Entries associated with the tag "Tyler Colman":

Chicago wine auction house Hart Davis Hart is touting its record-breaking sale last weekend at Tru of one of the largest single-owner wine collections ever to go on the block, heavy on first-growth vintage Bordeaux such as Haut-Brion, Margaux, and Latour. According to the company, the auction brought in $11,160,583, the fourth largest take for a wine auction in history.

The first lot up for bid, 12 bottles of 1982 Château Lafite-Rothschild broke a world record for the wine, selling to a Chinese bidder for $54,970. The number one bid? $179,250 for one case of 1990 Romanée-Conti Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. 

I ran this by wine economist Tyler Colman, aka Dr. Vino who was impressed, noting that half the Lafite-Rothschild lots sold to an unidentified Asian buyer who was bidding remotely.

"Maybe some creative financial type will set up derivatives to be able to short Lafite," he wrote.

This week in Omnivorous I chatted with Tyler Colman, aka Dr. Vino, who as an economics grad student at Northwestern wrote his dissertation on the political economy of wine. That work led to the publication earlier this year of Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink--a great read. Colman has since come out as a proponent of the production of quality box wine as a way for producers to reduce their carbon footprint. It is a trend the rest of the world seems to be embracing--but not here.

 "Unfortunately here there's a stigma associated with it, and rightfully so," he told me. "Because the quality in most cases is just so incredibly poor. But I think the consumers are actually leading producers in this case, because I put up a highly unscientific poll on my Web site and often respondents said they would absolutely be willing to try a good wine in the box. But the thing is, there just aren't that many of them out there."

Colman is in town this weekend for some tastings and a seminar at the U of C. Check out the column for details.

In the listings: 18 wine bars.