It’s been a quieter few months on the Dragon Phoenix Wine Blog as Edward has put the finishing touches to a major study of the work of 20th Century American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955).

Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction will be published by Cambridge University Press in August and is the culmination of almost a decade’s research based, in part, on an original Ph.D. dissertation and subsequent research trips to the US supported by the British Academy and British Association for American Studies in 2007.

Stevens is perhaps best known for poems such as ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, his long doctrinal poem ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ and his late lyrics, such as ‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’. So what’s the connection with wine?

Stevens was something of a wine lover, especially of the wines of Burgundy and one of the book’s chapters is entitled ‘Food, Wine and the Idealist ‘I” (the ‘I’ is a special case of the first person speaker in several of Stevens’ 1940s poems).

The book proffers a long reading of perhaps Stevens’ most baffling gastronomic poem ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’, a text whose relationship with Burgundy and with Occupied France of 1942 is both ingenious and has previously remained tough for Stevens scholarship to decipher.

Part of the book’s argument is that Stevens’ embrace of an abstract aesthetic was not confined merely to poetic or artistic concerns, but involved his everyday imagination, interests and needs, including a love of the finer things in life, with wine being no exception (for initials reviews from Charles Altieri and J. Hillis Miller please click here).

This is, after all, the poet who wrote in ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’:

We drank Meursault, ate lobster Bombay with mango
Chutney. Then the Canon Aspirin declaimed
Of his sister, in what a sensible ecstasy

She lived in her house. She had two daughters, one
Of four, and one of seven, whom she dressed
The way a painter of pauvred color paints.

The study follows on from a joint project entitled Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pictured above.

Watch this space for updates on our combined wine writing, most recently in Decanter and The World of Fine Wine Magazine. We also have highlights from the 2009 tasting season in Beijing, plus some special Featured Tastings and up-to-date coverage of what’s been happening in China’s capital and further a field.

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(Photo: wines from the 2009 Landmark Tutorial)

We are delighted to be participating in this year’s Landmark Tutorial, to be held in the Yarra Valley in September.

Joining a group of 14 participants chosen from the around the world, this one-week, residential course exposes students to some of Australia’s greatest winemakers, wine critics, authors and other luminaries as well as several hundred representative and classic wines in vintages old and new (and in all colours and styles!).

Click here for the full list of this year’s participants. Further details on the Tutorial, can be downloaded here.

Click here for this year’s schedule of seminars and activities.

The inaugural Landmark Tutorial, held in 2009 in the Barossa Valley, showcased some 248 Australian fine wines. The success and stimulation of last year’s Tutorial was evidenced by student feedback and on the blog reports of 2009’s alumni, including the likes of Jamie Goode and Julia Harding MW.

We would like to extend our gratitude for enabling us this unique opportunity to the Landmark Tutorial Committee and to Wine Australia/AWBC for launching the initiative.

Watch the Dragon Phoenix Wine Blog for reports on this week-long course as well as our more recent forays within China and around the world.

Edward Ragg & Fongyee Walker

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(Photo: The Wine Doctor)

Not so long ago we put our heads together to come up with a suitable Chinese name for legendary Haut-Medoc producer Chateau La Lagune.

If you want to read Fongyee’s rationale for the translation and discover the name itself, please click here (to download the La Lagune Newsletter).

This is now the official Chinese name for La Lagune and has since been adopted by The Singapore Wine Review and the Chinese Bordeaux Guide (which is working on a comprehensive list of names for all chateaux in the 1855 Classification).

For a full profile of La Lagune, click here. The Chateau’s wines are currently imported into China by Links.

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Informative, bilingual trade magazine Drink (based in Shanghai) has enlisted our services for a series of introductory wine articles.

Here’s our article from Issue 4 devoted to the art of tasting and how to arrange your own wine tasting. To read a copy, please click here.

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A recent article in Beijing Today outlined the situation of being a sommelier in this emerging market.

To read it, please click on Beijing Today.

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Edward has recently posted in-depth articles on Catavino and Enobytes:

DBR Lafite, Bodegas Torres and The Future of Wine in China

‘Nava Valley’: The Fate of American Wines in China

The Enobytes piece was also aired on Wine Business.com (where Enobytes is a Featured Blog)

Look out also for Edward’s and Fongyee’s recent ‘Sinophile’ column in The World of Fine Wine Issue 24: ‘How Large is a Chinese Grand Cru?’

There’s also a fascinating article by Jamie Goode in the same issue entitled ‘Help or Hype? Fine Wine on the Internet’. Goode praises some aspects of Adegga, the on-line community and tasting note resource of which we at Dragon Phoenix are also big fans!

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It’s already mid-June. Beijing has been awash these past few weeks and months with myriad tastings - before the summer heat puts paid to most events - and our blogging backlog is already looking hefty…

In the meantime Edward has just written a new article for Catavino (DBR Lafite, Bodegas Torres and The Future of Wine in China) and is due to write about American wines in the Chinese market(s) on Enobytes. He also has his head in the manuscript of a book due for Cambridge University Press in mid-August.

But as we rack up hours of WSET teaching, we thought a note at least informing readers of what’s to come on the Dragon Phoenix blog was more than a little overdue.

Thus, once we’ve completed our next ‘Sinophile’ column for The World of Fine Wine, here’s a taste of what we plan for future posts (click on links to find your way to these posts):

Featured Tasting: Highlights from Richards Walfords trade tasting (UK)

Featured Tasting: Heitz Cellars, Napa

Featured Tasting: Clos du Val, Napa

Featured Tasting: Silverado, Napa

Featured Tasting: Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, Napa

Featured Tasting: Cakebread Cellars, Napa

Bollinger NV Rose: Beijing Launch

Featured Tasting: Springfield Estate, Robertson

Bordeaux 2005: Wines of Bernard Magrez

China Agricultural University: Fongyee introduces Chinese students to the wines of Robert Mondavi

Raffles Beijing: Paul Jaboulet Aine dinner

China World: Chateau Palmer Seminar

… plus plenty of other features including two on Champagne (Roederer and growers Tarlant & R. Geoffroy), tastings with Angove’s, Burklin-Wolf, Vignobles Brunier, Portugal’s Plansel, Hewitson and the wines of Jean-Claude Boisset and Bouchard Aine.

There might even be the odd surprise feature too.

Finally, we will also publish a wider review of the Black Sesame cooking school food-and-wine matching exercise in which we took part (pictured below), with wines from The Wine Republic, as publicized in The New York Times (click here for full article) under the pen of Black Sesame owner Jen Lin-Liu.

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Book Review: “To Cork or Not to Cork: Tradition, Romance, Science, and the Battle for the Wine Bottle” by George M. Taber

This book outlines the history and science behind the various closures of the wine bottle over several centuries.

Although 270 pages on wine closures may sound boring to a lot of people, Taber writes a fascinating and balanced account not only of the natural cork,

but also screwcaps, glass closures and plastic corks, while providing interesting anecdotes about specific wineries and their searches to find the perfect closure.

In fact, Taber’s lively story-telling style ensures the book reads more like a collection of short stories rather than a dry discussion of bottle-closure pros and cons. For those who would like to read a balanced and reasonable account clearly demonstrating the positive and negative characteristics surrounding natural corks, plastic corks, screwcaps and glass, we can wholeheartedly recommend this title.

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21st February 2009

After a month away from Beijing - taking in the UK, Canada and the US - we can promise a series of posts on all the wines we tasted in California including winery visits at:

Grgich Hills Estate, Clos du Bois, Simi, Limerick Lane, Franciscan Estate, Robert Mondavi, Heitz Cellars, Clos du Val, Silverado Vineyards, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars and Cakebread Cellars.

The first post can be found here: Grgich Hills Estate.

Click on each of the following links for write-ups of each respective winery: Clos du Bois, Simi, Limerick Lane, Franciscan Estate, Robert Mondavi, Heitz Cellars, Clos du Val, Silverado Vineyards, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, Cakebread Cellars.

Admittedly, during this marathon tasting tour, Fongyee was mostly couped up in Yountville studying for the Master of Wine programme and Edward set a day aside to complete the Certified Specialist in Wine exam with the Society of Wine Educators in Napa City.

It was a jam-packed trip during which Edward blogged on US site Enobtyes (click here for his first post) and we drafted our first column for The World of Fine Magazine (see forthcoming Issue 23).

But given all the hype surrounding California, especially Napa, what was this cross-section of wines really like? Can they deliver a reasonable quality price ratio within the region and perhaps further a field?

Posts are archived according to time of winery visits (with full accompanying tasting notes on Adegga).

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We recently received a congratulary email from Pamela Heiligenthal of Enobytes who has compiled a Top 100 list of wine blogs via Google indexing and some enterprising research of her own.

Heiligenthal explains: ‘I created the “Google Top 100 Wine Blog” list by simply typing in a simple key term “wine blog” in the Google search engine. I then removed content that did not meet certain criteria, excluding blogs that haven’t been updated in over 3 months or websites that simply list other blogs.

I also excluded blog directories, redirects, subsets or duplicates and blogs that heavily focus on content other than wine. There are a lot of blogs that call themselves a wine blog but focus more on things like travel, sports, etc., and I also excluded product type wine blogs (e.g. subzero refrigeration)’.

The Dragon Phoenix Wine Blog weighed in at 75, not bad for a fledgling venture by a pair of wine writers just learning the ropes of Wine Web 2.0.

We have a long way to go, of course, particularly with blogging bells and whistles.

But it’s heartening to have some endorsement in terms of content and ‘findability’ on the web, particularly from such pioneers (Enobytes is one of the first sites to generate wine maps from Google Earth among other innvoations).

To read the Top 100 list and Pamela Heiligenthal’s full report, click here.

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