Starbucks announced yesterday that it will be adding wine and beer to its menu at select locations in Chicago, Atlanta, and Southern California. This is actually an expansion of its foray into alcoholic beverages: in 2010, the coffee colossus started offering wine and beer at a handful of stores in the Pacific Northwest. The Starbucks news comes just weeks after the hamburger chain White Castle began serving wine and beer at one of its restaurants in Indiana, a test run that is being conducted with an eye to possibly adding alcohol sales at other outlets. Meanwhile, drugstore giant Walgreen recently opened an upscale pharmacy in Chicago that includes a wine department stocked with hundreds of offerings. Walgreen has been selling wine again since 2010 (it had stopped selling alcohol in the mid-1990s), but the new Chicago location is apparently its first venture into high-end wines, and some of the choices are extravagant; for instance, the store is selling the 2006 Penfolds Grange for $450. The Grange would definitely look interesting sharing a basket with a bottle of Maalox and a box of Trojans; talk about unlikely pairings.

So wine is turning up in some strange places these days, which I suppose can be taken as an encouraging sign—further evidence that wine is shedding its highbrow image and becoming a mainstream American habit. Wine is even encroaching on beer’s turf; a number of baseball stadiums are now selling cabernets and chardonnays alongside the Bud Light. Of course, wine is now on the menu at baseball games for the same reason prominent chefs, restaurateurs, and food purveyors (Danny Meyer, Lobel’s) are turning up at the old ballpark: teams are trying to cater to the most affluent fans, and offering wine is seen as one way of pulling them in and keeping them happy (and spending money). So while I do think wine is losing the elitist taint, some businesses are clearly using wine as a means of appealing to those with particularly deep pockets.

The Starbucks story is the one that most intrigues me. At the moment, Starbucks offers wine and beer at five locations in Seattle and one in Portland, Oregon. The wine choices include an Oregon Pinot Noir, a Prosecco, and an Argentine Malbec. The company hasn’t disclosed whether the alcoholic beverages have boosted traffic but says the addition of wine and beer has proven popular with customers, and the fact that they are now expanding the program suggests that this is indeed the case. I could certainly see kicking back with a wine or beer at a Starbucks; some of the stores are quite comfortable, and depending on the hour and my mood, a wine or beer might be preferable to the house specialty.

However, Starbucks is known as a coffee merchant, and given the strength of its brand identity, I wonder if it can really diversify on a broad scale. Some Starbucks patrons in Southern California, interviewed by The Los Angeles Times, were not enthusiastic about the new menu items. “If I wanted a beer, I’d go to bar,” Doug Tanaka, a 48-year-old police officer from Valencia, told the paper. “I bring my grandkids in here. I don’t want to have to deal with a drunk if I’m having coffee.” (Given that Tanaka is a cop, one can assume that the feeling would be mutual.)  It will be interesting to see if Starbucks can fashion itself into a combination coffeehouse-wine bar. Let’s just hope they don’t get cutesy and put a merlot macchiato on the menu.

Let’s start with full disclosure: I am working on a story about children and wine and am raising the subject here as part of my reporting. I won’t quote any of you by name, but I anticipate that whatever discussion we have will very likely provide some interesting material for my article.

So I have two children, and I also have wine on the table pretty much every night of the week. I’ve always assumed that exposing kids to wine encourages responsible drinking later in life, and I let my children dip their fingers in my glass periodically. How very French of me, I know. With regard to kids and wine, I’ve forever viewed the French as beacons of common sense; they don’t treat alcohol as taboo, and it was my impression that French teens and twentysomethings were far less prone to excessive drinking than American youths.

But that just ain’t so—not these days, anyway. NPR aired a story last month about the rising incidence of binge drinking among French teens and the growing doubts in France about whether early exposure really produces better outcomes. And, in fact, alcoholism has long been a major public health problem in France, which suggests that the French approach perhaps isn’t all that enlightened. As with so many issues like this, the academic literature on children and alcohol can point you in whichever direction you want to be pointed: some studies show that permitting kids a taste promotes intelligent behavior, and other studies indicate that it has the opposite effect.

Self-doubt seems to be a condition of modern parenthood, and while I haven’t caught my son or daughter taking any unsanctioned swigs, I am giving a lot of thought to whether or not I’m doing my kids a service by allowing them to experience wine. I would love to get your thoughts on this topic. If you have children, do you let them taste your wine, and at what age did they start? Those of you who don’t have kids should weigh in, too. Was alcohol off-limits when you were growing up or did your parents permit you an occasional sip, and in hindsight, do you think that they had the right idea? With so many Americans now making wine part of their daily lives, I think this is an issue that a lot of people are confronting, and I am eager to hear what you have to say about it.

To Sideways, Mondovino, and Bottle Shock, you can now add Somm, a forthcoming documentary that follows several sommeliers as they attempt the notoriously difficult Master Sommelier exam. The trailer was just released, and while Somm has unmistakable echoes of reality TV, it looks like an engaging film and I’m eager to see it. I imagine it will further glamorize a profession that already enjoys significant star power on these shores. Indeed, sommeliers have truly become the rock stars of the American wine scene. There is a lot of talk these days about the future of wine journalism, but I wonder if those of us doing all the navel-gazing have overlooked one possibility: could the next set of big-time wine communicators come from the ranks of America’s sommeliers?

It’s a question prompted not only by Somm, but also by a recent thread on JancisRobinson.com, in which importer Bartholomew Broadbent made the following claim: “Today, sommeliers are becoming the most influential wine group in America—they are so organized that, I predict, within the next 7 years, they will trump all wine writers and bloggers, simply because they are so interconnected and have a direct influence on the consumer.” I’m not sure that sommeliers are all that organized, but there is no denying that they play a significant tastemaker function in the United States; just look at how fashionable grüner veltliner became for a time. Andrea Robinson made the jump from sommelier to wine communicator and is now among America’s foremost wine popularizers; there is no reason to think that other sommeliers can’t follow her lead.

A big push into the realm of wine content (print, digital, video, some blend thereof) would seem to be the next logical step in America’s sommelier revolution. As I wrote a few years ago in Slate, Americans have completely redefined professional wine service and have turned the role of sommelier into an exemplar of upward mobility. In addition to acquiring the kind of celebrity that normally attaches itself to chefs, sommeliers are moonlighting nowadays as winemakers and entrepreneurs, and a few are also nibbling at the edges of journalism. Rajat Parr, who oversees wine for Michael Mina’s restaurant empire, recently co-authored an excellent book with Jordan Mackay titled Secrets of the Sommeliers, which combines an inside look at the life of a sommelier (more glamorization!) with practical advice for consumers. And that last bit underscores a key point: besides having an encyclopedic knowledgeable of wine, the finest sommeliers are superb communicators, which suggests that they are more than capable of competing on the same turf that I do.

But pace Broadbent, it’s also possible that sommeliers may recede in importance in the years ahead. Steve Heimoff had an item yesterday riffing off an article in the San Francisco Chronicle looking at how tablet devices are replacing waiters in some restaurants. Heimoff suggested that if waiters can be supplanted by machines, so can sommeliers. I think that’s true; lots of people can navigate wine lists on their own and neither need nor want human guidance. The upscale bistros that are all the rage in Paris at the moment do without sommeliers; as Christian Constant, the godfather of the so-called bistronomie movement, put it to me, “People know wine as well as the sommelier.” That’s an exaggeration, but plenty of people know wine well enough that they can manage without the help of a sommelier. Doing without a sommelier is also a way for restaurants to keep costs down, and at a time when diners want good value in addition to good food, that’s no small consideration. We have an increasingly self-confident wine culture in the United States, and we also have a struggling economy, and it’s possible that these two things could lead restaurants here to cut back on dedicated wine service. If that happens, I suppose some sommeliers might dive into wine journalism out of necessity rather than choice. When they discover how lucrative it is, they’ll be kicking themselves for having waited so long!

In the introduction to his book A Hedonist in the Cellar, Jay McInerney offered the following observation: “In Europe, where wine has been a part of daily life for thousands of years, American oenophiles are sometimes viewed as monomaniacs—zealous and somewhat narrow-minded converts to a generous and pantheistic faith. American wine lovers need to broaden their vision and relax: to see wine as just another aspect of the well-lived life.” Those words were published in 2006, and while I think McInerney was wrong in one respect—American oenophiles have long been among the most open-minded wine drinkers on the planet—his larger claim was absolutely correct: at that time, there was a certain zealotry among American grape nuts. You could see it very clearly in the relentless point-chasing and trophy-hunting of the early- and mid-2000s. However, there seems to be a lot less of that stuff nowadays, and people also appear to be consuming a much wider selection of wines than they did even just five years ago. Economic factors have unquestionably played a major role in bringing about these changes, which raises an interesting question: Has the Great Recession produced a healthier wine culture in America?

Pollyanna types often note that good things grow out of hard times, and although I’m generally inclined to believe that it’s always darkest just before it goes pitch black, it does look as if the grim economy has had some positive effects in the realm of wine appreciation—that it has moved us towards that broader vision and more relaxed attitude that McInerney wished to see. I know that I often cite wine discussion boards here, but I think they are a good barometer of the mood among wine geeks, and I’ve noticed some significant shifts in behavior and attitude since 2008. People seem much less fixated on ratings, for instance, and on scoring highly acclaimed wines. Where it used to be that getting onto mailing lists was a big deal, discussion board denizens now seem to take pride in dropping off of them. Back in the pre-crash days, people didn’t hesitate to post accounts of blowout dinners at which numerous rarities would be uncorked. You don’t see many posts like that now. Ostentatious consumption is out, value is in, and oenophiles are finding tasting pleasures far beyond Bordeaux and Napa.

Maybe the habits of yesteryear are just in hibernation and will return once the good times return, but I’m not so sure. The Great Recession is undoubtedly going to leave some lasting scars, and I suspect that the changes we’ve seen within the wine geek community since 2008 will prove to be lasting, too. Wine is not a trophy, and the days of treating it as one are probably over, at least on these shores. It seems to me that our economic woes have yielded a healthier attitude—dare I say a more European attitude—about wine. The obsessive-compulsive exuberance that McInerney lamented back in 2006 has given way to a more laid-back and ecumenical wine culture, and that’s a very good thing, in my opinion.

What say you? Has the sour economy led us to a sweeter spot as wine appreciation goes? Has your attitude about wine changed as a result of the prolonged economic downturn, and have you noticed a change in outlook among fellow wine buffs? Is it one cheer for the Great Recession? I’d love to get your take on this topic.

Early in my marriage, I nearly earned the eternal wrath of my mother-in-law. My wife and I went to my in-laws’ for dinner, and I brought a bottle of wine for us to drink—us meaning my wife and I; her father prefers beer, and her mother abstains. I took two glasses from the china cabinet, poured the wine, and began sniffing around the edge of my glass like a bloodhound on speed. My father-in-law looked at me with an eyebrow arched so high that I thought it was going to reach his hairline. I quickly identified the problem: the glasses, which hadn’t been used in years, reeked of furniture polish. I then made the mistake of announcing this. Because my mother-in-law is Japanese and very discreet, she refrained from reaching for her meat cleaver, but I know that she wanted to. A few months later, I added indignity to insult by showing up for dinner at her house with my own wine glass. My wife received an earful the next day, and although my mother-in-law seems to have gotten over the affront, a dozen or so years after the fact, the story of me and the wine glasses is still trotted out whenever my in-laws feel like having a laugh at my expense, which is fairly often.

Although I’m usually a courteous guest (or so I think), my manners almost always fail me when I encounter a wine glass with an off-putting aroma. You know those “If you see something, say something” warnings on trains and subways? When I smell something, I say something. Several years ago, at a friend’s dinner party in Paris, I was given a wine glass that had a pronounced whiff of dishwasher detergent. Stemware zealot that I am, I immediately made the problem known to the entire table, which did not thrill my host. A few months ago, I was at another dinner party, and several of us noticed that a just-poured wine had a somewhat musty aroma. I put the glass to my nose and determined that the wine wasn’t off. I then started sniffing the outside of the glass, realized it was cabinetry that we were smelling, and blurted out to the hostess, “Did the glasses come from a wood cabinet?” It was only after I got home that it occurred to me that I might have embarrassed or offended her (I’m pleased to report that the friendship has survived, although I suspect I’ll be drinking wine out of a plastic cup the next time we are invited to her house for dinner—and it will serve me right).

So I’ve acknowledged that I can be impolite when it comes to malodorous stemware. Calling attention to a faulty wine glass is perfectly acceptable in restaurants, of course, but is it always rude to do so in someone’s house? I ask because I once refrained from making an issue of some aromatically compromised glasses, and I’m not sure that I made the correct decision. Some years ago, my wife and I auctioned off our cooking and sommelier services on behalf of a local charity. The dinner took place at the winner’s house, and we supplied the food and wine. I brought two very good bottles, a Domaine Tempier Bandol La Tourtine (I can’t remember the vintage off the top of my head) and a 1998 Beaucastel. Unfortunately, the host’s glasses stank of detergent, and I found it impossible to enjoy the wines. No one else seemed all that jazzed by them, either, and I have to assume it was because we were mainly smelling Cascade rather than mourvèdre (back off, pedants: I know the 98 Beaucastel is primarily grenache, but you get the point). Keeping my mouth shut avoided causing any offense, but it also condemned us to a night of disappointing drinking.

Was I right to let us all suffer in silence, or should I have said something? Wine geeks can usually be relied on to take good care of their Riedels and Spiegelaus, but the general population is not always as scrupulous. Is it ever okay to tell a host that his or her wine glasses quite literally stink, and under what circumstances would you pipe up? Have you ever encountered situations similar to the ones I’ve described above, and what did you do? Playing off my nearly fatal faux pas with my mother-in-law, a bonus question: if a friend or family member has defective stemware, can you volunteer to supply better glasses, or is that just rude? I know that I’m not alone in being a pain in the ass about foul-smelling glass; what’s acceptable stemware etiquette?

Alder Yarrow, Seth Long, Bill Moore, and Dan McCallum, take a bow—sort of. Alder, you got the exact scores but had the wines reversed. Dan, you had the right score for Wine 2 and were off by a point for Wine 1 until you let that tobacco note throw you. Seth, you nailed Wine 1 and were off by a point for Wine 2, and Bill, you did the opposite. Well played, gents.

So, the answer to the quiz:

Wine 1: 93 points

Wine 2: 97 points

I am not going to identify the critic, the publication, or the wines themselves, because the issue isn’t any one critic or publication. The point I was trying to make was that professional tasting notes are often just a tangle of inane descriptors and fail at their most basic duty: to convey with some degree of precision how good, bad, or indifferent a wine is. I’m not sure that I succeeded in making this point with the tasting notes I cited, because a number of you correctly guessed that the wines had received significantly different scores, and a few of you came thisclose to acing the quiz. Perhaps my preamble yesterday gave the game away, or maybe the two tasting notes were not as indistinguishable from one another as I thought they were. I have to say that I was struck by the way some of you expertly zeroed in on the use of certain words and phrases in the two tasting notes—a tour de force of linguistic sleuthing!

Despite the somewhat ambiguous result of the quiz, I am going to exercise my prerogative as the landlord of this joint to ignore the result and to reiterate a point I made yesterday: numerical ratings got to be so popular in no small part because professional tasting notes are usually such unenlightening gruel. The question now—the question that prompted this two-part post and the bonus quiz—is whether the numerical ratings dished out by wine critics are coming to be seen as equally useless. To put it in pop culture terms, have scores jumped the shark?

No doubt, lots of winemakers still care about the numbers, and many collector/investor types surely do, too. But I sense that points are losing their hold over the marketplace. Judging by the chatter in the chat rooms, wine geeks no longer seem to get as worked up about professional scores as they did back in the day (over on wineberserkers, the discussion concerning Antonio Galloni’s Napa scores was largely driven by ratings refusniks). Perhaps grade inflation is to blame; when every wine these days seems to get 90 points just for showing up and scores in the mid- and high-90s are given out like candy on Halloween, it becomes hard to suppress a yawn. Maybe the weak economy has thinned the point-chaser population, or it could be that the numbers racket has simply run its course and American wine culture is changing. The rise of CellarTracker may also be a factor.

Whatever the reason, professional scores don’t appear to carry as much weight as they did in the past, and I’m not the only one who has detected a shift. I recently spoke with Kermit Lynch, who told me that retailers and restaurants don’t seem to be nearly as preoccupied with numerical ratings as they were just five years ago (and, in fact, a number of wine shops nationwide are now point-free zones). I’m curious if your observations square with mine (and Kermit’s), or if you think I’m guilty of wishful thinking. And how important are professional wine ratings to you? Do you follow them, and do they inform your buying decisions? When you pop into a wine store, do shelf talkers still have the power to get you hot and bothered? Are you living a point-less life, or are you hooked on scores?

The latest issue of The Wine Advocate, published just before Christmas, is generating a lot of chatter because it includes Antonio Galloni’s first Napa Valley reviews—1061 reviews, to be exact. Galloni’s scores were pretty effusive—so much so that some observers think he may have single-handedly recalibrated the scales, so to speak. As W. Blake Gray put it, 94 points seems to be the new 90. Indeed, with so many Napa wines receiving scores in the mid- and upper-90s (according to Gray, 123 wines were awarded 95 points or above by Galloni) anything below that really does look like chopped liver now. Whether Galloni’s scores accurately reflect the quality of the wines being made in Napa these days or are the result of grade inflation is a matter of debate. But I have a different question: Do people still care all that much about professional wine ratings?

No, you are not about to read another broadside against the 100-point scale or wine ratings in general. I think ratings are an inevitable aspect of wine appreciation, and I certainly haven’t been able to resist the urge to keep score; I use letter grades instead of numbers, but it still amounts to scorekeeping. I happen to believe that the 100-point system is uniquely flawed, but I understand its appeal—it offers a succinct, unambiguous verdict. And when you read a typical professional tasting note, you see very quickly why numerical ratings got to be so popular. Take, for instance, these two reviews, which I recently came across in a wine publication that shall remain nameless. Both wines were rated on a 100-point scale. Try to guess which one earned a higher rating and the score that each wine received:

Wine 1: “The _____is  a captivating wine graced with exquisite finesse, depth, and grace. Seemingly endless layers of dark red fruit, tar, spices, flowers and tobacco are woven together beautifully in this stunning, deeply expressive _____. A radiant, supple finish rounds things out in style. Today the ___ comes across as quite open and accessible given the richness of its fruit.”

Wine 2: “The ____emerges from the glass with dark plums, black cherries, licorice, graphite and spices. The wine possesses striking textural depth and richness, with dazzling purity and exceptional overall balance. Today the spiciness of the oak comes through just a bit, but that should not be an issue by the time the wine is ready to drink. A final burst of fruit informs the explosive finish.”

Judging by all the superlatives (captivating, exquisite, stunning, dazzling, exceptional, radiant), the critic clearly liked both wines a lot. Apart from the one caveat concerning the second wine, the two tasting notes strike me as basically indistinguishable—the same degree of enthusiasm, the same banal verbiage. I am curious to hear what you think—so curious, in fact, that I am going to hold off on finishing this post in order to give you a chance to offer your guesses. Again, which of these wines received a higher score, and how many points was each wine awarded? I’ll be back tomorrow with the answers and to continue my point about points.

Happy New Year; I hope everyone ate and drank well over the holidays and avoided any bad hangovers, and my best wishes to you for the coming year.

I thought it would be good to start 2012 with another installment of The Wine Ethicist. As you surely know, Christopher Hitchens passed away last month. In addition to being a Vanity Fair contributor, Hitchens did a weekly column for Slate, and in 2008, he wrote an amusing screed about restaurant wine service, specifically the practice of sommeliers and waiters refilling wine glasses without being asked to do so. This “breathtaking act of rudeness,” Hitchens fumed, “conveys a none-too-subtle and mercenary message: Hurry up and order another bottle.” He suggested that the dining public’s tolerance of this ritual “must have something to do with the snobbery and insecurity that frequently accompany the wine business. A wine waiter can be a bit of a grandee, putting on airs that may intimidate those who know little of the subject…people somehow grant restaurants the right to push their customers around in this outrageous way.”

I think Hitchens was being a little unfair to sommeliers. Here in the United States, at least, restaurant wine service has undergone a dramatic transformation over the last two decades or so, and it is pretty rare now to encounter an insolent sommelier. Moreover, the better somms are very adept at reading the mood of a table in order to determine whether automatic refills are welcome or not. In my experience, the problem Hitchens described tends to arise in restaurants without sommeliers, in which “regular” waiters handle the wine service. And it is a real problem: in many restaurants, wine glasses are topped up with no regard for the wishes of the customer, and the pours are often obscenely large. A few years ago, four of us were out for dinner, and the waiter emptied almost the entire bottle on his first go-around. To spite him, we nursed our glasses for the entire night rather than ordering a second bottle.

The obvious solution to the problem of heavy-handed or incompetent wine service is to wrest control of the bottle from whoever is doing the pouring. Or you can just announce at the outset that you, the diner, will take care of the pouring, which avoids the problem entirely. However, I don’t like to invite the wrath of people who handle my food (you never know what they might do!), and informing a waiter that he is not to touch your bottle could leave him feeling insulted. Sure, if he cares about his tip, he’ll swallow his pride and graciously comply with your wishes. But waiters don’t always act in their own best interest, and making an issue of the wine service could create an undercurrent of hostility and diminish the pleasure of the meal. So taking charge of the bottle is not a risk-free move.

My approach now is what might be called the two-strikes-and-you’re-out rule. If the waiter pours too much wine in the glass or is too quick with refills, I’ll gently indicate that I’d like him to back off; if the problem persists, I will relieve him of the pouring duties while trying to be tactful about it. This strategy generally works well, but I’m curious to hear how you handle restaurant wine service. Do you go the wait-and-see route, or do you deny the waiter/sommelier the opportunity to tick you off by assuming control of the bottle from the start? Do you agree with Hitchens that the unsolicited refill is a “barbaric custom” that should be ended? Tell us how you deal with unsatisfactory wine service, and definitely share any horror stories that you’ve experienced!

With 2011 now down to its final hours, I have been playing grape skin prophet and giving some thought to what the major wine stories of 2012 are likely to be. My guess is that the biggest story of the coming year will be the continuation of what I believe was the biggest story of 2011: the declining importance of Bordeaux. Among American consumers, there seems to be little love for Bordeaux at the moment. Left Bank, Right Bank, grands crus classés or crus bourgeois—it makes no difference. Bordeaux is completely out of fashion right now. Fairly or not, the aggressive pricing for the top growths has soured many wine buffs on the entire region, and while it is possible the diminished interest in Bordeaux is just temporary, I can’t help but wonder if something more permanent is taking hold.

While there is no question that greed (or extreme profit-maximization, to put it more delicately) has hurt Bordeaux’s image, I think Bordeaux is also suffering because tastes are changing. A few months ago, I suggested that cabernet sauvignon’s hegemony is over; for many oenophiles, pinot noir has supplanted cabernet as the reference-point grape, and this has eroded Bordeaux’s stature (Napa’s, too). An even bigger problem for Bordeaux is that because of the high prices of the classified growths, younger drinkers are cultivating their palates on wines from other places. For generations of wine enthusiasts, Bordeaux was the benchmark; the finest clarets were the yardstick against which all other wines were measured. But that’s clearly not the case for this new breed of wine geeks. For them, Bordeaux is just another region, and I doubt that will change.

With sales in the U.S. moribund, the Bordelais have been banking on Asia in recent years. But even there, Bordeaux now seems to be losing some of its cachet. China’s Lafite craze looks to have peaked, and Burgundies, not Bordeaux, were the hottest items during the fall auctions in Hong Kong. Burgundy long ago eclipsed Bordeaux as the lodestar for younger American collectors; the same thing may be happening now in Asia. Meanwhile, British merchants are already warning that next spring’s en primeur campaign could be a disaster unless the Bordelais cut prices dramatically. Is Bordeaux just in a rut, or are we witnessing an historic shift in consumer preferences? I suspect the next 12 months will go a long way to answering that question.

What do you think is happening with Bordeaux, and what do you believe the big wine stories of 2012 are likely to be? Let’s hear some predictions!

My wallet is unmoved: Liv-ex Fine Wine 50 index down double digits in 2011, matches 2008 decline.

Boom times abroad for buttery Chardonnays: California wine exports were up 23 percent through first 10 months of 2011.

Insert requisite Harold & Kumar reference: White Castle considers adding wine, beer to its menu.

Canadian, American—what’s the difference?  A fun BBC report about the state of French cuisine, with hilarious anti-American gibe aimed at the Canadian reporter (21-minute mark).

Oh, the morning after: In time for New Year’s Eve, The New Yorker re-posts an illuminating piece about hangovers.