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.


