My Crypt at Forest Yawn

I just don’t have the time to answer all the questions I get as HoseMaster of Wine™. It seems people are fascinated with how I go about my job. Nearly every day an admiring wine business fan writes to invite me to explore the possibility of using myself as the receptacle for my own DNA. Many others kindly remind me that as long as I have my head in that place, I might as well look around for polyps and save myself the colonoscopy. Others wish that I were already enjoying a lovely afterlife, while others seem to want to sexually satisfy the horse I rode in on. I wish that I had the time to answer each thoughtful note individually, but, as loyal readers know, I’m incredibly busy practicing coprophagy, though on freshly baked bread, and with a nice glass of Lemberger. So, to save time, and perhaps answer everyone else’s questions in advance, I thought I’d respond here to the questions I am most frequently asked. I am constantly surprised at their insight and eloquence.

I read your blog twice a week, and can’t seem to stop. You have so many opinions about wine and the wine business that I don’t see anywhere else. Here’s what I’d like to know, Why don’t you just fuck off and die?

You know, that’s an interesting philosophical question, and one that has been posed to me often, most recently by everyone who makes Prosecco. (I do love Prosecco’s motto—“Prosecco: For when you need a reason to quit drinking.”) There’s really no simple answer to the question. I suppose that I could fuck off and die; after all, it’s a lovely wine business tradition. Look at Jay Miller, Natalie MacLean, James Suckling, and all the former wine bloggers buried at the National Bloggers Cemetery, known colloquially as Forest Yawn. Look at all the sad boys over at the chat room Wineberserkers, who were not asked, but told, to fuck off and die by Robert Parker. Not to mention that fucking off and dying is the basic wine writer’s retirement package--being a valued employee is so rewarding! So it’s an option for me, but then who would fill my role? There is much left to do for the HoseMaster. So much hypocrisy, so much pretentiousness, so much pompous and boorish behavior yet to lampoon. And that’s just me.

How do you think of that shit?

This may be the question I have been asked the most often my entire life. I have no idea. I always wonder how you don’t think of this crap. Much of what I do writes itself, which explains why it reads that way. How hard is it to make fun of wine bloggers? It’s like shooting Tim Fish in a French oak barrel. Alice Feiring is self-parody, stubbornly defending her philosophy in the manner of Rudolf Steiner, who is to science and humility what Stephen Hawking is to tap dancing and playing the bagpipes. McInerney is Satan, tempting the hapless to taste the fruit from his Tree of Imaginary Knowledge and be condemned to wine hell. How hard is he to make fun of? I don’t remember a day in my career in the wine biz that I wasn’t astounded at the foolishness of it all. Not wine itself, which is beautiful and mysterious, like love, the star-filled heavens and Sea Monkeys®, but our ways of speaking about it, of rating it, of finding ways to make wine incomprehensible and complicated when it’s the simplest joy in our lives, aside from doing the Boner Limbo. Simply, I don’t know how to stop thinking of this shit. That fucking off and dying thing is starting to look a lot better.

Who told you you’re funny, douchebag?

So kind of you to imagine people tell me I’m funny. I do fantasize that certain people tell me I’m funny, but they’re only fantasies. Like I imagine one day at a large industry tasting Alderpated Yarrow will walk up to me after tasting 350 wines and say, “Aren’t youuu za-uh, uh, the Holesmattzer, um, Whoresmapper, fuck, I’m drunk, Hooozemaster of Wine? Oh, crap, I wet myself.” That would be a dream come true. Or just once I’d like to get a fan letter from another of my heroes, the hilarious Karen MacNeil. She wrote the Bible! The damned Wine Bible! You know how crazy people think every word in the Holy Bible is the truth? There are cretins that think the same thing about the Wine Bible! I know, I know, who’s written a better spoof than the Wine Bible? She’s the funniest redhead since Lucy, or the guy at the Batman movie. Now if she told me I’m funny, wow, wouldn’t that be an honor! And, really, if I were funny, wouldn’t I be getting paid for this horse manure?

Where’s your “like” button, asshole?

I like people, really I do. I like a lot of people. It’s people I can’t stand. When I was growing up my mother always used to say to me, just like your mother probably said to you, “If you can’t say something nice, just lie like all the other asshole men.” I often write posts about the things I love, but then I delete them because I sound like a weenie. And there are way too many weenies writing wine blogs. Don’t you find yourself reading endless blog posts and at the end of them saying to yourself, “Jesus, that idiot’s a huge weenie.”? Like Tom Wark is going on and on about some insight he had about how much wine and urinal cakes have in common and at the end you say, “Man, what a weenie.” Or Alfonso Cevola writes some nostalgic post about the good old days when he and his Mafioso friends used to kill sommeliers and make their tongues into bowties, and at the end you want to say…OK, not a good example. But, come on, the only bigger collection of weenies than Palate Press is at Oscar Mayer’s house. You read their posts and you want to stick a little toothpick in them and serve them on Super Bowl Sunday. Wait, am I answering the question?

Hello I am a Very Successful Wine Righter with Big Magazine that is Famous and Obeyed. I am in Need of Some Money to Get Back Home from Singapore Where I am Being Held by Pirates in Pantyhose. If you immediately send me 15 Million Dollars You Will Become Next Famous Righter of Wines. Can you send the Money soon?

Check’s in the mail, big boy. Check’s in the mail.