A Few Minutes Decomposing with Andy Rooney

I’ve been in touch with the late Andy Rooney recently. It may surprise you to know that I speak with many dead people—Jess Jackson, Robert Mondavi, Robert Parker, Ron Paul, Gabe Kaplan, Richard Dawson… There is a wisdom in dead people that I find compelling. Andy Rooney was kind enough to allow me to publish his posthumous thoughts about wine and the wine business. So if you don’t like the opinions, don’t blame me. I’m just channeling the old fuck. Pardon me, dead fuck.

ON BLIND TASTING

Every wine critic and wine publication these days claims to taste wine blind. I don’t understand this. They say that tasting wines blind takes prejudice and subjectivity out of the equation. First of all, I don’t know about you, but I simply don’t believe they’re tasting the wines without having any idea at all what the wines are. These are professional wine critics, or so they’d have us believe, you’d think they’d have a pretty good idea all the time what they’re tasting, whether it’s in a brown bag or not. And they’re human, well, all of them except Matt Kramer who’s actually a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon, and humans cheat, or leave themselves loopholes. But let’s say, tongue in cheek, that I believe that they taste the wines blind. Why do they think that makes their ratings and scores more legitimate? By the way, most of them score on the 100 point scale and say they know what a 94 tastes like at least as well as the other guys who know what a 94 tastes like. I think Oliver Sacks wrote a New Yorker piece on a man who thought he knew what numbers tasted like. The guy had brain damage.

I think it’s stupid to pretend objectivity when you’re a critic of anything. We know that the critics we like have prejudices. We might even admire his taste in prejudices. A movie critic doesn’t go to a movie and not know who the director is. They don’t have special films made without the credits for a movie critic to view. They don’t send book reviewers galleys that don’t have the author’s name on them. They don’t blindfold Hugh Hefner and give him foldouts that only have Scratch ‘n’ Sniff.

Let’s grow up, wine critics, and forget the blind tasting claims. I think we’ll get numbers that taste better.

ON WINE BLOGS

I read somewhere that there are more than a thousand wine blogs. Isn’t “blog” kind of a stupid word? It sounds like something you hork up when you have a nasty chest cold, or you’ve been smoking unfiltered Camels for 30 years. Or maybe it’s what camels hork up. A thousand wine blogs sounds like 995 too many to me. Isn’t there something we can do about there being too many wine blogs? Yes, I know, we can simply not read them, and, let’s be honest, even the most popular wine blog gets fewer hits than a YouTube video of a cat using my balls as a scratching post. I miss that cat. I love a good subordinate claws. But even if no one reads wine blogs, it bothers me that they exist. I don’t have anything to do with wine-of-the-month clubs, but it bothers me that they exist too. Are there that many jackasses to support that many wine-of-the-month clubs? It bothers me that there are.

I think wine bloggers should voluntarily start removing their blogs from the Internet. I don’t mean stop writing them, I mean deleting them. We love the Internet, it’s a modern miracle, let’s not leave all this crap just laying around for someone else to clean up. Let’s start with that HoseMaster of Wine. I don’t know about you, but I think he’s about as funny as leprosy.

ON NATURAL WINES

There’s been too much talk lately about natural wines. Some people even call them naked wines, but that seems counterproductive if you like them. I think most naked things are disgusting, don’t you? When critics and winemakers talk about natural wine I start to get nauseous. Just another wine term no one can accurately define, like “terroir,” and “Meritage,” and “profit.” They make it sound like natural wine is better. These are people who wear a lot of makeup and carefully groom their body hair. Apparently, wine is better when it’s natural, but people are not. I think I’d trust the people who promote natural wine more if they had eyebrows like mine, and abundant nose hair, and unshaven legs. They mostly wear too much unnatural makeup.

I’ve tasted a lot of natural wines and too many of them are terrible. A lot of unnatural wines are terrible too. Can’t we just call crap crap and leave it at that? Crap is a word I can define. You’re reading it.

Weaners

Damned Weaner

They ignore our laws, our borders, our boundaries, our whistles and clickers. They take jobs from unemployed Americans. They breed relentlessly and resist any form of birth control. They congregate in large numbers in parks and on street corners begging. They urinate in public. Yes, we depend on them. But at what cost? They never bother to learn the English language. They tax our abilities to feed them, take food from the mouths of our grandmothers. They smell. They have horrible breath. They want a better life but don’t feel the need to contribute to American society. Most of them are illegal, unlicensed--estimates go as high as 70%. When do we stop the madness? When do we finally rid ourselves of this economic and societal plague? When do we finally throw them all out of this great republic and slam the door behind them once and for all?

I’m talking, of course, about dogs.

Or, to be politically correct, Canine Americans. Or, to be politically incorrect, Weaners. Off the bitch’s teat and onto ours—Weaners. Lazy damn Weaners. Isn’t time that we as a nation face the Weaner problem the way the dogs themselves do? Stick our nose into the dark tunnel of Weaners and inhale until we recognize the shit we’re knee-deep in? Our lives and our economy teeter on the brink of disaster, yet we ignore the root cause of the problem—Dogs! They’re not citizens. They are not entitled to the American way of life. They haven’t earned those rights as we have as citizens of this great country, by paying taxes, voting, and serving on juries. Have you ever seen a Weaner on jury duty? OK, there was a bitch on “American Idol,” but that’s not the same.

Now before you start calling me prejudiced let me say that I do not condemn all Weaners. Many fine Weaners contribute to our society. Many have served in the military; and a few dedicated Weaners have sniffed out more drugs than the entire wait staff at Hooters. Weaners do wonderful work with the blind and the infirm, hunt down escaped criminals, fetch Dick Cheney hunting accident victims… Some of my best friends are Weaners. My anger isn’t directed at those Weaners here legally, those who contribute to society and have real jobs, like working for Michael Vick. No, those Weaners are welcome.

Making the elderly homeless

But what about the others? The curs and mongrels and half-breeds that are bankrupting us. Let’s look, as an example of what I’m talking about, at wineries. Almost every winery you visit in California, and other states as well, depends upon the labor of illegal Weaners! This is unconscionable, and leaves as bad a taste in my mouth as Monterey County Cabernet. Nearly every winery has a winery dog, a Weaner, to greet you as you arrive to taste their $100 Cabernet. A recent survey found that fully 75% of those winery Weaners are illegal and unlicensed aliens! This is a shameful fact that is right under our collective noses. And those Weaners, hundreds of them, take jobs from Americans. Imagine if Wal-Mart fired all of their octogenarian greeters and replaced them with mutts. The uproar would be deafening! And what’s the difference, you ask? Both Grampa and the Weaner have a wet spot about belt high! Well, yes, but Grampa is a citizen of this great country, a citizen entitled to a job. Yes, the Weaner works for less, but I’ll bet if you ask him, Grampa would also work for tummy rubs and a handful of dog biscuits. Isn’t that what Grandma gives him every night for dinner on his Wal-Mart salary? Every time a Dog greets you at a tasting room remember that because of that Weaner one of our senior citizens, maybe someone in your family, perhaps your weird Uncle Benny who wears condom wrappers as war medals, has been denied a job. Perhaps your bottle of wine is a little bit cheaper because of this illegal worker, but aren’t you willing to pay a bit more if it means a stronger economy for you, for your family, for your grandchildren?

Next time you’re visiting wine country and a Weaner greets you at a winery door, demand that the winery hire an American citizen to work as the greeter. Be loud and forceful so that everyone can hear you. Refuse to buy their overpriced wines until they agree. And, maybe, just maybe, if you’re angry enough, lure the Weaner into your car and take him to the nearest Humane Society where they’ll give him a scholarship to study abroad with their prestigious organization, Youth in Asia. You’ll be doing the Weaner, and all of us, a favor, while simultaneously helping lower the unemployment rate.

Weaners are the wine business’ dirty little secret. Owners say they check their Weaners, but do they? Most winery owners play fast and loose with their Weaners, believe me, that’s why so many of them end up in divorce court and lose their wineries. As right-thinking Americans, we need to rid the wine business of Weaners. Round them up and get rid of them. The future of our country depends upon it.

I have an idea. Maybe we should follow the example of that great democracy North Korea and grind them up to feed the hard-working men and women who pick the grapes. Those fine folks are the very backbone of the wine business and not squeamish about what they eat. Just seems like an obvious solution.