It’s finals week at the University of Puget Sound, so I’m thinking about the question, what wine goes best with final exams and term papers?  A sweet wine, to capture the sweet taste of success?  Some bubbles to celebrate finishing one set of tasks and moving on?  Or maybe a bitter sweet wine, because moving on inevitably means leaving some people and relationships behind?  Hard to figure how best to match a wine with all these emotions. It’s a difficult question.

Dump Bucket Drills

But I know one wine that doesn’t match up very well.  My class on “The Idea of Wine” organized an informal tasting on Monday to celebrate finishing their term papers.  The main project was a blind tasting of inexpensive (some were very inexpensive) Merlots.  I was impressed with the students’ serious efforts to evaluate and score the wine and their recently acquired (and, for college students, somewhat unnatural) propensity to use the dump bucket.

We tasted other wines including a Chinese wine that Brian West personally hauled back from Beijing a few years ago.  It was a 1999 Changyu Cabernet Sauvignon.  Changyu is China’s oldest winery and a good example of a mid-market Chinese wine (I wrote about Changyu and the Chinese wine industry in The China Wine Syndrome).

I found a video review of this wine on the web (click here to view it, but be forewarned that there is some harsh language used by the reviewer) that described the wine as being all about ashtray and coffee ground flavors with aromas of urinal crust.  Hard to imagine.  Until you taste it, that is.  The description is right on the money.

I’ve read many optimistic reports on the Chinese wine industry, mostly based on high potential production volumes and not so much on quality.  The quality wasn’t there in 1999, based on this wine, but there is reason to believe that things are changing.  I sure hope they are! The dump bucket got good use on this one.

Hard Heads, Soft Hearts

I’m reading my students’ final papers now – they are quite good, by the way – and I thought you might be interested in their topics.  I gave them great freedom to choose topics that interested them or related to their academic majors.  You can find a list of the paper titles at the end of this post.

Most people think education is about learning the right answers, and this is certainly important, but I think the more valuable skill is learning to ask the right questions, and this is true about wine.  I was impressed by the creativity of the questions my students asked.

One student, a Finance major, asked why Treasury bill auctions and wine auctions have different structures and what the impacts might be? A very interesting theoretical treatment. Another student did fieldwork in three wine retailers to try to understand the actions and interactions of wine buyers and wine sellers. The result was a revealing first person account of wine consumer behavior.  An economics student who grew up in Napa Valley examined issues relating to migrant labor there, combining economic theory, empirical data and personal observation very effectively.

All the papers were very interesting. My favorite title: “How corks are being screwed over” (an analysis of the cork versus screw cap debate).  Imagine, I get paid to read this!

Looking at the list of paper titles, I’m struck by how many students were drawn to issues of sustainable or ethical production and consumption:  organic wine, climate change, biodynamic wine, fair trade wine and so forth.  In general their analysis was thorough, pointed and objective.  They have “soft hearts” and “hard heads,” as Princeton Economist Alan Blinder would say.  They care about social issues, but think about them critically.  Blinder says (and I agree) that’s better than the other possible combinations: soft head/hard heart, soft heart/soft head or hard head and heart.

• Comparative analysis of changes in Treasury auctions versus global wine auctions
• An ethnographic study of wine consumer trends
• Hispanic workers in California’s wine industry
• Climate Change: what it means for Spanish vineyards.
• Climate change and the wine industry
• TetraPaks and cans: the alternative packaging of wine
• Movement from niche markets to mainstream: prospects and challenges for ethical consumption in the wine market
• The terroir of equality: fair trade wine
• Organic wine: the beginning of redefining fine wine
• Oak in Wine: an exploration into differences.
• Green wine: ideas and details of sustainable wine
• Wine’s historical and modern role in religion
• Of vines and witchcraft: biodynamic wine
• India’s wine prospects
• Old world crash: wine’s changing face in the globalized market
• What makes that bottle so expensive?
• How corks are being screwed over
• Aging wines: from barrels to bottles
• Drowning in the wine lake
• Wine brands: friend or foe?
• Wine tourism and economic development
• Bordeaux versus Burgundy: why the rivalry matters
• Transitioning wine industries: assessing development strategies in the wine industry