Puckette's Charge: Wine Folly

Are you new to wine? Do you want to learn about wine from someone who knows only the teeniest bit more than you? Isn’t that the way you prefer to learn, from someone just a little bit smarter than you? What if you wanted to become a surgeon? Medical school is so expensive, and the teachers there talk way over your head! Surgery doesn’t have to be just for brainiacs! Why not just learn from the local butcher? Surgery is just knives and meat. Start there. But you don’t want to be a surgeon, you want to learn about wine. That’s why Wine Folly is here! No brainiacs allowed! We’re Wine Folly. We’re the knives, and you’re the meat! Let’s get started.

I’m Madeline Puckette, and I’m just like you. I like to get drunk and make videos! And I figured out how to create a wine empire for people just like us, people who want our wine knowledge to be shallow, but good enough to make our craft beer drinking friends think we’re cool. I make wine simple because I know you’re simple. I even use a really large typeface for Wine Folly so that it’s easier to use your fingers to read it. I never take the intelligence of my fans for granted. I just assume you’re reading Wine Folly because you don’t have much. And, dammit, that shouldn’t stop you from enjoying and understanding wine! Other wine websites use all these big words that are confusing. Not here. I make wine simple. And I never forget that my fans are like privileged white kids with powerful attorneys—I always give you really short sentences.

You’ll find lots of neat graphics on Wine Folly, too! At first, they might not make sense. But stay with it, maybe read along with a friend who has a high school diploma. The graphics are a way to make wine easier to understand. For example, you might read in one of those hard wine books with hardly any pictures that wine is about 85% water, 14% alcohol, and 1% minerals and acids and stuff like that. I know, that’s not easy to understand for me either. What exactly does that mean, 85% and 14% and all that? So I made a pie chart! Don’t you love pie charts? I like them almost as much as I like real pie (oh, yes, I forgot to mention that I’m really funny, too). If you don’t know what a pie chart is, you will! I’m all about pie charts. A pie chart is a chart in the shape of a pie. We call it “round.” A wine can be “round,” too, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves! That’s advanced wine talk. On my “round” pie chart I divide the circle into three parts. The biggest part is the 85% part, and it’s labeled “water.” This would be the part of the pie Robert Parker eats! Another part, a lot smaller, says “alcohol.” This is the little part of the pie that I might eat, and maybe throw it up later when no one’s looking. Finally, a little sliver is the “minerals, acids and other junk” part. Give that little piece to the wino downtown. See! That’s so much easier to understand. Simple, right? Wine is mostly water like Wine Folly is mostly empty space.

Now hop on over to Amazon and buy my new book, “Wine Folly: The Essential Guide to Wine.” Don’t be scared that it’s 240 pages! You can read the whole book in about 20 minutes. Well, maybe not you. It’s jampacked with pie charts, and graphs, and the sorts of illustrations you find on absolutely the finest cocktail napkins! Many of them took several minutes on the internet to research. Look, you can buy 50 different beginner wine books on Amazon, and they all say the same things. There’s absolutely nothing new here. Not in those books, and sure as hell not in mine. But “Wine Folly” has all my pie charts and graphs! They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Oh, don’t let that intimidate you. My pictures are only worth five or six!

You’re going to learn so much about wine from my books and videos! For example, I help you understand how to taste a wine. First, you need to smell it. This is from my book:

“Hold your glass just under your nose and sniff once to ‘prime’ your nose. Then swirl your wine once and smell again. This time, smell the wine longer and slower but just as delicately. Switch between sniffing and thinking.”
 
This is how even MWs and MSs smell wine. You can’t be expected to sniff and think at the same time! No one can do that. It’s why we hold our breath when we’re trying to figure out the crossword puzzles in “Highlights for Children.” And it’s important you just swirl the wine once. Wine can get dizzy, and then it gets all confused. Hey, you haven’t even bought my book yet and already you’re a lot smarter about wine!

I don’t like to brag, but what sets me apart from the other people writing about wine is that I don’t feel the need to be right all the time. Wine isn’t about facts. You get that. The whole reason to have a wine blog and to write a wine book is to show people that none of that stuff really matters. Facts, in fact (oh, I can’t help it, I’m just pixieish and funny), are just like wine. Pick the ones you like and just ignore the other ones. I try to make it into a game. See if you can figure out what facts are actually facts, and which ones I’m ignoring. Smart people get bogged down in details, which is just so stupid. But when you read Wine Folly, don’t worry, there’s no smart people here!

I think close enough is good enough. Like I’m close enough to a wine expert that you should buy my book. Like in one of my informative videos I compare an Oregon Pinot Noir to a California Pinot Noir. Which was fun because I had no idea what I was talking about. So the California Pinot Noir was a William Hill Pinot Noir from the Central Coast. I don’t know what that means. Central Coast? That’s vague. A Coast is really long, and a Central is really small. WTF?  So I mentioned that when a wine label says Central Coast the grapes could come from anywhere from all the way up in Mendocino to all the way down to Santa Barbara. See there! Close enough! If you don’t know that’s way off, then your stupid Millennial friends won’t know either. And, come on, Mendocino is only a few hundred miles off! And it’s not like I didn’t know Oregon was near Canada somewhere.

My book is the top-selling wine book on Amazon! Suck it Jancis and Karen! You spend years and years writing your books and I write mine over the weekend. I guess we know who the best wine writer in the world is now. Ask Geoff Kruth MS, or“The Washington Post,” or all the other really smart people who put my book in their Best Wine Books of the Year lists. Those hypocrites. They know. Facts just don’t really matter.

Jay McInerney Splooges "On Wine"

By Jay McInerney

It was Robert Mondavi who first told me about Dick Splooge the last time we dined together at French Laundry in Yountville, the quaint town named for Hall of Famer Robin Yount. Thomas Keller manned the kitchen at his eponymous restaurant himself that night, apparently not trusting his Native American (Sioux) chef to prepare a meal for such an influential and important figure in American wine. Or for Mr. Mondavi either. Mr. Mondavi was accompanied by his wife, the famed Belgian surrealist Magritte. Magritte is a handsome woman, old and wealthy, which I find irresistible, who insisted during dinner that she needed to paint a portrait of me, “If only,” she said, “to illustrate that it is not only your prose that is flat.”

Geographically, the Napa Valley is a mere thirty miles long, and roughly fourteen feet wide. And yet it contains some of the most valuable soil in the wine world. There is the justly famous Rutherford Bench, as well as the lesser-known Oakville Bus Stop. Historically, it was the famous Captain Gustave Niebaum-Coppola (no relation to Sofia, who once asked me to star in a film version of my novel, The Great Gatsby) who discovered the brilliance of wines from the Rutherford Bench, and to this day his legacy is honored when we speak about the greatness of Rutherford Cabernet’s Finnish.

When Robert Mondavi began his eponymous winery in the heart of Oakville, after an ugly family dispute involving his brother and a camel drove him to leave Charles Krug Winery, where he’d crafted some of the planet’s finest Champagnes—the 1965 Krug remains one of the greatest bottles of sparkling wine that has ever gone up my nose—there weren’t any “cult” wineries yet in the Napa Valley. The potential for wringing money out of the valuable soils of the Napa Valley was virtually unexplored. Foolishly, the winemakers in Napa Valley at the time sold Cabernet Sauvignon for a modest profit, while their French counterparts in Bordeaux were wisely soaking the gullible Brits into paying a lot of money for underripe and overhyped Frog juice. Not even Petrus or Ausone, where I recently spent several nights at the request of the French government (the details of which I am legally sworn never to divulge, except to say I shared a bunk bed with Julian Assange, who snores and has abhorrent nocturnal emissions, called Wikileaks), but, shamefully, Second Growths! I don’t believe I’ve ever consumed a Second Growth, at least not wittingly, but I’ve been told that it’s the equivalent of sleeping with an actress with an “Also Starring” billing—one can only imagine sinking to the level of a Nicolas Cage.

Thomas Keller had just personally served us our third course at French Laundry, a light and ineffable bite whimsically called “DNA en croute,” when the subject of cult Napa Valley wines came up. I had mentioned Bill Harlan, whose wise countenance and ruggedly handsome booty seemed a reflection of my own future, and Robert began to reminisce about his founding of the eponymous Opus One, considered one of the first cult Napa Valley wines, though far too common for my taste. The conversation soon bored me, and I turned it back to a more interesting subject—my own experiences with the legendary cult Cabernet Sauvignons of Napa Valley.

Fortuitously, I had just come from a complete vertical tasting of Harlan Estate, which included some of the greatest wines I’ve ever tasted. I confess that I consider Harlan Estate the greatest winery in California, in no small part because the label looks like money. There was a time when wine writers failed to see the paramount connection of money to great wine. Wines were approached critically from the primitive and resolutely ignorant perspective of quality, and their accurate reflection of “terroir” (a vague and mostly discredited French word that loosely translated means, “dirt poor”). It’s only recently, when a new generation of wine writers has emerged, the most important of whom first published unreadable, autobiographical, eponymous novels, that the undeniable link between the greatness of wine and the wealth of the winery owner has come to be accepted. Now it seems to be all that I write about. Wine knowledge and a sense of wine history have become vestigial when it comes to wine writing, qualifications that are long outdated and completely overvalued, as my WSJ editors will attest. You want greatness in wine? Follow me, and follow the money.

Mr. Mondavi had been talking animatedly for several minutes, tolerable only because it was fascinating speculation about my formidable palate, when he paused and asked me if I’d ever met Dick Splooge. Splooge Estate, the winery now synonymous with both Natural and Cult wines, was still just an inkling in Dick’s prostate at the time, and I confessed I had not heard of Mr. Splooge (though, in a strange coincidence, that had been Raymond Carver’s nickname for me).

“Dick Splooge,” Robert Mondavi told me, as we sampled Mr. Keller’s next course, a delicious ham and melon dish eponymously named “Ass Hat,” “is a visionary the likes of which Napa Valley hasn’t seen since Georges de la Tour.”--an obscure reference to the visionary behind the Tour de France. “I think you should meet him.”

I wouldn’t normally take advice from a washed-up Napa Valley icon, not even James Laube, but something that day told me I should. Maybe it was the Mr. Splooge nickname coincidence, or maybe it was Magritte slipping me the tongue as we kissed good night, I’m not sure. Yet there was something I needed to know first, something critical to whether or not I’d even consider meeting Dick Splooge at his under-construction Splooge Estate.

“How did he make his money?”

A simple question, but the only question that matters in the world of Napa Valley, thirty miles long and roughly forty feet wide. The question most asked in every tasting room in the county. The question that most certainly determines the value of the resulting wines. And the question that certainly determines whether or not I’ll visit a winery, whether I’ll write about it, whether, first and foremost, I can be entertained there in the fashion to which I am accustomed.

“Where did Dick Splooge make his money?” Mr. Mondavi replied. “Just where you’d expect a Splooge to make it.

“Software.”

Nat Defrauds

Photo from Nat Defrauds--source unknown

Dear Splooge Estate,

I’m a gi-normous fan of Splooge Estate, but, then, who doesn’t love Splooge? I wanted to introduce myself to you, and tell you about all the benefits of joining me on “Nat Defrauds,” my award-winning website. Together, we can move a lot of Splooge.

I’ve been in the news lately, and not just from my lawsuit against those inflatable love doll manufacturers who blatantly stole my patented hair style for their own uses. Sadly, there have also been slanderous untruths published in online wine forums about Nat Defrauds, but that’s the price I pay for being one of the world’s most important wine personalities. I want you to know the charges stem from simple jealousy. Some wine writers will say that they stand on the shoulders of giants like Jancis Robinson and Robert Parker. Not me. I wipe my feet on them.

Nat Defrauds is the most important wine website on the Internet, and I am the foremost wine authority in Canada, and probably the world, if you don’t count the other countries. If you don’t believe me, here are a few quotes that easily could have been written by famous wine writers if they could get over their envy and speak from their cold, dead hearts so I wouldn’t have to fake them:

“Nat is not only one of the great palates in the wine business, she has fabulous tits.”—Hugh Johnson, author of “The Story of Wine—A Tribute to Nat MacLean”

“I urge everyone to carefully read everything Nat has to say about wine. She’s the foremost authority on the subject, and should win every award, especially for her fabulous hooters.”—Jancis Robinson, author of “Vines, Grapes, Wines and Nat”

“The 100-Point-Scale was Nat’s idea…I learned almost everything I know about wine at Nat’s feet…though her boobs are even nicer.”—Robert Parker, author of “The World’s Great Wine Estates and What They Owe to Nat.”

I’m almost embarrassed to repeat those quotes, but you can see for yourself that they’re real. And notice that I gave full attribution, though my jealous wine critics claim I’m not that good at it.

Now that you know who I am, I know you’ll want me to talk about your wonderful Splooge Estate wines on Nat Defrauds! Let me tell you a little bit more about my site, and how it’s designed to show your wines in the brightest light.

My site has a gi-normous data base of my wine reviews. I have some of the finest wine reviewers in the world writing for my site, and they all work for me for FREE! That’s how loved and respected I am. (“Nat is the most loved and respected wine writer alive, and what knockers!”—Eric Asimov, author of “How to Love Wine, and Nat’s Knockers”) I collect their reviews from the special Nat Defrauds Cloud that Google has designed specially for me, cut and paste them on my site, and, Bingo, eh (as we Canadians say), the most authoritative collection of wine reviews on the planet! I do make certain to give credit where credit is due, though. Each review is clearly initialed so that my subscribers know the source. I’ve created what I think is a perfect system—really, the initials are so obvious to anyone who knows anything about wine! Here are some examples:

FB/FD—Fat Boy with Flatulent Dog (So obvious it’s a Wine Advocate review)
TOMW—Tired Old Master of Wine (Sorry, Jancis, somebody has to say it)
RAD—Rabid Australian Dingo (My love handle for James Halliday)

I’m all about transparency! (“Nat Defrauds is all about transparency—you should see her gazongas in lingerie!”—Paul Lukacs, author of “Inventing Wine—How Nat Did It”) I’m not sure how any of my subscribers could be confused about who writes the reviews on my website, except, of course, that they’re mostly Canadian.

I know you’re very anxious at this point to see Splooge Estate wines featured on Nat Defrauds. And that’s why I’m writing. Yes, I could purchase your wines and review them in a very objective manner, but what good would that do either of us? I’ve made it much simpler for a fine winery such as Splooge Estate to get reviewed on Nat Defrauds. It’s easy as 1-2-3.

1. Go to my website, www.natdefrauds.fuckethics.ca, and become a subscriber. It’s only $2/month, far less than you’d pay for buying a meal for a sommelier, or the price of entering a worthless wine competition. Make sure and leave a valid credit card number! Fair warning: I hate people who use stolen credit card numbers—stealing numbers is just wrong. Unless it’s from chumps like BurgHound!

2. Send me your fabulous Splooge Estate wines. DO NOT SKIP #1! Of course, the only way to get my shipping address is by subscribing, it’s behind the pay wall, which is also where I store my integrity.

3. Get ready for your website to light up with hits and orders from my 128,000 subscribers. (“Nat Defaults has 128,000 subscribers!”—Marvin Shanken, editor of Wine Spectator, and Nat Aficionado”) When the Best Wine Writer in the World says put some Splooge in your mouth, people eat it up!

I look forward to hearing from you right after I see that your subscription to Nat Defrauds has been activated. Don’t confuse this with pay to play. It’s entirely ethical. Ask yourself this, if it weren’t ethical would the Best Wine Writer in the World be able to do it? If it weren’t ethical could it even be on the Internet? Send me the money and the wine and let me worry about what’s ethical.

And please feel free to forward this informative and entertaining letter to any of your friends and fellow winery owners. There’s only so much time in the day for the Greatest Wine Writer Who Ever Lived, and there’s one of you born every minute.

The World of Jenna Talia

"I kid you not, I love Jenna Talia."

Eatme.com’s Jenna Talia Baioppsi brings her hyperfresh questions to some of the country’s leading sommeliers. Be prepared for her incisive, cutting-edge, computer-generated ideas, and the fascinating answers they elicit. We’re lucky when we’re exposed to hyperfresh Jenna Talia. She’s the voice of Millennials, the ventriloquist to those dummies.

Rog Subparr

I have a really interesting question for you, Rog. What do you think will be the next trend in wine? I thought of that question myself. I can’t stop thinking about you.

I haven’t quite decided what I’m going to make the next trend in wine, Jenna Talia. Orange wines are already so yesterday. You can tell, even Steve Heimoff knows what they are now. However, orange wines were a fabulous trend. Average wine consumers hated them! This is the very definition of a successful wine trend. I hated them too, but, as a famous sommelier, I felt the obligation of my calling—educating people what to like while ignoring what they have to say. It’s so rewarding to recommend a wine using the influence of the sommelier position and then watch the person struggle to understand why the hell you’d drink a wine that smelled like the underside of man boobs.

But to answer your brilliant and probing question, Jenna Talia, the next trend is going to be adding your own alcohol to wine. My colleague over at San Francisco’s hottest new wine bar Dick is already doing it. It’s simple, really. You convince a few winemakers to have a few cases of their wines de-alked. You offer those de-alked wines by-the-glass—Dick has wines from wineries like Kosta Browne, Littorai and Siduri, as well as three de-alked Jura wines—and then, on the side, you give the customer his own glass of alcohol to add. It’s cool. One person in the party likes really low-alcohol wines, so he just adds a splash. Another wants 16.5 ABV and adds a huge dose. It’s very democratic. Sure, wineries always preach to drink what you like, but then they dictate the alcohol level. And you’d be surprised what you learn. Like when you taste the Jura wines without alcohol they taste surprisingly like Super Balls.

Again, this will be the hot new trend, and your average wine lover will hate it and generally ignore it. I’m the master of that.

I like how you give really long answers to my questions that I made up without anyone else’s help. I could listen to you talk all night. You have the cutest lips. What wine region has you really excited right now?

Well, Jenna Talia, I love off-wines from interesting regions. Wines that even the locals don’t really want to drink. I’m compiling a long list of German red wines for my new restaurant client Mein Kampfo Fina—it’s an Italian-influenced German restaurant. I love their steamed mussels with pasta dish, the Musselini. I pair it with another one of the wines I’m excited about lately, white wine from Uruguay. It’s a white made from a relative of their black grape. It’s called Tannat King Cole.  I’m telling you, Uruguay will be the next big thing in wines from places you’d never visit, replacing Lodi.

Oh, there is just so much obscure wine in the world, it seems foolish to spend any time at all on the boring old great wines. Who wants to spend a lifetime tasting Bordeaux and Barolo and Rioja? It’s like only having sex with three beautiful women when there are all these needy homely women out there. And, you see, it’s what we do when we become wine experts. We put down the classics and celebrate the plonk. Who needs Alsace when you can get wine from the Canary Islands for a song. Get it? Canary Island? Song? Never mind. And the upside for us wine experts, whether we own a wine shop or run a wine list, is that no one knows the difference between crappy wine from Irouleguy and great wine from Irouleguy! Is there a difference? There is if I tell you there is.

Of course, I’m also making my own wines under the Subparr Cellars label. You know when you taste a wine made by a famous sommelier, it’s going to be Subparr. I have a Subparr Assyrtiko/Vignoles blend called “Assgnoles.” It’s on the list at Dick, the Dick List. I’m often featured on the Dick List. And I’m about to release a Subparr Red from Cabernet Pfeffer—the “p” is silent, like in swimming pool.

I really like how you talk down to me. I feel it’s only appropriate. Do you like my questions? I wrote them for you. Here’s another one. What’s the biggest change in the wine scene you’ve noticed since you became the most famous sommelier in the world?

That’s a very good question, Jenna Talia. I love that you’re smart, and not just a face. What’s changed is how many more people want to be sommeliers. There used to be hardly any, now they’re like cockroaches.  “Hello, I’m Gregor Samsa and I’ll be your sommelier this evening. Oh, crap, who turned the lights on? Gotta go.” Sommelier isn’t a job, really, it’s a title. Like Prince, or Ambassador, or President. You’re not an average person any more, you’re a title. And carrying that title obligates you to certain things. Mention it at every opportunity. Never admit you like Zinfandel. Never, never win a Wine Spectator Award for your wine list unless you work in some hillbilly state. And always come off as pompous in interviews.

Promise me that you’ll always remember our time together.

I promise, Lettie.

Wine Blogging: An Obituary

“I am a blogger. But I am not a blogger. Blogging is well and truly alive. But blogging is dead.”--Jamie Goode, wineanorak.com

“She’s my sister. (slap) She’s my daughter.”—“Chinatown”

Seems like you’re screwed either way.

Wine Blogging (2004-2012)

I first met Wine Blogging in 2008. My mother had died the year before. Or was it my sister? Or was it my mother? Though she was well and truly alive. Until she died. She would have hated Wine Blogging, and it’s a blessing that she didn’t live to see us become involved. She loved the English language with a passion most people reserve for involuntary manslaughter. Wine Blogging had little regard for language, and even less for grammar and punctuation. Wine Blogging overflowed with ridiculously ornate descriptions of wine, so ornate they were bigger than your fucking head, so ornate they made the Sistine Chapel look like a crummy tasting room with especially powerful crackers. At the same time, Wine Blogging could be mindlessly dull, emptier than a Food and Wine feature, more meaningless than a Double Gold Medal from the Temecula Wine Competition and Bachelorette Party. For years, Wine Blogging held the English language in its soundproof basement, bound and gagged and subjected to every imaginable torture, including waterboarding and reading Vornography out loud. It’s still there, screaming hopelessly in vain to be rescued. But Wine Blogging won’t let language die. That would be too easy. Yet now Wine Blogging is dead. And Wine Blogging is well and truly alive. Alive enough to really fuck up language, anyway.

At first, I had a soft spot for Wine Blogging, sort of like a bruise on a fresh peach, or that spot on the back of a newborn’s skull you sort of want to see how far your finger will go in before something bad happens. I took to Wine Blogging. But, you know, when you start a new relationship, you inherit their friends as well. I was fine with Wine Blogging, but Wine Blogging’s friends were insufferable. God, the endless yammering. Together, just the two of us, Wine Blogging and I had a lot of laughs. And we didn’t laugh at all. But we laughed a lot. Primarily, at the expense of Wine Blogging’s other buddies. Those humorless and self-absorbed knob jobs. Get them all together in a room and they’d yap endlessly about the 100 Point Scale, like so many Sean Hannitys wishing that just talking about something without actually knowing what you’re talking about will just make it go away. Or they’d talk about natural wines in reverent tones usually reserved for their favorite episodes of “Star Trek,” or the day they met Alice Feiring on Match.com. But you start a conversation in a roomful of humans and nearly every one will eventually talk about his favorite subject at length and in great detail—himself. His wine journey—convinced he’s goddam Odysseus when he’s really Gilligan and wants to take you on a three-hour tour, a three-hour tour. His opinions about wines that were sent to him gratis by marketing people, thus reinforcing his sense of self-importance, and how surprisingly good they are compared to the crap he usually drinks—fascinating and useful talk. Makes you want to rush out and buy everything recommended from a sudden desire to drink yourself to death. Which may be the motive for wineries to send wines to those crap peddlers in the first place—to see their livers shut down. And yet to live forever. Live forever talking about themselves. Some in the third person, because the first two were so stupid.

Wine Blogging and I had a tempestuous relationship. We loved each other. And then we hated each other. Maybe it was just for the makeup sex, though, finally, I was told I wasn’t supposed to wear makeup. When we loved each other, there was nothing about Wine Blogging I didn’t like. Sure, Wine Blogging could be demanding, and there were always dozens of snide comments. Wine Blogging was always inseparable from snide comments. They went together like Wine Blog Awards and mediocrity, like, like Phillipe Melka and overpriced Cabs. And for a while I could stand all of that, because the rewards of embracing Wine Blogging seemed so great. And then they didn’t. And I hated Wine Blogging. But now Wine Blogging is dead. But I am well and truly alive. At least I was when I wrote this. Can you be sure I’m still alive now, when you’re reading it? And what if there are no readers, I used to ask Wine Blogging, how do you know you’re alive? Do you care? Not if you’re dead you don’t care. Ask Robert Parker.

When I got the Tweet that Wine Blogging was dead, I felt numb, like your tongue after judging Petite Sirahs, like your brain after listening to an M.S. speak, like your left arm after Marvin Shanken falls asleep cuddled up next to you after a dreamy night of playing “Hide the Havana.” Did this mean I was finally through with that bastard Wine Blogging? Or would it mean that I’d never be through with Wine Blogging? I feared both outcomes. A death so young can have ripple effects that last forever. Eight years old. Wine

Blogging was only eight years old, and now Wine Blogging was dead. And it was well and truly alive. But eight years is not a bad life span for a Poodle, a bitch. Or was it my sister? Or my mother?

Rest in Peace, Wine Blogging. I’m not surprised by your death, old friend. You were always in poor health, and had neither the skills nor the money to get healthy. You died a Goode death.

I’ll meet you where you went to die. In Portland. In August. But I won't be there.

On and On and On and On and On and On and On the Wine Trail in Italy

Life is short. Like the finish of a cheap Prosecco. Like the memories of the young, and the time between an old man’s trips to the bathroom at night. But life is also long. From the time you begin to read this until the time you finish, life will have seemed to have dragged on forever, and you will have felt like Dante was your guide here and not me. Life is both short and long. A midget with a large dingdong. We straddle both lives, like a gymnast working the parallel bars—even for men, uneven for women. A man works a woman’s bars at the risk of his very salsiccia. Yes, life is a midget with a large dingdong. Show him respect.

Where the hell's the bathroom?

People, so many people in this wine game. The young come to it filled with ideas, certain of their conviction that their ideas are new. All ideas are new when you’re young. I know. I once had ideas myself. But it’s been many years since any ideas have appeared to me. This is the folly of youth. Ideas drive them. But age teaches. Age is the great teacher. I had a great teacher once, in my youth. He taught me the wine business in just a few words. “Alfonso,” he said to me, “leave a little something of yourself in every wine you drink.” And now all those somethings have reduced me to what I am today. A couple ideas short of nothing.

Emptiness, where I walk

Twice is a word I like. It’s like “ice” with a “tw” before it. I like twice because I like people to read everything I write twice. So it finally makes sense. Like tradition makes sense. Without tradition, what are we left? Emptiness. The feeling I try to leave you with here. The tradition of emptiness. Like writing about ratings. Ratings have no tradition, no memory; ratings are emptiness. I contradict myself by writing about ratings when I express that writing about them is emptiness. Words folded into words, this is my luggage on the wine trail in Italy. American Tourister—my role in the wine world of Italy, and my luggage. Folds within folds.

My Life--full, or empty?

Where do we go from here, the young and the old? Life is a midget with a large dingdong and no ideas, only luggage. If you think about that long enough, maybe read it twice, it will start to make sense. Where will wine go? My beloved Italian wines, where will their journey take them? Will it be a short journey or a long journey? Both. Short for the wines that court emptiness, like Soave and wines in fish bottles. Why do they put wine in a fish bottle? Just for the hali…but I digress. Long for the wines that speak of the people and the country where they are made. The wines of my dreams and my nightmares. My dreams, my loves, my desires. My nightmares, my fears, my… What was I talking about?

Age. Ideas. Folds within Folds. The emptiness of my luggage on and on and on and on and on and on and on the wine trail in Italy.

Wine Bloggers You Can Trust

I was under the apparently false illusion that I had discovered Carbon Footprint Wines. I got suckered into publishing some of their marketing material because I believed I had scooped the wine blogging community. Foolish me. As if I could outwit the parade of brilliant bloggers the Internet has to offer, those titans of wine journalism. Oh, the hubris, the hubris, my aching hubris. I was surfing the blogs, if one can surf in what amounts to a Poodle puddle, and, lo and behold, everyone is talking about Carbon Footprint! Some sort of mass mailing of samples had occurred that gave the top bloggers something to write about, and UPS guys hernias. I've taken the liberty of quoting a few of them here.


SwirlSmellSlurp (Best New Wine Blog, Same as Best Old Wine Blog)

Pinot Noir, "Screw the Ozone," Carbon Footprint, 2008 (sample, retails for $65)

She said: Delightful and Decadent, the heavy bottle reminds me of one of Mannfred's Sine Qua Non bottles, which I can say because I know Mannfred and he admires my palate and I helped him start his winery. Initially, the wine comes across as floral, but the flowers give way to huckleberry, Bartlett pear (Josiah, not the Familiar Quotations guy--damn, my nose is discerning!), and pluots. The wine has a lot of heat, not just a little heat, damned Al Gore kind of heat, but it's the heat that carries it. If the bottle were a bit heavier and the wine a little higher alcohol, it could be Sine Qua Non, a winery I'm very familiar with, did I mention?


He said: I was pretty sure this was Merlot when I first smelled it, but then I thought, why would they put Merlot in a ten-pound Burgundy bottle? It was definitely red in the glass though, so that got me confused. On the palate it was red too, with white undertones. It tasted a lot like red wine and I liked it. Definitely a wine I'd drink for free again because I'm all for climate change because it's really hot here today. Do I seem drunk to you? You'll never guess what I'm rating it because I have my own opinions, really I do, that's what makes us so important.



BiggerThanYourHead (Best Wine Reviews and Little Else)

You'd never know the Carbon Footprint 2007 "Amazing Hurricane Season" Cabernet Franc was made from grapes farmed irresponsibly. I wouldn't have known if they hadn't bragged about being part of the fledgling Brown Movement, a Movement I believe I had this morning. Dedicated to the pursuit of the end of civilization as we know it through the frivolous use of chemicals and fossil fuels, clearly someone at Carbon Footprint knows how to make wine. Now I'm going to tell you exactly what it smells and tastes like, and you can take my description to the bank. I'll be certain to explain my precise terminology so that you can follow along. I make it an iron-clad rule to talk down to my readers, though what choice do I have? Intial aromas of macerated cherries and oolong tea lead to tertiary aromas (aromas from the tertia) of powdered cufflinks and Certs, but without the Retsin. In the mouth, the wine is layered and warm, like my Brown movement this morning, and displays a fascinating sense of doom, which comes from the barriques (or "barrels") which are made from heirloom plantings of oaks from now completely logged and barren forests. Drink now through the Rapture.


Jay McInerny On Wine (Who Says Ignorant Bloggers Can't Get Paid to Write)

We had friends over for a simple meal over the weekend. Bill Gates was looking trim and fit, fashionably skinny like he was a citizen of one of the Third World countries he and the lovely Melissa are always trying to save from themselves. And how handy that they'd brought immunizations for dysentery for everyone. Mick was feeling full of himself and insisted I turn him on to the wines I'd be praising in next week's WSJ column so that he wouldn't be shut out when he tried to buy them. I told Sir Mick that I'd be waxing rhapsodic about the great wines of Carbon Footprint, and that we'd be having some with dinner. The old queen Sir Ian laughed in that funny way of his I adore, as though Zelda Fitzgerald were there with us in spirit having recognized me as rightful heir to her husband's literary legacy.

I'd been turned on to Carbon Footprint by Larry Ellison. It was on his private jet that I first tried the Carbon Footprint "Revenge of the Dinosaurs" Chardonnay and it was a revelation. Why can't all California Chardonnays be this amazing? I was reminded of the great Chardonnays of J.J. Prum, but, perhaps this was not as oaky. I decided to accept samples from Carbon Footprint, though I confess I felt bad refusing their requests for autographed books in return because that violates WSJ's policy of never giving anyone anything.

I was very impressed by one of the wines that I served at our casual meal, the Carbon Footprint "Creeping Deforestation" Grenache, a grape I was unfamiliar with. It reminded me of a good Burgundy, maybe from Joguet, though it wasn't nearly ready to drink. I remarked that I felt like I'd committed infanticide, which inexplicably offended Melissa Gates. As I once said in my best-selling novel, "Bright Lights, Big City," "Fuck her."

WSJ readers will be pleased to learn that Carbon Footprint Wines eschews organics and other cultish Green viticultural practices in favor of massive resource consumption. My boss, Rupert, will be pleased to know that, after Sir Ian is through buggering him.

Tom Wark's Sermontation

A blog set inside the world of wine public relations--where the media, the culture and I are different words for the same thing.

HOW THE BP DISASTER IS LIKE EVERYTHING I CAN THINK OF IN THE WINE BUSINESS


1. The BP oil spill is exactly like the Three Tier Distribution System. In the brief history of the United States, a history unlike the history of any other country because no other country borders Mexico and Canada at the same time, the BP oil spill is the worst ecological catastrophe ever seen. Similarly, the Three Tier Distribution System sucks too. All of us bear some responsibility for the BP disaster. We insist on using fossil fuels to power our vehicles, heat our homes, run the gigantic Google servers that bring you this important, pioneering blog, and blow leaves from our driveways. If there were no demand for oil, there would have been no BP disaster. I imagine you hadn't thought of that. Compare that to the Three Tier Distribution system as it now stands in this great country that borders both Canada and Mexico, where, by the way, there are no Three Tier Distribution Systems even though, supposedly, they are countries more backwards than the United States. Perhaps all of us bear some responsibility for the Three Tier Distribution System as well. We allow it to exist when we know it's wrong. So just as we need to clean up the oil in the Gulf of Mexico, we need to eradicate the oily mess that is the Three Tier Distribution system. The oil companies own our government just as the liquor distributors own our state legislatures. It's time we take them back, return government to the people it belongs to, the ignorant masses. I predict that the Three Tier Distribution System will be dismantled about the same time we give up our cars and squeegee all the seagulls clean.


2. The rise of wine bloggers is like the rise of oil from the ocean floor. Wine bloggers have changed the wine environment in similar ways to how the oil from the Deepwater well has changed the Gulf of Mexico. Where once there were clear waters and smooth sailing, now there's all sorts of crap floating around. When I invented wine blogging several years ago, and created the Wine Blog Awards, I confess I didn't know how important it would be to the wine business. I could not have foreseen how important I would become. Now, just as the Deepwater well has sprung a leak spewing unfathomable amounts of goo and crude from one location that has spread all over the Gulf of Mexico, so has wine blogging spread all over the world. And despite the efforts of many to try and stop the wellspring of bloggers, nothing has worked. Just as thousands of gallons of oil emerge from Deepwater every day, so hundreds of new wine bloggers emerge, unleashed from the bounds of traditional media just as the oil has been unleashed without the use of traditional wells, and with much the same results. The waters of the wine business will never be the same. And even when the flood of wine bloggers is capped, if it's capped, the effect will be felt for generations. Just like the BP disaster, we have yet to see whether it's a good thing or not.


3. Wineries had better learn to embrace Social Media in the ways I tell them to or they face their own BP disaster. Just as British Petroleum had all the resources to avoid a catastrophe like the one in the Gulf of Mexico, a catastrophe that has brought them to the edge of financial ruin, so do wineries have the resources to hire a person for Social Media. Those that do not face the same dire consequences as BP--their names besmirched, their company boycotted and despised, and huge profits for their executives. I advise my winery clients, who will remain anonymous because that's what they hired me to do, to use wine bloggers and Twitter and FaceBook even if it means they divert resources from vineyard management and cleanliness. The only thing that matters about wine is how it's promoted. Had BP had the foresight and planning to promote their oil spill in a positive light, the company would be in fine shape. What if BP had mounted a campaign to emphasize that the Deepwater spill brings oil discovery to the people? The people who walk the beach, the people who fish the Gulf waters, the people who are birdwatchers. Would people still be as outraged? What if BP had blamed Al Qaeda? Just carefully insinuated through a series of carefully orchestrated Tweets and FaceBook quotes that it was Osama bin Laden working with a team of divers trained at a school in Florida who were responsible for the spill? Suddenly the whole country would be rallying to help the poor folks at BP. Rudy Giuliani would be giving inspirational speeches and Bruce Springsteen would write a song, "I'm Gonna Miss Tuna, Miss Tuna, How's About We Plug Your Well." Wineries need to use Social Media in the same way corporate giants use FOX news, and, believe me, bloggers are more than eager to oblige. The ones who aren't already marketing people (aka, Wine Blog Award Winners) are for sale, and cheap. It behooves wineries to spend their money where it should be spent, on marketing. If you're paying a winemaker more than you're paying your marketing people, you're making a terrible mistake. Wineries that make that mistake will end up with the kind of disaster on their hands that BP has.


4. Traditional wine writers are going the way of marine life in the Gulf of Mexico. A few will survive, those that are able to withstand the most oily residue, like Jay McInerny who has had years of hair gel as practice, but most will perish under the wave of noxious slime that is wine bloggers. This is just how it goes, get over it. The landscape changes, and what changes it the most is natural disaster. And so it is with the wine business. No one could have foreseen that winery owners would have to move from kissing the diamond-tipped drill bits of James Laube and Robert Parker to greasing the palms of a giant school of wine blogging barracuda, but that's just how it goes. All wine bloggers are wine writers because I say so. And so wine writing has much in common with the Gulf of Mexico.

We're going to miss them both.

STEVE!

Longtime readers will notice that I have removed my surname from the title of my blog. I think it's time. I'm a one-name brand in the wine business if there ever was one, like Liza is on Broadway, or Sting in the music world, or Shamu in the world of water and drowning people. When I call upon the finest wineries in California, many of which you won't have heard of, at least not until I write about them in Wine Enthusiast and make their reputations, I usually just say, "It's STEVE!," and that's enough. They know who that is. I often see myself referred to as just plain Steve in my favorite wine blogs. That's always how 1WineDoody refers to me and he's my bbffILF (best blog friend...well, you know the rest). If it's good enough for him, it's good enough for us. So from now on, I'm just STEVE!


I've just learned that I have won the coveted "Best Writing on a Wine Blog" Award. The awards haven't been announced yet officially, but all the balloting has been done and the judges have made their final decisions, so I think it's safe to say that I'm the winner. I don't think my thank you is the least bit premature. What I'd like to do is thank you, my readers, for voting for me and recognizing what I think is ridiculously apparent. STEVE! is the finest writing on a wine blog. And by that I don't mean the most creative, though I am still chuckling at my whimsical parody of "Les Cages Aux Folles" starring Robert Parker and Marvin Shanken--that was clearly inspired. I just mean the best. However, in all fairness, I don't think it's the fault of the other four nominees that they were up against a writer of my ability and stature. It's just bad luck. I admire the work of all four of my fellow nominees, though I've never read any of their blogs. Paul Gregutt and I both write for Wine Enthusiast and I can vouch for the fact that it's not his fault he's assigned to the borderline appellations of our northern neighbors. It's just simple logic. He didn't write an indispensable wine book like "STEVE'S! Indispensable Wine Book: Interviews I Granted California's Finest Winemakers." And none of the other nominees has written a definitive guide like my "STEVE'S! Definitive Guide to the Russian River: The Appellation I Made Famous." I like Paul, I like what he's done with the wines of Washington State and the abilities God gave him. I think he has a bright future in music. I just want to humbly thank everyone who voted for me for the now prestigious Wine Blog Awards.


For those of you who read my blog and think that all it takes is monumental talent to do what I do, a justifiable opinion to be sure, let me just say that it also takes hard work and dedication. Having the most successful and interesting wine blog isn't a matter of luck. My work days revolve around my paying job as wine critic for Wine Enthusiast. This is a very powerful job. Yes, I've heard the jokes going around about the Wine Enthusiast. Which is better, the circulation of the Wine Enthusiast, or the circulation of Dick Cheney? Well, Cheney ain't dead yet. Not that funny. I spend hours every day tasting the wines and assigning them numbers, using a specially designed Magic 8 Ball. It's only after those ratings are done that I am able to think about my award-winning blog STEVE! How do I talk about the burning subjects in the wine world in a way my readers will be able to understand? Will I be able to work in secret messages to my bbffILF? How do I generate comments?


I'll let you in on a little secret. The last question is an easy one for me. Longtime readers who read STEVE! carefully may have noticed that whenever I have a couple of posts in a row that receive a measly amount of comments, I find a new way to talk about one of three subjects guaranteed to generate participation. I churn out another column on the 100 Point Scale. Or I write a piece about the diminishing influence of Robert Parker. Or I can always post about wine bloggers--that's a surefire way to get comments. The genius lies in making each tired old subject seem fresh. It's like squeezing lemon juice on week-old fish. Once my readers swallow it, eventually they'll spit something out. This information might come in handy for the rest of you bloggers. Absolutely no subject generates comments from wine bloggers like wine blogging--they love to talk about themselves because it's the one subject they know. Well, that and the basic emptiness of existence.


I'll be off to give the keynote address at the Wine Bloggers Conference in Walla Walla where I'll also be accepting my "Best Writing on a Wine Blog" award. I'm honored. If you had asked me two years ago if wine blogs would have any impact on the wine industry I'd have said, No, I don't think so. What's changed since then?


STEVE!

Mis(s) Feiring

What am I looking for in wine?

I'm looking for the Gertrude Steins, the k.d. langs, the Dizzy Deans. Wines that have a nasty screwball. Which I can relate to. I want my wines natural. Think pubic hair. Think armpits. Makeup is OK, only a little, but no animals tortured. Unless they're my critics who don't get it. I write only for me, about wines for me. But I'm driving a bandwagon. Under the influence, but a bandwagon nonetheless, and I want everyone to be on it. Except Parker. He'd have to sit on the left side and everyone else would have to sit on the right. Balance. Like wines. I seek balance. Think tightrope walker. No balance, they're dead. Naturally. So I'm a wine cop. With no authority. Except my own. I'll write you a nasty ticket if you make wines that aren't natural. I'll throw the book at you. My book. I wrote a book. You have it. It changed you. It changed everyone. I'm a wine messiah. Follow me. I know people. I'll mention all of them. Most are famous. Others should be. Who cares? I'm famous, I'm a wine cop, I'm a messiah. I'm so lonely.


Posts


I was asked to speak at a seminar. I'm the leading authority on Natural Wines. No. Make that I'm the Only Authority on Natural Wines. I'm asked to speak often. I changed the world. Like Gandhi. Like Martin Luther King. Like the Exxon Valdez. The only disasters I like are natural too. Earthquakes. Tsunami. Gamay.

I don't like giving speeches. I like giving commandments. Thou shalt not sulfur. I remember Jesus said, "Sulfur little children..." That was wrong too. Where was I?

In a room, issuing commandments, signing books. Michel Bettane was there, he's a wine critic also. He's French. I like the French, they're so natural. He had nose hair like a wire brush. I wrapped my fingers in it. He asked me to sign my book for him. My book. You have it, I know, it changed everything. I was happy to sign Bettane's book but the pen was filled with synthetic ink. Not ink from an octopus or a squid or pasta. I could not sully the book. I pricked my finger and signed in blood. It felt good. Natural. I thought of Carole King. Maybe it was Bettane's nose hair that reminded me of her hair. Jewish hair. Natural hair. "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman!"

I probably shouldn't have sung it out loud.

I signed the book, With Love, Alice. Bettane smiled. I'm so lonely.

Others were there too. Mostly famous people to hear me. Maybe not famous to you. Not yet. But famous to me, and I assign fame only for myself. To myself. I'm a fame cop. Always copping the famous. Many great winemakers were there. Did I mention this speech was in France? I love France. I surrender to the French. No one's ever done that before. Usually the other way around.

I hope that doesn't offend my French friends. But I speak the truth. Someone has to. The wine world is filled with liars and cheats, and, well, then your wine is filled with lies and cheats. Is that what you want in your stool? Shit, I said stool.

Yet another lie. Another commandment. Thou shalt only use wild yeast. I almost typed wild Yeats. He was a poet. And a good one. He was at my speech. But he's dead. Ironic. He often wrote of the dead. I signed a book for him too. "To Bill" I wrote "you were far too cultured for my taste."

No wine can be natural if it wasn't fermented by wild yeast. Though yeast all over the world has been infiltrated by cultured strains and there is no more wild yeast. I don't care. I have my standards, my commandments. Pick out the cultured strains like they pick out illegal aliens in Arizona. It can be done. I can tell when I taste. I know when a wine was done with cultured yeast. It speaks to me. In an English accent. I hate the English. The accent is fake, like my writing style. The wines taste fake. You just know. You do. Ask anybody who agrees with me.

Francois Ghitaine was there at my speech from Domaine Hornswaggle. His wines are natural. When I visited Francois he proudly showed me his cement vats for fermenting. Cement vats are making a comeback. Why? They are better for the wine. There is concrete evidence. Get it? Concrete evidence! Funnier in French. Francois even goes so far as to ferment the wine in the vats before the cement has even set. The flavors of the ground, the rocks, are in his wines. His Petit Manseng is wet cement in a glass. It's perfect. I took a finger and wrote my name in it. "Alice" I'm so lonely.

I was last at Hornswaggle when only Francois' wife was there, Brigitte. She cooked for me while I spoke to her in short sentences. Very short. I asked her about their biodynamic lifestyle. She was blunt. Francois is a pig. She told him to bury his damned man horns in the vineyard stuffed with the manure he'd brought into their lives. I spoke more short sentences to her. She cooked. Eggs, from a virgin chicken. Over easy. Just how I wanted them. And her. She left weeping. The eggs were runny, like her nose. But the wines are brilliant. I'm brilliant.

I'm so lonely.

1WineDoody

It's One Wine Doody time,
It's One Wine Doody time.
If you are new to wine,
You'll like my blog just fine.

It's One Wine Doody time,
It's One Wine Doody time.
I'm just a wine cut-up,
You wish would just shut up.


Hi Boys and Girls! I'm 1WineDoody! You've probably heard of my brother Howdy. Some people have a hard time telling us apart. One of us is small, with a happy grin plastered on his face, a big clown for a sidekick and everything he does is because someone is pulling his strings! The other one used to have a TV show with Buffalo Bob. Welcome to my blog! I'm here to teach all you kids about wine. So many of you think wine is intimidating, that it takes years to understand. Why that's foolish! Look at me! Please, look at me. Down here!

It doesn't take an expert to teach you about wine. Look, I've got a CSW after my name! That's a lot longer than an MS or an MW, a full third longer! And I wrote it on big letters at the top of my blog. I learned this from Safeway. "Certified" is a word that is powerful despite the lack of meaning. You put "Certified" in front of some words and, well, that makes it better. "Certified Angus!" "Certified Public Accountant!" "Certified Wine Specialist!" What do all those things have in common? If I give you the first four letters, kids, can you finish the word? OK, what they have in common starts with B-U-L-L****!

You're going to like it here at 1WineDoody. Everyone does! Certified! 1WineDoody is nice to everybody. If I'm not here praising every wine blogger I meet, well, I'm on other blogs contributing brief little word essays that pay tribute to their wisdom. And I believe in brevity, boys and girls. Everything you need to know about wine is on the surface, just like people. Right there on the surface, like a little layer of scum. And that's what I will teach you about wine, boys and girls, just the stuff you skim off the surface.

OK, here are today's Twitter notes about wines I've received from all my clown friends, all the Clarabeaus and Clarabelles that run winery marketing departments. Notice how at the end I've given every wine a grade! This is so you know what I actually think about the wine because the words probably won't tell you. Other wine bloggers, who are certified talented and really nice people, use the 100 point scale, which you my fans know from being at the lower end of it. Points are too complicated, you have to kind of think hard about them, and I don't want to give just a few points--that's not how 1WineDoody is! So I give grades! You know grades, right, boys and girls? They're like 100 point scores only nicer. I don't know about you, but a "C" was always pretty good as far as I was concerned. "C" is average! And 1WineDoody is nothing if not Certified Average. I'm just a Certified Average Joe. Now on to the notes!

• 08 Geyser Peak Sauvignon Blanc (Sonoma County): If my dog smelled this he'd be looking for a leaky pussy. $12 C+
• 07 Cakebread Cabernet Sauvignon (Napa Valley): I played in a band like this once, a lot of noise and drunk girls. $75 B
• 08 Trimbach Pinot Gris (Alsace, Baby, that's right, I drink Alsace): Brought to mind Christopher Cross' "Sailing," only didn't make me seasick. $20 A-
• 05 Jean Milan "Terres des Noel" (Champagne): Can I get you some antibiotics for that yeast infection, Baby? $75 A
• 06 Silver Oak Cabernet Sauvignon (Alexander Valley): If ABBA were a wine, this would be their Dancing Queen. Rare, but easy to find. $60 B-
  

Isn't it amazing how I can just keep cranking these reviews out? And like I told you, just the surface, kids, just the certified surface. Oh, I know more than I'm showing, I'm humble. I hardly ever mention my musical talents, my gorgeous wife,1WineJudyDoody, or all the letters after my name. And you never hear me talking about how my wine blog friends are really influential--Steve Heimoff and that GoodGrape guy (Good Grape was my favorite flavor of Funny Face drink, along with Loudmouth Lime) and Dr. Vino, who has even more letters after his name than I do! 1WineDoody isn't here to waste your time with information! Oh no, not unless I'm killing a post recycling some publicist's wine event information. Then I go on and on about details.

Nope, boys and girls, 1WineDoody is all about making wine fun! That's why I'm the #1 wine blog around. I'm nice, I write in short sentences and I always assume my boys and girls are just Certified Average and listen to puppets.

Vornography

Every January the Zinfandel Advocates and Producers (ZAP) throw a tasting in my honor at Fort Mason in San Francisco. I'm honored that they do this for me, I don't see myself as worthy of the honor, I'm just a humble blogger who is frequently given accolades, awards, free trips, free wine and inexplicable admiration from an industry that deeply admires sycophants. The theme of this year's ZAP tasting in my honor was "Alder Zin You Can Drink," and, as I do every year, I agreed to allow others in the industry, as well as every day people, to attend. I don't have to do this, but I feel that wine is best when it's shared, and, besides, it's really lonely being the best blogger in the country.

There were fewer wineries this year, which I was not happy about and someone will pay, believe me, but the good news is that it meant I only had 740 wines to taste so I'd have an extra hour to come home and post pretty pictures on my blog. I'd really like to post pictures of kitties, I love kitties, especially in ribbons, but that wouldn't be right so I post trite photos by Andy Katz--get it? Katz? I post pictures of Katz! And you wonder why I win wine blog awards!

I was honored by the 220 or so wineries who chose to pour me wine at ZAP. Part of the enjoyment I get out of this annual event (last year's theme was "We All Live in a Yarrow Submarine") is the time I get to spend with all my many friends that produce Zinfandel all over the state, and even the world! People even come from Italy and South Africa to pour wines for me, hoping for a coveted 9.5 to 10 score, which I only give to 40% of the wines I taste so they are really going against the odds. This year I was honored to spend 11 seconds talking to Joel Peterson, the heroic producer and founder of Ravenswood, 8 seconds tasting with Larry Turley, and a full 15 seconds reveling in the stories of Kent Rosenblum. Did you know he's a veterinarian? When Dr. Rosenblum tells you you're a horse's ass for claiming you can taste and rate 740 wines in a day, you know he knows what he's talking about!

I was also asked to moderate a panel about Zinfandel and Social Media the Friday before the ZAP tasting. I am often asked to sit on panels because I'm the most respected wine blogger in the country and I can answer many questions that prospective bloggers constantly ask. For example, I am often asked what has made my blog so successful. It's not that big a secret. What makes Vornography so successful is that most people can't tell the difference between being prolific and being good. Choose prolific. And, always, they want to know how to get wineries to send them free samples. Here's where my journalism background comes in handy. Puff pieces. Wineries love puff pieces about themselves and I do that better than anyone else blogging today. You can't go wrong writing fluff, being a fluffer, about a winery owner fulfilling a dream. They eat it up, they post it on their website, they tweet about it, and they send me every release of wine they ever produce hoping I'll flatter them again. It's essentially like taking candy from trust fund babies.

Tasting 740 wines in six hours is no big deal, but, obviously I'm not superhuman enough to also take tasting notes. That would be ludicrous and, frankly, arrogant. Besides, no one reads tasting notes, tasting notes are just filler, like the white stuff in Twinkies, it's just there to distract you from what really matters, the delicious cake outsides. And it's all Zinfandel anyway. You already know what Zinfandel tastes like, it tastes kind of like berries. All you need to know is what I think about the wines as reflected in my scores. You already know my taste in wine, you've been faithfully following my blog for more than six years now, and if you're new here, well, take it from all of my regular longtime readers, my scores are valid and meaningful and come from my astonishing seven years of experience tasting wines. You can tell how valid my scores are by all the winery people kissing my butt in the comments section. I list the 740 wines grouped by my vague scores in such a way that it enlightens you as to which Zinfandels are worth your hard-earned money. The ones at the top. They tasted the best. Trust me.