Our real question is – where is the commemorative label version of this wine? It somehow made it’s way into Snooth.com – where it sits unadorned with tasting notes or availability information and unrated. And we know Snooth wouldn’t clutter up the Internet with less-than-useful wine ratings, so we’re intrigued. Is Snooth posting phantom wines, or is this some inside California cognescenti thing that only a few Hollywood A-listers know about? And is it really a two-headed monster like the photo implies – sort of like a Diamond Collection version of conjoined twins? We love Coppola – and we especially love it when the guy commemorates. So if anyone knows where we can find this wine – please let us know. Of course, maybe it’s still in oak barrels somewhere, ahead of it’s release, and the publicists are just getting a jump on things. Either way, we wait with baited breath.

What better way to learn about wine than with free media that’s accessible while you commute, workout, or jog. Or heck, listen along from your couch with a glass of vino in your hand… it’s all the same to us. iTunes has a plethora of wine related content at varying quality levels. The UnCorker sorts it out for you.

Wine Library TV (video podcast)

The fact that Gary Vaynerchuk recently signed a seven figure book deal that is not really about wine is revealing. WineLibraryTV is often more the story of Gary than the story behind the wines being discussed. Gary’s amazing nose and palatte. Gary’s ability to score a wine with tremendous precision on a 100 pt. scale after only seconds in his mouth. Gary’s apartment. Gary’s fridge. Gary’s soulmate. Gary’s love of olives. And least trivially, Gary’s advice for staying optimistic and self empowered through the down economy. Here’s an example from his twitter feed, which has a ginormous following(170,000 twitees at last count): why wont people realize that $ isn’t the game! The 10 happiest people I know make wayyyyyy less money then many people I know. A confessional tone with oodles of personal sharing has forged a following for a show that exists more or less around a single personality – equal part Tony Robbins & hyped-up Jersey version of Robert Parker.

The host is entertaining enough and we don’t have a problem with his over caffeinated dialogue and manic pace. He posts nearly daily with a wide variety of topics, locations, and guests. He knows wine, that’s beyond dispute. It should also not count against him that he is exploiting a perfectly acceptable part of the vernacular of his video-blogging medium – informal personal style and loosely – bordering on “un” – organized content. Watching people taste wine is boring – and Gary knows this, trying every crazy analogy he can come up with to keep things moving. Gary’s tasting notes are creative, funny and atypical – racquetball, fabreze, cocoa puffs, jolly rancher, starburst not to mention the combos – black currents in a cedar box. Like Car Talk, this is the show that aspires to entertain an audience far beyond it’s specific milieu. But ultimately the show is a difficult format in which to learn about wine. When Gary tastes a 2004 Latour Martillac Bordeaux (in his apartment kitchen) and is ‘bullish’ on the experience – we’ve forgotten the wine completely within minutes after viewing. Instructional designers talk about retention and transfer as two types of learning outcomes. Here we take away only the memory that Gary’s fridge seemed awfully empty. Gee, we think, this guy must really travel a lot.

3 Wine Guys (audio podcast)

Here we have a trio of real Chicago guys: prone to swagger-y, masculine banter and inside jokes – the sort of talk that happens between old college buddies over a boring televised hockey game (is there another type?) You know, Ditka guys. But these guys are obsessed with wine and it shows. The testosterone contrasts nicely with the crunchy NoCal vibe of so many other wine related podcasts (Jersey wunderkind Gary Veynerchuk excluded, of course). The guys alternate their podcast format each week between a loosely formatted rant called “What are we drinking?”, mysteriously entitled ‘blogcasts’, and their official (and far more interesting) themed podcasts that focus on a specific aspect within the wine world: a varietal, a producer, a region. If iTunes had an option that let one subscribe only to alternating weeks, thereby skipping the “blogcasts”, this would rank higher in our book – as the information is quite deep, well-structured and useful. You get the impression these guys would be having this exact conversation over the same bottles of wine with or without a microphone around – and that’s what’s great about the show. We like it when these guys aren’t trying to pull every last tasting note out of the air and are communicating the context behind the wine to us. Their comfort zone is shooting the shit – and the show suffers in terms of pacing as a result. But it’s generally interesting and worth spending an hour (or so) of commuting time on.

Crushnet TV (video podcast)

One day the make-your-own-wine-2.0 craze will come to end. Folks will quit logging on to stylish websites to check the brix level of their fermenting lots of cabernet and they’ll be content to leave that stuff to professional winemakers. UC Davis viticulture grads will have to face the hard reality that theirs is an agricultural profession and their job opportunities in trendy urban-industrial nabe’s like SoMa or TriBeCa are limited. But until that day comes, there is Crushnet – the amazingly informative video podcast by San Francisco DIY winemaking coop Crushpad. The podcast is part marketing effort and part dialogue and tutorial between the professional winemakers who work at Crushpad and their clients – the “barrel team” armchair winemakers who follow along from home (and occasionally drop by the winery or the vineyard to help.) In general, it’s great to listen to a winemaker while they taste and talk about wine – unlike a critic- as they tend to sum things up with great economy and without much fuss. That’s the tone here – and the short video clips combine to form a cohesive and insightful look into the winemaking process – even if you never intend to use Crushpad’s services. The seven minute segment on oak barrels is probably the most interesting wine-related item on iTunes. Period. In a lot of ways, this is better than a visit to the winery itself – as you get the benefits of watching things unfold over time – from harvest, to crush, to fermentation decisions, to barreling and racking, and bottling. And their willingness to show all the ‘behind the scenes’ technical equipment and lab processes goes beyond what most in-person winery tour insurance policies must allow. This is great wine education – so definitely check it out now in case their Silicon Valley business model flames out before you get a chance to.

The Wine Spectator (video podcast)

Ok. This seems to be the scoop on the venerable rag, The Wine Spectator, among wine geeks. Nobody loves it. Everybody reads it. There is something a bit tight about the Spectator, and it’s not just their need to taxonomize and score the wines. There is an editorial focus on discriminating, refined consumption at work – a need to create sponsor-friendly weather in it’s ecosystem. As a lifestyle mag it lacks nuance and reinforces the feeling that global wine culture has a certain universal look and feel – a town and country faux rustic-ness, a polished Reidel sheen, a quality of bland professionalism to it. Let’s face it – a lot of times reading the Spectator is about as fun as reading one of those thick, glossy local destinations guides that comes with your hotel room. And it’s not cheap enough that you don’t care. But being the status quo – these guys know everybody and are the epicenter of the wine world in so many ways they just can’ t be ignored. In this – the free podcast version of the magazine – they cover major events, talk through their featured articles, top wines of the year, interview famous chefs and winemakers, and (particularly enjoyable) give behind the scenes clips… sort of like a “making of” of the magazine. We don’t always buy the mag, but we wouldn’t miss the podcast… a convenient substitute that does the trick and is even worth putting up with the occasionally blatant product placement disguised as editorial content. It’s well-produced, frequently updated, short clips that keep you in WS’s world with minimal bother, fuss, and price. How can we complain?

Grape Radio (audio and video podcast)

While this outfit is based in viticulturally challenged Orange County, California – you would never know it from this podcast. Grape Radio is plugged in, not only to the massive amounts of wine activity in the central and northern parts of their own state, but world-wide. These guys (and gals) consistently line up excellent interviews with major wine world personalities, cover interesting events, and visit vineyards and wineries. Here’s a crew that knows how to put a show together – something rare in the podcast world (not counting those programs which are produced originally for terrestrial radio.) It is one of the more professional “radio-like” podcasts in terms of structure – and the video segments are well done and consistently educational. Clearly these are not just a couple of guys in the basement farting around on their MacBook, and their website reinforces this claim with many awards and recognition within the pocasting world (not to mention a vast panel of contributors). While we like the folksy amatuerism of less slick podcasters, we do appreciate a good interview. Here they let their subjects talk and express their full story, ask insightful questions, and are not afraid to run long segments. They manage to keep things contextualized at the high level, while not being afraid to dive into the details as well.

Honorable Mentions:

We love listening to the The Oz Show out of Australia for it’s different perspective, and the guys are pleasant to listen to and know their stuff – but unfortunately this one succumbed to podfade and is not updating anymore. Worth checking out the back catalog which is still available on iTunes.

We also listen to Tim Elliott’s WineCast – but ommitted it here because of it’s industry focus. If you’re interested in becoming a wine blogger, then you might like this one.

The comic series is so insanely popular in Japan and Korea that the wines it mentions sell out immediately.  Obtaining a copy of this manga has become an obsession – but unfortunately nobody at the UnCorker reads Japanese.  So what to do? Spend hours with a Kanji dictionary just to experience a 2001 Chateau Mont Perat compared to the ’sweet and husky’ voice of Queen lead singer, Freddy Mercury?   Apparently there are no plans for an English translation – even though the French now have one.  The manga market in the US & UK is focused primarily on minors, who legally aren’t allowed to experience a ‘99 Richebourg in “full bloom” even if they could manage Shizuku’s high-wire aerial decanting technique – so it’s no wonder there are no plans in the works for an official published version in English.   Kami no Shizuku targets young-ish men (mostly) and women, many of who are in their thirties – with the express goal of educating them on the basics of being an insufferable old-world wine snob.   Only one option remains if you want to read this in English translation… enter the nerdy counter-culture of online comic book traders and find a “scanlation” (or unauthorized translated copy.)

Well, it’s worth mentioning at this point that we’re procrastinators in all things except drinking and aging wines (“sure it would be great in a couple of years, but why not drink it now?”)  The first move therefore is to call some friends with more pop-culture cred than ourselves and see if we can get our hands on this without resorting to trolling the file sharing networks… which frankly, sounds like a lot of work.  Within about five minutes, our friends at Del Ray Manga clue us into a couple of scan sites that have a taste of Kami no Shizuku in English.  One’s called mangafox.com and the other is called ncismanga.net.  Mangafox has the first 5 chapters of volume 1 in a very easy to access format – the pages render in large, crisp images directly in the browser with no annoying logging in or downloading involved.  Ncismanga has their download links disabled – indicating one must use IRC to find and download the files, a technology not used here since our TRS-80 went on the fritz.  Five segments of the popular Japanese TV show, with English subtitles, is available here at Iron Chevsky.

Ok. First lesson learned when it comes to reading manga translations – they make a lot more sense if you remember to read from right to left (although, this being Japanese pop culture… not as much as you’d think.)  In anime circles – of which we admittedly didn’t know existed until now – scanlations have a reputation for sloppy translations – particularly when it comes to the more subtle cultural references and idioms.   We’re sure that such awkward translations (if any) only add to the giddy delight and wierdness of reading Kami no Shizuku – for instance, when our hero feels “sick in the back-teeth” from all the blathering from his annoying parents, it contributes cultural terroir to the story.

It turns out that loads of people rightfully enjoy this as a pure manga experience – even without a strong interest in it’s wine aspects.  It has great art, a fun story line with dramatic tension, and even though it doesn’t have a lot of shonen (exaggerated martial arts style action), or fan service (POV style panty shots and other non-plot related sexual inferences), it’s surprisingly physical and in the spirit of the genre, especially given it’s fussy subject matter. The plot is centered on Shizuku and Issei tracking down twelve great bottles of wine that will unlock the keys to the kingdom – which in this case is their deceased father’s priceless wine collection.  The plot unfolds with compelling twists and turns, but never hesitates to slow down and linger on the great delights of the wine itself.  Long sequences of detailed sniffing, swirling, and ecstatic facial expressions accompany most of the wine sequences – which are based on real wines with real vintages.  Despite the dated, and franco-philiac!, nature of their particular breed of wine snobbery, the characters show great emotion and reverence for the godly liquids they imbibe – and refreshingly never resort to a Parker-style rating system.  It’s this sort of enthusiasm that does exactly what a lot of wine criticism fails to do – puts the fun back into talking about wine.   If wine is nothing else, it’s a rich mileau for storytelling, full of colorful characters and locations.  We can’t wait for these ’scanalators’ to get us more.