lagrein is the most widely grown grape in Alto Adige. The area experiences huge temperature swings from day to night, but guarded by the Alps, the cool slopes of the Bolzano basin still experience warm summer times that are perfect for Lagrein.

Lagrein is one of those grapes that truly inspires me with its disconnect between performance and expectation. Although the wine often appears inky, dense, and dark, it comes off much lighter on the palate than its color seems to suggest. Many Bordeaux drinkers might find this alarming at first, and when I first shared a bottle of Lagrein with my dad, the first thing he said what that the wine seemed “thin.” However, about fifteen minutes thereafter, as it began loosening its lederhosen, true appreciation dawned upon us. Many Lagrein wines have a lightness that is elegant, refreshing and unpretentious. Maintaining a smart terroir-driven minerality, it can be characterized by its tight dark fruit, smooth tannins, and velvety notes of violet, earth, and smoke. Although the wines can be anything from light to medium, and sometimes even decently full-bodied, (I had one particularly jammy one that I would have sworn was a different species), they are distinctively clean, with nice fresh acidity, and a dark, brooding finesse.

I would especially recommend Lagrein if you like Cabernet Franc, or as a stunning substitute for Chianti or Valpolicella. Lagrein lends itself well to the traditional foods of the area, (think of fatty cured pork speck, sauerkraut, bratwurst, and stewed game). However, I would contend that its lightness and acidity make it a refreshing summer wine that can easily be paired with lighter cuisines as well. In terms of specific producers to look out for, I would recommend J. Hoffstatter, (especially the wines from the Steinraffler estate). I also feel compelled to include the Georg Mumelter Lagrein Griesbauerhof, which I recently enjoyed extraordinarily.

Lagrein is an unusual and expressive mountain wine that couples terroir-driven purity with unique velvety depth. However, it is relatively unknown amongst many drinkers, and is currently only ranked as the 116th most frequently consumed varietal out of the 156 listed in the cellars of Drync users. Just yesterday, Eric Asimov introduced Lagrein as Unfamiliar, But Worth Getting to Know. It is arguably not for everybody, but I hope you go out and try a bottle.

Also check out http://www.altoadigewinesusa.com

As we prepare to toast to a new year, there is one addition to wine that we all covet: bubbles.   But why?  As it turns out, the luxury status that Champagne has attained is the byproduct of a few savvy marketing techniques that date back hundreds of years.

The purposeful addition of bubbles into a bottle of wine is a relatively new phenomenon in the history of fermented grapes.  Although still wines from Champagne were served during the coronation ceremonies of French kings (which took place in Reims, within Champagne) dating back to medieval times, it wasn’t until the English scientist and physician Christopher Merrett, in 1662, published a paper detailing the use of “vast quantities of sugar and molasses to all sorts of wines to make them drink brisk and sparkling.”  Dom Perignon, the famous Benedictine monk frequently credited with discovering Champagne, did not set foot in the region until 6 years after Merrett’s discovery and spent much of his efforts attempting to rid bottled wine of unpleasant bubbles.

Following the death of Louis XIV in 1715, the court of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans made the sparkling version of Champagne a favorite among the French nobility.  However, the production process was difficult to replicate until a technological breakthrough–stronger glass bottles– allowed the second fermentation stage to take place without the bottle rupturing.  As the formalization of the méthode champenoise made production of sparkling wine on a large scale profitable, this period saw the founding of many of today’s famous Champagne houses, including Krug (1843), Pommery (1858) and Bollinger (1829).

While Napoleon’s troops popped bottles of Champagne  the old fashioned way on the battlefield to celebrate victory, Champagne houses devoted considerable energy to creating a history and identity for their wine, associating it and themselves with nobility and royalty. Through advertising and packaging they sought to associate champagne with high luxury, festivities and rites of passage. Their efforts coincided with an emerging middle class that was looking for ways to spend its money on symbols of upward mobility.  They even made a concerted effort to target women, touting the wine’s favor with a Countess and using labels that were designed with images of romantic love and marriage as well as other special occasions that were deemed important to women, such as the baptism of a child.

As we all begrudgingly know, Champagne can’t be called Champagne if it isn’t from the designated growth region of Champagne, France.  The name “Champagne” is a protected designation of origin in the European Union and since a court ruling in 1985 the méthode champenoise cannot be depicted on bottling in the EU to designate the form of production unless it is from Champagne.  However, cava from Spain and most sparkling wine from the US are made in the same fashion.  Prosecco and Asti, from Italy, go through their second fermentation partially outside of the bottle, which is a less costly method and produces some quality bubbles at affordable prices.

So while we might think the boastful consumption of Champagne by our modern-day celebrities and rappers is a novel display of nobility, it all dates back to some savvy marketing tactics of Champagne houses in the 1800′s.  So raise your glass–in my case, of Sonoma sparkling wine– to the English for figuring it out, to the French for popularizing it, and to all those around the world who enjoy popping a cork to commemorate life’s many occasions to celebrate.

Don’t forget to rate your New Year’s Eve wines in your drync.com cellar, online or on your mobile app!

Special thanks to The Oxford Companion to Wine, The Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia and A Short History of Wine.

In a recent blog post, I touched on some killer use-cases for mobile wine apps. Namely, finding specific wines at local retail stores, and wine search based on barcode or image recognition technology. Given the “barcode buzz” of late, I thought I’d revisit barcodes and do a bit more of a deep dive. This post will focus on the barcode use-case and compare it to a more traditional type-ahead text entry scenario.

If you’re not into reading the detail, the conclusion is that using an “intelligent”, well-tuned type-ahead interface where you type a few letters from each of the words on the wine label and let the app fill in the correct words, gets you a more accurate result more often and *much* more quickly.

Wine Search Using Barcode Recognition

Barcodes are pervasive in consumer products because they work and make identifying the contents of a package fast and accurate. The reasons they work include, on the technology side – dedicated hardware, good lighting conditions,  generally flat packaging, and an easily adapted environment to improve reading conditions ie. you can move the product around until you get a good “read”. And on the data side, there is a standards body that manages the database of UPC codes (barcodes), ensuring “clean data” (ie no duplication or re-use of codes) and that all product codes are accessible centrally.

No doubt the world of wine could benefit from a similar structure and technology. Scanning a wine barcode and receiving detailed information, including market prices for a given wine is compelling. The problems, as I outlined in my previous post, are the following:

• We don’t have dedicated hardware with a little red light that creates a specific, readable reflection. Nor do we have flat packaging or good lighting conditions. We have a digital, low-ish resolution camera with no flash, curved bottles, and are typically in a store or restaurant with low light. That said, some of the new technology, like Red Laser by Occipital, is excellent and does its best to correct for the inherent shortcomings of using a phone for barcode recognition.
• There is no single central database of unique wine UPC codes.
• Only 30% of wineries use UPC codes at all today, and of them, *very* few boutique producers use them and their use is sparse outside the US
• Wines found in restaurants do not typically have barcodes on them
• Because there is a cost associated with generating new UPC codes for each SKU, wineries re-use UPC codes. This ambiguity requires that the user visually guide the barcode recognition system when there are multiple matches for a given barcode.
• Oftentimes, wineries will use a single barcode for all of their wines. That’s right – one code for all years of all wines. Oops.

That said, let’s get to some empirical data…

Now that there are some barcode-based systems for smartphones on the market, we took one to a retail store and started doing barcode lookups. Here are the results:

Overall accuracy (meaning that it found the wine on first “snap”): 48%

But that data needs qualification. First of all, the system basically only worked on US wines, and our data was skewed towards US wines. Here is a more granular breakdown:

US Wines - 11 out of 12 wines were recognized correctly (92%)

International Wines – 3 out of 17 were recognized correctly (18%)

Digging deeper, we found:

• NO vintages were available through the barcode recognition system. In other words, the user always has to identify the year if the system comes back with the right wine.
• 3 out of 29 wines were from producers that used the same barcode for every wine they produced.
• For 8 out of 29 wines, the barcode was read correctly but they were not found in the database.

The time it takes to use one of these systems to look up and identify the correct wine, assuming it is available in the UPC database, is about 20-30 seconds.

So, while the technology is undoubtedly amazing, factors outside of our control limit the usability and usefulness of using barcode recognition for wine search. But what are the alternatives, given that no one wants to sit in store or restaurant tapping at their phone for 5 minutes while people stare at them?

Text Based Wine Search Using Typeahead

Text based search on a phone is pain in the ass by any measure. We tap tap tap and then wait for a result to come back. At Drync, we’ve heard from our users that they don’t enjoy that process, and we ourselves have gotten fed up with having to do it.

So Rob, one of our engineers who is into solving really hard problems, gave himself a Thanksgiving puzzle to solve: could we analyze our 600,000+ historical wine searches done by users, and the 100,000 unique words they used in describing those searches, and implement a type-ahead system that pro-actively tries to figure out what you’re typing and fill in the words?

(For those of you who aren’t familiar with the phrase “type-ahead”, it’s a technique commonly in desktop applications – like Outlook/Mac Mail and web browsers – and on the web when a user is being asked to type something, like a search query. The Google app for the iPhone does this beautifully, if you want to see an effective example.

To cut to the chase, Rob was successful on his typeahead journey and was able to reduce the number of “keystrokes” (tapstrokes actually) by ~50% on average when searching for a wine using Drync Wine. We were impressed.

As an example:

Before, if you were searching for “chateau de Beaucastel Chateauneuf-du-Pape 2004″, you’d probably type “2004 chateau beaucastel chateauneuf du pape”. That’s 43 tapstrokes.

With Rob’s typeahead system, here’s what you’d type:

ch <select chateau from the typeahead list>

beauc <select beaucastel from list>

chat <select chateauneuf-du-pape from list>

That’s 14 taps, or a 67% reduction in tapstrokes. Also, it only took ~10 seconds to enter, and another 2 seconds for Drync Wine to look up the wine. Pretty good in my book.

You draw your own conclusion, but ours is that a typeahead interface is quite a bit better for users than a barcode recognizer, despite the sexiness of using your phone as a barcode scanner. Does that mean we’ll never implement a barcode recongition system for wine search? ABSOLUTELY NOT. We are just going to wait until the data side of the equation becomes more reliable and comprehensive.

* The Drync Wine typeahead interface will submitted to Apple shortly and hopefully will be available before Christmas 2009.

Wine on the iPhone is now formally a hot category. When we launched Drync Wine 10 months ago, there were only a handful of wine journaling apps available. We were lucky to have been early in the market with an innovative app, and to have received the coveted “love” from Apple to jump start our journey. That was cool, we thought we were rock stars.

As with any “real” market, competitors arrive and the honeymoon ends. This has been particularly true on the iPhone because barriers to entry are low. There are now over 50 wine apps in the app store, many of which are worthy of the real estate on your phone and some that are not. Apple’s unpredictable app promotion practices have further muddied the field as of late.

But, given an equal playing field, we believe that quality wins. This week vindication arrived in the form of a “definitive” analyst report on all things iPhone + Wine. Produced by Paul Mabray at Vintank, a respected wine industry analyst firm, and published by Palatte Press in a two part series, the report reviews 50 wine apps and names the best of the bunch.

We’re proud to say that we were chosen as one of the top 5 wine apps on the iPhone. The unique thing about this report is that, unlike your average journalist who tries a few apps at dinner and writes about their experience (which is cool too, don’t get me wrong), Vintank has been intimate with the wine industry for years and performed an insightful, exhaustive deep dive on the subject of iPhone apps as they relate to wine consumers and industry.

Check out the report here: http://palatepress.com/2009/10/wine-iphone-apps-the-top-five/

A lot of work went into this report, not only because of the sheer volume of apps, but because it involved breaking down the key consumer use-cases related to wine and mobile, tying those to the myriad features presented, testing specific user scenarios for each app, and then looking at the overly complicated wine value chain to understand the longer term opportunity. No small affair. The net net is that from a user’s perspective, there are three key “user scenarios” that matter and are achievable today -  point-of-sale research, pairings, and journaling – and a handful of apps have been successful delivering to those use cases.

At Drync, we’ve focused to date on the “research and remember” value proposition. That is, enabling you to quickly find any wine and learn about it from probably the most exhaustive database in the industry, and then store it away with comments, ratings, and photos, in your virtual cellar for future reference. That speaks to the “POS research” and “Journaling” use-cases. We have more coming, but that’s the starting point and so far our focus seems to resonate with users.

Particularly impressive about the Vintank analysis is that they took the time to grok and test the key technologies behind the apps, and how they improve the user experience. In the case of Drync Wine, that included understanding the depth of our search technology (which we would argue is the industry’s best for wine related searches and enables the user to type just about anything to find their wine), and our data merging capabilities (used to identify duplicate records and merge them, therein reducing confusion for users).

Looking forward, we see three key “features” that were not considered in the Vintank report but that we believe will improve the user experience dramatically in the future:

• Find a Wine Nearby – In theory, if you know the inventories of the local retailers, and you’ve got a GPS on the phone, you should be able to direct a consumer to a local store to find a particular bottle of wine. This in our view is a killer use-case, but difficult today to deliver on. The reality is that the wine industry as a whole is not particularly tech-savvy. In fact, 9 out of 10 retailers that I visit still use pencil and paper to manage their inventories. But, slowly, through the efforts of companies like Beverage Media Group, the industry is coming online. Once we hit critical mass, good things will happen for consumers. We promise!

• Look up a Wine by Label or Barcode – people are talking about this today. The idea is that you snap a photo of the barcode or label on a bottle of wine, and the app automatically recognizes what wine you’re looking at and provides detailed information about it. No doubt this will be an amazing feature when delivered with high usability and accuracy. The reality today is this: there is no standards body maintaining barcodes for wine, wineries re-use barcodes, compared to bottles produced each year only a very few are given a barcode, and barcode scanning accuracy needs to improve significantly to address the mainstream user. Image search is equally interesting, and daunting. There are several companies with university borne technologies that attempt to mimic the human cerebral vision function. They compensate for angles, blurr, low light, curvature, and reflection. And it’s likely they can successfully be applied to “wine image search”. The problem here is that there is not definitive database of high quality wine label images. That’s the requirement – high quality images, and lots of them. There are a few companies working on this and likely it will happen at some point.

• Purchasing Wine on your Phone – This also will happen. Online wine retailers need to support mobile web and mobile payments, and they need to get their inventories online. When that happens, apps like Drync will start to refer qualified customers to them.

It will all happen, and we’re doing our best to push the envelope!

Big thanks to Paul and the team at Vintank.

-brad rosen, ceo, drync.

Every where we turn, there’s more news about our countries economic woes and how this is changing our lives.

For me, like many others, it’s changed how I hang out with friends. Last year this time, our default was to head out to a bar or restaurant to grab some drinks and food. Now, we still do this but also have had picnics in the park, potlucks at each other’s houses, and gone to free summer concerts. Like others, we’ve become a bit more careful with how we spend our money.

Now how can Drync help me with this? Well, in two ways. First, the the fact that I can use Drync reviews to make sure the wine I’m buying is worth my dollar. And hey, maybe by checking out the most popular list I’ll find a new, less expensive wine that I might have previously dismissed.

The second way Drync helps me out always makes me feel a bit like a spy. You see, if there’s a couple of wine stores that I love to go into. Whether it’s that they have super fun tastings, a cool ambiance or just because I know they carry some really interesting options, visiting them always a good time. BUT I also know, that some of their wines may be a bit more expensive then some of the other shops I go to. I understand, I mean those  tastings and the ambiance has to come from somewhere! But right now, I can’t always afford to buy whatever wine I want whenever I want. So I’ll surreptitiously snap a picture (hence the spy vibe) and add the wine to my Drync cellar as something I want to purchase in the future. Maybe I’ll come back in a few weeks … or maybe I’ll spy the same wine somewhere else a little less expensive.

What about you? Have you found a way that Drync helps you be wise with your dollar?

– Carol O.

I have to admit something. I re-gift wine. Frequently.

Here’s the scenario that happens all too often: we’re running out of the house to a dinner and realize we didn’t get a gift. So I go to my wine “cellar” (more like a wine cupboard), and stare at it. How much should I “spend”? And for that matter, how much is each bottle I own worth (of course, I have no idea because either they were gifts or I picked them up years earlier while traveling overseas etc.)? What are we likely to eat that we might want to pair the wine with?

Well guess what (this is going to come as a big surprise) – Drync Wine can help! In fact, it did help me just recently, in three ways.

First, I now have my wine cellar cataloged in Drync Wine. I know the value of each bottle, as well as have expert reviews and winemaker’s notes for each. For instance, I was shocked to find out that bottle of Antinori Tignanello a classmate gave me is worth $114 (! don’t give this one away !), and the 2002 Fond de Cave Malbec I schlepped back from Argentina is worth less than I paid for it…

Second, I was given a bottle of 2005 K Vintners The Creator the other evening. This turns out to be a $55 bottle of wine that received a rating from The Wine Advocate of 96/100. According to the winemaker, I’ll find “black olives, tapenade, dried herbs, earth, and spice” in there. Whoa! Definitely not re-gifting that.

And last, as we are walking out the door it’s super fast and easy to refer to my Drync Cellar and choose an appropriate wine to re-gift.

I’m not proud of this lazy habit, but it is what it is. And I assume I’m not alone.

-brad

Words of wisdom sent to me today…

Two Glasses of Wine

When things in your life seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar and the 2 glasses of wine…

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls.

He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls.

He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a unanimous ‘yes.’

The professor then produced two glasses of wine from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.

‘Now,’ said the professor, as the laughter subsided, ‘I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things; your family, your children, your health, your friends, and your favorite passions; things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.

The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, and your car. The sand is everything else; the small stuff. If you put the sand into the jar first, he continued, there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls.

The same goes for life: If you spend all your time and energy on the small Stuff. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medicalcheckups. Take your partner out to dinner. Play another 18 holes. There will always be time to clean the house and fix the disposal. Take care of the golf balls first; the Things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.’

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the wine represented.

The professor smiled. ‘I’m glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of glasses of wine with a friend.’

We are asked occasionally when we’ll offer a wine pairings guide. To date, we’ve tried hard to focus on the single use-case “remember what I’m drinking right now”. Of course, other compelling use-cases have naturally extended from there, such as researching wine and reading reviews, sharing, and buying wine. But at the core, Drync Wine is about remembering what you drank. That’s not saying we won’t expand in the future, but that’s where we started and exist right now.

That said, I came across a nice website today from one of our Twitter followers (@wineforeveryone) containing useful rules of thumb for wine pairings…

1. There are no rules to pairing food and wine, only guidelines.
2. Balance the weight of the food and wine, one should not over power the other. A hearty wine like a Syrah will over power a delicate dish such as chicken with mushrooms. However, a lighter style of red wine like Pinot Noir (Burgundy if you’re buying French) would be a great choice as the earthy characteristics will compliment the mushrooms. Take the flip side of this, a creamy Alfredo sauce will over power a lighter Pinot Grigio, however a full-bodied, aged in oak Chardonnay, which is often described as buttery would make a great match.
3. Match geographic location. Food and wine from the same region often times share the same characteristics. Wine and beef will have similar characteristics if the grapes are grown in the same ground and soil type as the grass the cow ate. There is an old saying that sums this up, “What grows together, goes together”.
4. When choosing a wine, consider the strongest component of the food dish first, and then consider the base ingredients. In other words, if you are serving lemon chicken, focus on pairing a wine with the lemon first, then pairing the wine to the chicken.
5. Foods high in protein help offset highly tannic wines.
6. When serving multiple bottles of wine serve: a) dry wine before sweet wine (the same reason desserts are sweet and served last), and b) light wine before heavy wine (a light wine will often times seem tasteless if served after a heavy wine).
7. Opposites attract (sometimes). This is a much more difficult way of pairing food and wine. For example, Asian food typically goes well with Riesling or Gewürztraminer, however don’t be afraid to try it with a Pinot Noir or Chardonnay. You never know what will make your taste buds sing and dance.

Above we mentioned there were no rules to pairing food and wine, we lied, this is our only rule: follow your tastes and have fun!

Thanks to Josh Lipson for this great reminder.