Newsworthy Wine Stuff: Catavino’s Rioja Report, EWBC 2008, AAWE and Blog de Vinos de Argentina

It’s been a very busy week, but after my nice catching up session with Google Reader, here are some treasures worth noting from the RSS pileup:

1) Catavino’s Rioja Report and EWBC 2008: Gabriella and Ryan over at Catavino have made a labor of love—an ambitious sort of compendium that is all things Rioja. From regional gastronomy to what else? Los vinos! You can find maps, profiles of wineries, beautiful photography and even a comprehensive explanation of Rioja labeling practices. I also found their buying guide particularly valuable and look forward to bringing it along on some shopping trips in the near future. This kind of stuff is a privilege to be able to look at when you consider other “regional reports” published by people with a sense of entitlement to wine travel and $60+ annual subscription fees. Ryan and Gabriella are accountable for their material, actively and genuinely elicit and value readers’ opinions, suggestions and evince passion for this stuff, so go ahead and bookmark them.

2) Speaking of La Rioja, check out the page for this summer’s inaugural European Wine Bloggers Conference.

3) Remember Mr. Show’s Worthington Law applied to wine? Looks like the research findings from that CalTech/Stanford study published earlier in the year have been further validated. Working Paper No, 16, published by the American Association of Wine Economists details a new study in which people generally preferred less expensive wines, unless told by researchers of course, that a wine was particularly expensive.

4) If you read Spanish and want to stay up on the latest happenings in the Mendoza wine industry, you may want to bookmark El Blog de Vinos de Argentina. I have been reading their blog for some time now and have found it more and more valuable in terms of getting an inside track on what they’re thinking in Mendoza. As an Argentine, I’ve become a bit tired of receiving my Argentine wine industry news solely from the perspective of English-language consumer magazines. In the Argentine wine-sense, I’m approaching the sort of frustration many over here are feeling with news sources like CNN and FOX—it’s unfortunately limited for my needs. I may not be alone in wanting something like this—I really feel that things would get interesting if insiders from many wine regions only generally covered by shiny-cover magazines began communicating their perspectives directly to readers in a couple of other languages.

5) I would like to issue a preliminary warning before checking out this final note...it is cringe-inducing. I caught this on an Argentine website related to wine news. You'll click on the link and notice the article is written in Spanish, but that won't deter you from making the appropriate inference...Madonna will be contracting some local producer to lovingly craft her own label of Malbec. My comments? Oh hell no. Truthfully though, the nausea actually set in when I read that the label will reportedly be named after "Evita." Whether you are a foreigner and think Evita was a great person or an Argentine who may have the courage to speak up and express a more balanced perspective for the legacy of this famous political figure, one thing's for sure, Madonna could have chosen ANY OTHER variety cultivated in ANY OTHER country. Why us, oh God why us?