Six Wines to Drink Before You Die Next Wednesday

I didn’t want to be the one to tell you, but come Wednesday, you’re history. I’m not trying to be funny. Word is you’re a goner, and there’s no reason to believe otherwise. On the bright side, pretty much everyone believes you have it coming, so it should be good news for most people. And you’re not that young, so there’s that. Now is the time for you to say your farewells, to get your affairs in order, and to Drink These Six Wines Before You Die on Wednesday.

Chateau Rayas 1990 Châteauneuf-du-Pape

You might have time to find a bottle of this legendary wine. I’m not sure how good it’s going to taste with that nasty pain medication you’ll be on, but what choice do you have? Everyone who ever rated this wine awarded it 100 points, so even with your dulled senses and unpredictable vomiting, it should be terrific! Notice the length of its finish. You should be so lucky.


Screaming Eagle 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon

All that fun money you’ve been rather foolishly saving (at least it’s foolish in hindsight now that you know Wednesday, and I mean early Wednesday, is your last day) will be well-spent on this legendary Napa Valley Cabernet. The ’02 Screaming Eagle is astonishing; notice the silkiness of the texture—a bit of foreshadowing for that coffin lining you’ll be feeling for eternity. Oh, that’s right, you’ve asked to be cremated. Smell that toasty oak!

Chave 1999 Hermitage

The ’99 Chave Hermitage, unlike you, has a long life ahead of it. When you get your hands on this wine, be sure to decant it for a day. So, by Tuesday. I still have a couple of bottles, and I’d invite you over to share, but I’m guessing the CDC won’t allow you out of quarantine with that virus you’re going to have. Turns out you’re going saignée style—bleeding from a lot of different pores. Your future, it turns out, is very rosé.


Jayer 1978 Richebourg

Most people don’t understand just how long Pinot Noir can live. They were wrong about you, too, of course, so it’s no big surprise. Everyone who loves wine should have the opportunity to spend a few hours with a Jayer Burgundy. You’ve got the chance now that you won’t need to make that next mortgage payment. What I love is that you’re using a Coravin to have only one glass. You’re hilarious!


Nicolas Joly 1996 Coulée de Serrant

Maybe if you’d spent your wine life drinking biodynamic wines, you wouldn’t be under this death sentence. You should have been more careful about what you put into your body. Beyond that, you should be ashamed of yourself, drinking all that industrial wine. You not only ruined your own life, you fucked with this planet we supposedly share—at least for a few more days. Is it any wonder we don’t really care you’re a dead man walking? Sure, what do you care now? Selfish prick. Maybe a taste of Joly’s wine will make you see how stupid you were, although, sure, we’re all going to die anyway. But if you’d drunk only wines made organically or biodynamically or naturally, those of us you’ve left behind may have had more respect for you, and you might have lived a lot longer. I think I say this on behalf of all the natural wine advocates, this is what they all really think of you, Fuck You, Industrial Wine Drinker, You Can't Die Soon Enough! You were a moron, anyway.


A Wine From Your Birth Year

Yeah, poetic. Hasta la vista, Baby.

Failed Master of Wine Dissertations 2: The Examiner's Feedback by Peter Pharos

One of my fellow columnists from Tim Atkin MW’s site, Peter Pharos, sent me this response to my previous post. It’s damned funny. I’ve never met Peter, but now I hate him. The only other wine person who’s funnier in print than I am is David Schildknecht—but you have to read his work translated into English. For years, I’ve asked for people to write guest posts for HoseMaster of Wine™, but Peter’s is only the second one I’ve published in, lo, these ten years. Though I do have the funniest common taters in the wine blog biz.
 
It’s always the stupidest posts that catch on. “Failed Master of Wine Dissertations” seems to have stuck some sort of chord. I’m glad. And I’m really glad I got this free post out of Peter.

The Paris Tasting of 1976: Who the Fuck Cares

While the examination committee considered you have answered the topic correctly and exhaustively, “Stephen Spurrier” is below the required word count.

The Effect of Climate Change on BevMo’s Five Cent Sale

The research paper has to cover a wine-related topic.

Vineyard Dogs: Their Effect on Sales, and Why They Do That Thing With Their Legs When You Scratch Their Stomach Just Like Angelo Gaja Does

Your methodology lacks primary data, specifically any experiments of you scratching Angelo Gaja’s stomach.

Natural Wine: Does All That Hair Get Stuck in Your Teeth

The topic has a very limited scope, as if one drinks natural wine often enough, one is left without teeth.

Sommeliers on Tinder: Always Pick the Second Cheapest One

The work rests on the faulty premise that there is a second cheapest sommelier on Tinder.

Champagne: How They Missed the Boat on the Charmat Process

Have you tried Moët NV? Does it strike you as being fermented in bottle?

Do Sexually Suggestive Wine Labels Sell More Wine to Stupid People, Drunk People or People With Serious Signs of Traumatic Brain Injury

While the Institute applauds inclusive terminology, using “people” to refer to males leads to semantic confusion.

If Tastebuds Were on Your Nipples, Would Wines Smell Better Cold

How do you think Tim Hanni tastes wine?

Are Wines Really All That Different: I Can’t Tell Them Apart and Neither Can You

Shhhhhh!

Women in Wine: Is Three Hours Enough Time to Marinate

The topic is redundant, as in the end the man will be picked.

Is Every New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc Under $25 the Same Wine With a Different Label

SHHHHHHHHH!!!

South African Pinotage: Is it Better or Worse than Apartheid

Your work failed to highlight that they were both propped by the English.

Case Study: Slurping or Gargling, Which More Effectively Annoys Fellow Judges at Wine Competitions

Your work failed to consider judges who introduce themselves as “Name Surname MW”

Blind Tasting: Party Trick or Desperate Cry for Attention

Your work failed to consider the effects of wearing a pin.

Variety or Varietal: The Predictability of Lower I.Q. in People Who Use Varietal as a Noun

The Institute has a zero tolerance policy towards abuse of its members.

Swartland: Where Swart Comes From

The research paper has to refer to a wine-producing area.

When Austrian Wines Were Considered the Best in the World: What a Day That Was

Your work correctly identified the day as the 11th of March 1940, but did not mention that it applied only in the Axis-occupied World.

Is a Penis Effective for Bâttonage. No, I’m Just Happy to See You

Students have been told repeatedly that what happens in the MW study trip, stays in the MW study trip.

Failed Master of Wine Dissertations

Stuff I think about...


The Paris Tasting of 1976: Who the Fuck Cares

The Effect of Climate Change on BevMo’s Five Cent Sale

Vineyard Dogs: Their Effect on Sales, and Why They Do That Thing With Their Legs When You Scratch Their Stomach Just Like Angelo Gaja Does

Natural Wine: Does All That Hair Get Stuck in Your Teeth

Sommeliers on Tinder: Always Pick the Second Cheapest One

Champagne: How They Missed the Boat on the Charmat Process

Do Sexually Suggestive Wine Labels Sell More Wine to Stupid People, Drunk People or People With Serious Signs of Traumatic Brain Injury

If Tastebuds Were on Your Nipples, Would Wines Smell Better Cold

Are Wines Really All That Different: I Can’t Tell Them Apart and Neither Can You

Women in Wine: Is Three Hours Enough Time to Marinate

Is Every New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc Under $25 the Same Wine With a Different Label

South African Pinotage: Is it Better or Worse than Apartheid

Case Study: Slurping or Gargling, Which More Effectively Annoys Fellow Judges at Wine Competitions

Blind Tasting: Party Trick or Desperate Cry for Attention

Variety or Varietal: The Predictability of Lower I.Q. in People Who Use Varietal as a Noun

Swartland: Where Swart Comes From

When Austrian Wines Were Considered the Best in the World: What a Day That Was

Is a Penis Effective for Bâttonage. No, I’m Just Happy to See You

Rich Prick Wants a Lower Score

Dear Ms. Erin Brooks,

In the most recent issue of Wine Advocate you rated my estate Pinot Noir 97+. Thank you, but that’s a stupidly high score. I don’t want a score that high. Is there any way you can lower it? If I want an inflated score for my wine, I’ll buy one from James Suckling like everybody else.

While I’m thinking about it, what the hell is the “+” for? I don’t want the 97, so I sure as hell don’t want the “+.” I don’t even know what that means! You’re the damn critic. Is it a 97 or isn’t it? You think maybe my Prick Family Vineyard Pinot Noir is better than 97? MAYBE? MAYBE? You’re using cold, hard, objective numbers to rate wine. Critics claim their numbers have value and meaning. Where does MAYBE come in? “MAYBE I underrated it?” Now you’re feeling insecure? You put it in your mouth, swill it around, call on your decade of unaccredited expertise, pronounce it, “97,” and then you think, “Oh, it might be better than that.” Then give it 98, fer Chrissake! You’re assigning numbers, Ms. Brooks. “+” is NOT a number. It’s a symbol. I have a few more suggestions for your scoring system:

    97#—It might do better on Twitter
    97:—I may have smelled butt
    97&—It seems like it was grown in ampersandy soils
    97…—Bob Parker just likes us to throw in an ellipse now and then.

See how stupid that is? Stupid+.

I’m certain that most winemakers write to you to complain about their lousy scores, or to gush over you for having the talent and wisdom to see that their wine is, indeed, a near perfect 98. Trust me, Ms. Brooks, most of these winemakers have IQ’s that are a perfect 100. When I submitted my Pinot Noir for your consideration, I was hoping for a more realistic score. Believe me, I’ve tasted a lot of great wines in my life, and that Pinot Noir is by any measure about a 90. That’s all I wanted. A lousy, stinkin’ 90! 97+ is a terrible score. I don’t want it! Please, lower it. Would it help if I told you I added raspberry Jell-O to the fining agent? Yeah, I know, like I’m the only one.

The problem is, you’ve raised expectations for my wines going forward. It’s like listing my penis size as 11 inches on Tinder. Wait, as 11+ inches on Tinder. I can’t live up to those expectations! Yes, that will come as a huge relief to my date, but it’s really embarrassing to me. She’s expecting a big mouthful of Pinot and I end up with a lot of explaining to do when it’s tired and thin. No one is happy. Now, if you’d given my wine a 90, bang!, I over-deliver. I’m a hero. Like if you’d said I was hung like a travel blogger! That I can live up to, with an extra testicle thrown in.

Wine critics often say that wine scores aren’t inflated these days, it’s just that wines are better now than they’ve ever been! Bite me. Let’s say that’s true. I don’t think it is, but let’s just say that’s true. Then why don’t you wine critics get together and raise the goddam standards? Look, it wasn’t long ago that gymnastics judges began giving out perfect 10’s in the Olympics, and other international competitions. Notice how they don’t do that anymore? Why? Because they raised their standards to account for how much better gymnasts are these days! They stunt gymnasts’ growth at a much earlier age now. You gotta love science. How else can we get mutant athletes to perform for us but with high-tech drugs? Anyway, my point is, why don’t wine critics decide that 90 is the new 100? The 100 point wines of 30 years ago just wouldn’t make it in today’s world as 100 point wines. Can we just raise our standards? I’m volunteering to begin the process by taking a 10% cut in my score. I’ll bet you an awful lot of wineries would volunteer to do the same.

You’re probably too young to remember when 90 meant something. It doesn’t mean diddly-squat any longer. It’s sad to see 90 fall into irrelevance. It’s the Brian Williams of wine scores. No one gives a shit about 90. 90 is second runner-up in the Miss Leprosy pageant. Yet 90 out of 100 is amazing! People get MWs for lower scores. You’re young, Ms. Brooks, and you’re the future of wine criticism. Wine scores are the next Venezuela. Hyperinflated and run by tyrants. Maybe you can do something about it. Though I’m guessing it’s too late.

Sincerely,
Rich Prick
Prick Family Vineyards

The HoseMaster of Wine's™ Report on the 2018 Bordeaux Vintage

After reading the authoritative and exhausting report on 2018 En Primeur by Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW...


For the 30th consecutive year, I failed to attend En Primeur week in Bordeaux. My unparalleled consistency is, I believe, a major factor in my unquestioned objectivity when it comes to each vintage in Bordeaux. Too many other critics enjoy the wines of Bordeaux, and especially enjoy the sycophantic bacchanal that is En Primeur week. This must necessarily color their scores and opinions. Alone among my colleagues, I review each vintage without the handicap of actual attendance. Indeed, I believe that an honest and impartial judgment demands staying home and not letting those weasels influence my powerful opinion.

2018: The Vintage

What am I, the Weather Channel? I’m going to say what is always said every year by winemakers in Bordeaux. It was a challenging vintage. Because God knows it’s really, really hard to grow Cabernet Sauvignon!

Early in the year, it rained. It rained a lot. It rained so hard that all the cigarette butts in the vineyards decomposed. Wow. This doesn’t happen much in France, but it may explain the presence of tobacco leaf in the aromas of many of the 2018 wines. I’m just hoping not that many smoked menthol. I hate that in wine.

Then it got really hot because it’s summer. This was a common theme among the winemakers with whom I talked via Skype. “Summer is often hot in Bordeaux,” one told me, “hotter than winter and spring. I don’t throw my butts in the vineyards then.” There wasn’t any expectation of rain reaching even into October, so it was hot and dry. This affects the grapes, but no one knows why. You can taste that uncertainty in the wines. It tastes like that weird metallic thing you taste after taking opioids. It may be the signature of the 2018 vintage—the bitter aftertaste of opioid abuse.

Bullet Points About the 2018 Bordeaux

• The vintage is not as consistent as other vintages like 2009, 2016, and 1855. It is as inconsistent as other inconsistent vintages, and, thus is consistently inconsistent in keeping with all the other inconsistent vintages that we consistently avoid.
• At its best, the wines will be worth buying in ten years when the prices plummet.
• Hail in July wreaked havoc on a few producers. A quick shower in August would have benefited an awful lot of the winemakers, I thought. Luckily, and this is something of a surprise, nearly everyone escaped the huge potential damage of September’s sharknado.
• Many of the wines are approachable early, while others will perhaps reach their peak in fifty years, and still others are weak and lame as scrofulous wine writers on deadline. Still, they’ll all be overpriced.
• Organic and biodynamic vineyards, as well as other vineyards that you should pretty much just ignore because they’re not very evolved and don’t give a shit about the state of our beautiful, lost, utterly doomed world, had some mildew problems. Turns out Lysol is fine with Demeter.
• Really, you’d think somebody would make a goddam Rosé. 

Can you spot the hole?

Conclusions and Recommendations

I don’t know anyone who buys Bordeaux anymore. OK, maybe in England they do, but with Brexit, that’s going to pretty much condemn them to bending over and kissing their Ausoneholes goodbye. I wonder who is going to buy all the 2018 Bordeaux primeurs. The Chinese? Hell, good luck with that. You’d be better off just selling them very expensive labels at a big profit to cut out the middleman on the fake wines. So I’d expect primeur prices to be rather stupidly high because it doesn’t make any damn difference what they want for their precious red wine, so they’ll try to make it seem like they’re still in big demand when they’re not. Sort of like tickets to see Celine Dion.

I’d recommend not giving a second thought to the 2018 Bordeaux. Others might disagree, but, remember, they want to go to En Primeur again next year and get their Ausoneholes kissed, so they’re really just shills for the whole shebang.

Next, my assessment of not attending VinItaly. Which I believe was held in Italy this year.

Reasons You Failed Your Master Sommelier Exams

During the service exam, you stuck your tongue into the neck of the wine bottle you’d just opened and moaned, “Oh, God, I love you, Lettie.”

In your description of Grüner Veltliner, you used the word “taint” without mention of cork.

Mistakenly wore your diaphragm around your neck instead of a tastevin. Made the wine smell funny.

May have been overheard calling Fred Dame MS, “Wine’s Donald Trump.”

When asked by the examiner if you thought a Duckhorn was good, you said, “Yes, it’s perfect for when you have a really tight duck.”

Forgot to bring the answers you found in your email to the blind tasting exam.

Your answer for a question on soil samples was 1000 words on Depends.

You mistakenly identified “sommelier” as the primary grape in Sauternes, and declared Barsac a venereal disease contracted from stools in natural wine bars.

During the blind tasting exam, you spit each wine into your hand and yelled, “Baby needs a new pair of shoes!”

Beyoncé is not a variety. It was not crossed with Kanye to make Pinotage.

When asked for a wine to accompany Hamachi, you suggested Yellow Tail.

You wore clown shoes.

Identified all six wines in the blind tasting as “kinda bitey.”

When asked to identify the seven subzones of Chianti, you left out Sneezy.

When finished serving a bottle of Grower Champagne, one is not supposed to spike it and yell, “In your face, cocksuckers!” That’s only allowed after serving Dom Perignon.

You thought part of the service exam was blowing a balloon animal in the shape of your MS mentor. Where did the balloon animal figure in, stupid?

You misunderstood the word “proctor,” and asked to have your prostate checked. Luckily, it was fine.

When asked what is your favorite German TBA, you said, “The winner of the Angela Merkel lookalike contest.”

You have a vagina.

The HoseMaster of Wine's™ Commencement Speech for the Shemp Howard Wine, Food and Dog Grooming Institute

Inspired by reading Karen MacNeil's commencement speech to grads of the C.I.A., a speech about "the last true things" (so, yes, it's a short speech), I thought I'd reflect on my own notion of wine's last true things...



I had the honor of being asked to be the commencement speaker at the recent graduation ceremonies for the unaccredited Shemp Howard Institute for Sommeliers, Wine Professionals and Mexican Hairless Dog Groomers. Here is my speech in its entirety.


Let me start by saying that when it comes to wine, wine writing, and the wine business in general, it’s all been done before. There just isn’t anything new you can add, and it’s best if you just understand that from the get-go. For one thing, I think we all know there are too many sommeliers as it is. I recently read a statistic that there are more sommeliers per capita in the United States than there are lab rats; though one group is used for drug experiments, and the other to run mazes for paltry rewards. Guess which group is which. Hard to tell, right?

Don’t let this discourage you. Every day, thousands of unqualified wine professionals just like  you write blog entries, assemble wine lists, host wine tastings, and annoy unsuspecting patrons of wine bars. The wine business seems to have an endless capacity to absorb graduates of wine programs from all walks of life into meaningless, poorly paid, and strictly tangential jobs. This could be you! You have every reason to be proud. The diploma you’re receiving today from Shemp U. has as much value as any wine education diploma from any other institution. Virtually none. There’s comfort in that.

But before you go out into the real world of wine, I have a few words of advice I’d like to share, advice gathered from a lifetime wasted in the wine business.

First, Have a Backup Plan
I hope you paid attention in your required Mexican Hairless dog grooming classes because there are thousands and thousands of wine biz wannabes who want to get into the business, most of whom will fail. Looking around at this handsome group, I’m guessing your real future is in credit card fraud. That’s great! Just have a backup plan. The job you’re dreaming about, whether it’s a sommelier job at a prestigious restaurant, or a much-admired wine critic (which, by the way, is an oxymoron), or a wine auction consultant selling fraudulent wines for quick bucks, is probably taken. Be smart. Go ahead and plan on spending your life stacking wine boxes at supermarkets at 4AM because that’s where most of you will land.

Second, Learn to Pretend
One thing I tell all the young people who ask me how I became so successful in the wine business is it’s important you know how to pretend you know more than you do. This is the key to success in the wine business. Indeed, I don’t know anyone in the business for whom this isn’t true. “Wine Folly” has built a shabby Tinkertoy wine empire on pretending, and you can, too! In almost every conversation I have with successful, even famous, wine people, I realize with astonishing regularity that they’re faking it. If you cannot learn to pretend, your chances of success in the wine business are very slim indeed.

Third, Don’t Make Waves
The wine business rewards dullness and unoriginality. We don’t like new ideas, and we don’t like to be challenged or made fun of. Do things the way they’ve always been done. This is especially true for those of you pursuing a job in wine marketing. The same old lies have worked for decades. It’s your job to walk the same path. But I can see by your faces that’s probably already a done deal. Good for you!

Fourth, This is a Man’s World
Get over it.

Proper Etiquette For Taking Your Own Wine Into a Restaurant

This is a piece written as a reaction to Matt Walls' piece on TimAtkin.com about the tired old subject of corkage fees.


Just what is the etiquette for bringing your own bottle of wine into a restaurant, you self-entitled twerp? Oh, I don’t know. You may as well ask, what is the standard etiquette for bringing my own semen to a Tupperware party? It’s about the same situation. There is no answer. But you can certainly expect some disgusted looks from the help. What did you think was going to happen? People were going to ask for a small taste?

Let’s say you’re determined to take that highly overrated wine to dinner. It is overrated, you know. You’re the kind of idiot who complains about the high prices on wine lists, but then goes out and spends several hundred dollars on an overrated wine because some wine critic everyone knows is on the take gave it 99 points. You think you’re saving money by bringing in your own overpriced trophy wine, that’s how smart and savvy you are. Hey, I know, next time you go to the movies, take your own projector! That’ll save you a fortune.

Sure, you have an impressive wine cellar. Good for you. It’s at home, right? So here’s what you do. Eat at home, Wineboy. Listen, I have pedigreed dogs, champions of their breed, but I don’t take one when I go out for Korean BBQ. What sense does that make? It’s like taking a chicken hawk to a cockfight. What are you thinking? Kinda rude, don’t you think? There’s gonna be dead chickens, anyway. You’re just being stupid.

But if, after all that, you decide to take your own bottle to a restaurant, what can you expect? Pretty much what you deserve—condescenscion and ridicule. Suck it up and take it like a man. Listen, these are people trying to make a living working in a goddam restaurant. They don’t care that you brought in some dusty old Bordeaux out of your amazing wine cellar. They already hate you, and now you want them to admire your taste in wine? Sure. I know, offer them a taste, that should make them suddenly smitten with your charm! Only offering them a taste of your ’59 Margaux is like offering caviar to a duck. And then expecting that nothing will be on the bill. Get over yourself.

Oh, everyone is going to tell you it’s fine to bring your own wine, that the restaurant is just happy to have your business. And, like whatever that is in your Tupperware, you’ll probably swallow it. I don’t know what you do for a living, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a customer trying to save money on your services isn’t exactly your favorite. I mean, you don’t take your own oil to Jiffy Lube, do you? Knowing you, you probably do. You probably also try to buy Girl Scout cookies with Bitcoin and ask for exact change. Dick. You’re sneaking hot dogs into baseball games and using their mustard and relish for free, without even calling ahead to ask if they have a weenie fee. You’re insufferable, you know that?

It’s fine. I don’t care. Take your own wine the next time you go out to dinner. Just don’t act like you’re doing the restaurant a favor. That’s obnoxious. And the least you can do is leave a generous tip, maybe some of that money you stole from the Girl Scout.

Worst Wine Marketing Slogans

Wine as natural as asphalt.

Your wine tasting experience isn’t complete until you visit wine country’s only vomitorium!

Our wines are as sustainable as an erection at a slaugherhouse.

Our wines are made in a natural and environmentally-conscious way as a promise to our customer that only the alcohol will kill you.

If it makes you feel any better, our ABV is completely fabricated.

Your tasting fee back if we check your ID.

If it weren’t for the herbicides, we’d be organic.

Voted “One of Ten New Wineries to Watch” by the Department of Health.

We’re marginally better than wines half our price.

Wine Spectator said of our Cabernet, “Now I know what my dog tastes when he licks his balls.”

Wine for people who still giggle when they hear, “bungholes.”

We always note the date our bubbles were disgorged, just like Michael Jackson did.

It was a trip to Napa Valley in 2003 that convinced us to pursue our dream and buy a vineyard in Lodi.

All of our wines are fermented by native yeasts. An Arapaho sits in our Pinot Noir.

We’re not happy with our wine unless you’re not happy with our wine.

Our favorite red blend was recently awarded, “Most Likely to Be Seen at Traffic Accidents”

The grapes come from a vineyard right next to a famous Superfund site!

Ask yourself, if our wines weren’t natural would we be able to say they were? Of course we would!

EPHEMERA: My Wine Enthusiast Piece

There’s something interesting about writing satire. It’s a way to express a part of yourself that much of the time you suppress—the part that is cynical, that despises the human tendency to prevaricate, our tendency to give in to pride and self-righteousness. I try to make fun of anyone and everyone, and make people laugh along the way. When I’m successful, I am, curiously, both widely admired, and widely despised. I guess it’s in my nature to like that.

In February of 2016, I attended the Napa Valley Wine Writers’ Symposium. For the farewell dinner, which has much in common with the last meal given to death row inmates, I was seated between Virginie Boone and Lana Bortolot. I’d never met either woman. Virginie is, of course, one of the lead reviewers for Wine Enthusiast. She’s a very self-possessed and fascinating woman, with a very difficult job. Assigning numbers to wines. You not only have to know wines, you have to know numbers! So, there you go. I adored Virginie.

Lana Bortolot was attending the Symposium as a freelance writer. I fell in love with her that night. We went from nervous tablemates to sharing a lot of personal stories in about twenty minutes. I may have proposed to her. Several months later, she informed me that she had taken a job as Senior Editor for Wine Enthusiast. Lana is, in a word, brilliant. Wine Enthusiast is lucky to have her onboard. She will make everyone at the magazine better.

In August I won a Louis Roederer International Wine Writers’ Award for my column on Tim Atkin’s amazing wine site. If you’ve never heard of the Roederer Awards, they’re the wine equivalent of the MacArthur Genius Grants, if you ignore all three of those words. (Lana cut that joke from my Wine Enthusiast piece, for which I might have divorced her if I didn’t love her so much.)

Lana proposed to Wine Enthusiast that it would be interesting to hear from me about what it’s like for a guy who spends his life insulting everyone in the wine biz to win an award from those folks. Originally, Lana told me, she was going to have Virginie interview me. But then Virginie would get paid for the piece, not the HoseMaster. Thoughtfully, Lana commissioned me to write a brief piece for the back of the magazine. I noted in a previous post that I’d been published in the March 2017 issue of Wine Enthusiast, but they have only now published the piece online.

For those of you who didn’t read the piece in the magazine, here’s the link:

WINE ENTHUSIAST

Frankly, everyone talks about how the wine business needs more satire, but no one publishes any. The only one writing comedy is Matt Kramer, he just doesn’t know it yet. Tim Atkin MW has published my crap for more than four years now, without ever changing a raucous, tasteless, profane word. That has taken courage. I owe him an enormous debt. Obviously, I can’t be that outrageous or tasteless in Wine Enthusiast. But it’s important to be acknowledged. I don’t care about the fame or the money (there isn’t much), but I care about the often under-appreciated art of satire. Being granted space in a mainstream and important wine publication matters to me.

Thank you, Lana. I love you. Thank you Wine Enthusiast for the exposure. And thank you to everyone who reads HoseMaster of Wine™. I don’t do this for you, I do it for my personal demons, but I very much appreciate that you support me.

EPHEMERA: 1969 Chappellet Cabernet Sauvignon--"ITS ALIVE!!"

You never know when the next great wine will appear in your life. “Great” is one of those words that gets bandied about endlessly when it comes to wine, and has become nearly meaningless. I’ve been fortunate enough to have tasted more than my share of what I consider great wines. I’ve never counted how many. That’s a bit like guys who keep a list of women they’ve slept with. I remember them all, but I don’t lump them together as trophies. Not all three women! Great wines, to me, are wines that simply knock you off your feet, leave you virtually speechless, fill you with gratitude that you’ve lived long enough and well enough to put them in your mouth. They are only rarely encountered, and they are never forgotten. They’re true loves, not one-night stands. I recently met one.

I was invited to Chappellet’s 50th Anniversary tasting in February. I haven’t the vaguest idea why. Most of the other attendees were far more illustrious than I. Among the attendees were Esther Mobley, the supremely talented wine writer for the "San Francisco Chronicle," Karen MacNeil, Kevin Zraly, the last name in wine writing, Kelli White (speaking of supremely talented), Laurie Daniel, Elaine Chukan Brown, and me. I felt like John Waters at the Director’s Guild Awards. I don’t belong here, I tell people to eat shit. However, I’m a longtime fan of Chappellet, and always bought their wines, especially their late-lamented Old Vines Chenin Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon, for my wine list, so I was excited to be there. Yet I had no idea I was going to meet a true love.

There’s something magic about an old wine that is still vibrantly alive. Very few are. Most begin to show their faults as they get older, many just get weird, an awful lot are dead but don't seem to know it. We have families like that. And then there are the blessed, the ones who age obscenely gracefully, a Molly Chappellet (the loveliest matriarch of Napa Valley, especially since the recent passing of Mary Novak of Spottswoode), and the 1969 Chappellet Cabernet Sauvignon. The Chappellets were kind enough to offer us the ’69 at their 50th anniversary tasting, and when a wine can dazzle even the jaded palates of countless wine “experts,” and the ’69 was the talk of the room, it has to be extraordinary.

What’s magic about an older wine is that it takes us on a journey through our memories, through our lives. Nothing else we consume does that. OK, maybe mushrooms. I was a junior in high school in 1969 when Donn Chappellet and Philip Togni were harvesting this wine, and it must have been bottled when I was a freshman at Occidental College—the same year my wife Kathleen was born, 1971. Imagine that. I had no idea in 1969 I would end up a sommelier married to a woman who wasn't yet born. I’d never tasted a single wine when this wine was bottled. Not one. Nor had I met anyone not yet born. And if I had tasted this wine when it was released (I would have been underage, but, more importantly, under-qualified), I would no doubt have hated it. We both needed to evolve.

I won’t bother to attempt to describe it. Esther Mobley did that beautifully in her SF Chronicle column about loving older wines (she said it was maybe the best wine she’d ever tasted). My tasting notes begin, “IT’S ALIVE!!!” I was channeling Dr. Frankenstein at that moment, amazed at the electricity in the wine, and falling in love with it at the same time. Wines like that are ineffable. Like being asked what I love about my wife. It’s both impossible to express in a meaningful way, and too personal. I was an unhappy kid in 1969—lonely and confused, angry and reclusive. And yet somehow I managed to live a wonderful life filled with amazing loves, and end up in 2017 happy to be alive. The ’69 Chappellet was like a message in a bottle from that miserable kid living in that miserable time. A message of hope. A kind of congratulatory experience, a reassurance that sometimes, and maybe more often than we think, if we just hang around long enough, things can work out. Drinking it felt like, despite all odds, I’d had a great life, and, as a reward, ended up drinking that great old Cabernet among my peers. It was humbling. Great wine always humbles anyone with a heart.

The other nine Cabernet Sauvignons Chappellet served us were interesting and variable. Many were top-notch. I’ve never been to a vertical tasting where that wasn’t the case. How did the ’69 turn out so miraculously, so much more compelling than the rest? No one seemed to know. Everyone was guessing, everyone had a theory, but no one actually knew. A bunch of decisions were made, most of them irrevocable, many of them guesswork; the wine was paid attention to, nurtured, but could easily have been undone by any one of those decisions. We’ll never really know how it made it to 2017 so alive and remarkable. And the same could be said for all of us in that room that day, not just the ’69 Chappellet.

The truth is, we don’t have to know how it was made. No wine, no one’s life, can be replicated anyway. Some, inexplicably, just turn out to be miracles.

2016: Based On a True Story

I must be out of my mind to still be writing HoseMaster of Wine™. Another year has passed, and I still spend my drive time to work kicking around ideas for my next post. A White Supremacist Sommelier? Really? Who thinks about shit like that? Wine Critics in Hell? Well, yeah, we all think about that, but I’m the idiot who makes it a play. I thought it was faux Eugene O’Neill. Turns out it was more Shaquille. Alice in Naturaland? Just nuts, really. In the words of the great Elwood P. Dowd, “Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it.”

This is the final post for 2016, and I often use the last post of a vintage as an opportunity to reflect on the past year. Not all of you will want to wade through this sentimental garbage. I don’t blame you. You’re excused. No offense taken. If you want self-indulgence you can read any blog on Wine Spectator’s site, you don’t need me. The Wine Spectator columnists are like the CIA in Afghanistan—they drone endlessly until death actually seems like a relief. My turn.

I’ve had one of the strangest years, not just in my wine writing career, but of my life. I spoke at a wine writers’ symposium, I was asked to write for Wine Advocate and Wine Enthusiast, I met Hugh Johnson, I became friends with Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW, as well as Lana Bortolot, and, most astonishing of all, I won a Louis Roederer International Wine Writer Award. I also lost an old friend in the wine business, one of the nicest men any of us will ever meet, Ben Pearson. I pissed off folks at the Court of Master Sommeliers enough that one of them tried to influence my employer to fire me. In other words, I had a blast in 2016.

When I was young, in my 20’s, I was that lonely guy who sits alone in his room all day writing jokes. Somehow, I became a sommelier, so in my 40’s I was that guy who knows a lot about wine. Here I am in my 60’s and, well, once again I’m that lonely guy sitting alone in his room writing jokes. Where does the time go? The internet changed my life, though I’m not sure how it happened or if that’s a good thing. More and more I think maybe the internet is puberty. You’re glad it’s here, but it scares you, you haven't the slightest idea how it's affecting you, and everyone thinks you have a weird voice.

Among my first few posts of 2016 were both my first “Trump, Your New Emperor of Wine” piece and my parody of “Wine Folly.” At the time, I failed to see how they were linked. When I spoke at the Napa Valley Wine Writers’ Symposium in February, a lot of other writers thanked me for calling out Ms. Puckette and her brand of internet wine post-truth. Now she’s one of the writers featured at the 2017 Symposium. Simply put, that's depressing. The Trump pieces were wildly successful, and a hoot to write. Now his brand of internet truth, that is to say, lack of, has put him in the White House. We don’t seem to care about honesty and facts any more. In fact, they tend to hamper success (though Hillary is hardly an exemplar of honesty and facts, she is, at least, not a bald-faced, orange-haired liar). The internet, like puberty, has confused us. We have all these powerful new urges. We’re finding weird hair where it never was before. We’ll let any old fraud screw us. Oh, but one day we’ll look back and laugh!

The truth is we are all frauds. Only some of us know it and admit it. The internet is this imaginary place where we create new personalities, exaggerate our own worth, and hope like hell we don’t get caught. We have FaceBook profiles that read like the back labels of corporate wines—slick, but virtually devoid of truth. We pretend we have thousands of Friends when, in truth, we have but a few—you know, the ones who don’t ever read your feed on FaceBook because they actually love you. We flame people anonymously, bully them, and feel great pride in doing so, especially without revealing who we are, which would take courage. Frauds almost never have courage. We have our real life identities, our weaknesses and our flaws, and then we have our selves as portrayed on the internet. We are all a Hollywood biopic now. Who we are on the internet is simply “Based on a True Story.”

So many nice things happened to me as HoseMaster, my fictional persona, in 2016 that I was made to feel like a fraud constantly. Who am I to harangue Master Sommeliers, imagine a bar full of dead wine critics, satirize every wine writer who inadvertently stumbles across my crosshairs? And then win a bigshot award for it? In a weird way, I understood how Bob Dylan acted when he won the Nobel Prize. I also didn’t have the nerve to show up at the Roederer Awards ceremony. I knew I didn’t deserve it, and so I was sure it was a setup. Yes, here’s your award, Ron, now stand right there for a minute while we…drop buckets of pig blood over you! In my dreams, come January, I hope a little bit gets splashed on the robe of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Though when it comes to pig blood, 45 is more a universal donor.

I’ve never had more fun in the wine business than I’m having now. The internet allowed me to be reborn as the obnoxious and unrepentant HoseMaster of Wine™. Thanks to him, I’ve become a household name in the wine business, both adored and loathed. I receive far too much praise, and equal amounts of scorn. What’s weird is how I’m more comfortable with the scorn. The praise makes me feel like the fraud that I am. At industry events I am often recognized, though just as often the mention of HoseMaster is met with a blank stare that would do Rick Perry proud. Which is humbling, and much appreciated. It’s the same stare of non-recognition I see every morning in the bathroom mirror. So, it says, who the hell are you?

I’m going to miss 2016. It was a very rewarding year for the HoseMaster, and gratifying as well. I keep writing because I am forever curious about where my mind will take me once a week. I feel like 1WineDoody, or Jamie Goode, always on a junket to somewhere weird, and then making shit up about it. My agenda has always been to try not to be dull. To make it about the writing, to try to find some value in writing about wine, not write about wine in order to get things that are valuable for me. I almost never live up to my own expectations. I think that I either have a really great idea which I then completely ruin, or I have a stupid idea and run with it anyway. I keep hoping I’ll get it right one of these tries.

I’m very curious about what 2017 will bring for the world. Satirists are, contrary to what you may think, optimists by nature. We point out human foibles and follies, insult liars and fools, lampoon the powerful, because we think that will change them, or change peoples reactions to them. Pretty stupid and hopeless when you think about it. So, yeah, that’s optimism right there. The internet, like TV and advertising before it, is about selling you death, fear and sex. And the pills that will help you with them. I spend very little time here compared to most people. I’m not fearful of Trump, or of Brexit, or of ISIS. I’m more fearful that I won’t live long enough to have the last laugh.

So long, 2016. Like my old friend Ben Pearson, I suspect your like will never come around again.

Flying the Friendly Skies

Here’s what I’ve been feeling the past few weeks.

We were on this large jet flying to somewhere beautiful, some sort of Paradise, we thought, when it was hijacked and now it’s headed toward a skyscraper. We had no idea there were even hijackers aboard, though we should have known, they’d been making a lot of noise back here in economy class. We certainly didn’t think they could overpower us, take over the plane and fly it into a building. If I’d known the pilot had orange hair, I’d have stayed at the airport. My mother always told me, “Never get on a plane with a pilot with orange hair. Nothing good can come of it.” What’s odd is that the hijackers seem exuberant about going down with us in a burst of inescapable flames. It will take years to clean up the wreckage.


The rest of this week's sermon appears on Wine Journal over at the Wine Advocate site. The rest of the piece wanders about quite a bit, going from Asimov to Kermit the Lynch, and lands on a heartfelt wish that all of you have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

You can't leave comments there, but I'd love to hear your feedback here. Everywhere I go, friends, people remark that the best part of HoseMaster of Wine™ is the Comments Section. Oh, they're just flattering me, but it's true. Thank you, Common Taters, one and all.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

WINE ADVOCATE'S WINE JOURNAL

EPHEMERA: The Malcolm Gladwell Paradox

A number of people sent me a link to a podcast by Malcolm Gladwell called, “The Satire Paradox.” Richard Hemming MW also mentions the same podcast in a piece he wrote for Jancis Robinson MW, a piece where I also receive a brief mention. So, of course, I listened to Gladwell’s podcast.

There isn’t a duller subject to write about than satire. E.B. White famously, and accurately, said, “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” Gladwell’s podcast is forty minutes long but seemed to last several generations of drosophila. Only the examples of satire broke the dullness. I can hear you saying what goes around comes around. Yeah, I get that.

Gladwell’s point, and the point of the experts he quotes, the “paradox” of satire in the title, is that satire is essentially toothless, that it speaks truth to power, but doesn’t actually influence anyone, change minds. So, exactly like podcasts. I happen to agree with all of that. Gladwell also says that we live in a Golden Age of Satire. Are you as amazed as I am at how many Golden Ages we’re currently living in? It’s the Golden Age of Wine Writing, too, I hear. And the Golden Age of Wine as well. Every time I hear the phrase “Golden Age,” I automatically assume the writer knows nothing about the subject. I live in the Golden Age of Skepticism.

Listening to Gladwell’s podcast (and I know nothing about Gladwell, have never read any of his books or listened to any of his podcasts before this), I began to realize that Gladwell knows absolutely nothing about satire, except what he’s read about it. Yet I agree with his conclusions. Satire is toothless, and does not change minds. But Gladwell misses the point.

I’ve been writing HoseMaster of Wine™ for five years, in this incarnation, and another three before that. I write satire. Or, as W. Blake Gray once said when writing about my disagreement with Riedel (and this is my favorite quote about me that I’ve ever read), “Washam, who claims to be a satirist…” That always makes me laugh. Anyhow, in all the years I’ve been writing wine satire, it was never my intention to influence anyone, to change anyone’s mind about the wine business or a wine critic. I don’t care about that. And I don’t think anyone who writes satire actually believes he can alter the course of human events. We do address the coarse of human events, but that’s slightly different.

Satire is often, and predictably, said to be a way of speaking truth to power. Perhaps. I’m slightly uncomfortable with that definition. Satire is more often a way of speaking truth to the ignorant. Perhaps that’s the same thing; I might concede that. But “truth” is a slippery concept in satire. Every reader brings their own truth to a piece. And they find funny in the piece only where they agree with it, almost never where they don’t. No one reads satire to discover truth, they read satire to laugh, and to laugh at other people they think are stupider, or more arrogant, or more powerful, or more important than they are.

Power, unfortunately, is unable to hear truth very well. So only an idiot would spend his life trying to speak truth to power. That’s like debating Donald Trump. A yuge waste of time. Sometimes the glass is half-empty, and sometimes the glass is half-empty. Satire depends upon viewing the world from a skewed perspective. It tries to show truth by glancing at hypocrisy and hubris and evil out of the corner of the eye, or by exaggerating its victim’s weaknesses and/or foibles to make them laughable. The aim isn’t to change a reader’s mind, but to make him laugh at the absurdity of the human condition. There’s no paradox in that.

This is not to say that satire isn’t a powerful weapon. It can be. Except that it’s a weapon rendered harmless when the object of the attack plays along. Smart and powerful people play along. It’s safe to say I’ve insulted just about everyone in reach in the wine business, lampooned them mercilessly, but, while fun, it doesn’t succeed unless the “victim,” reacts in a negative way. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Georg Riedel. Smart people understand satire’s ultimate impotence. Others do not, and feel the need to respond. Which, of course, plays into the satirist’s very weak hand. If Riedel doesn’t threaten to sue me (and Tim Atkin MW), I have far fewer readers, far less influence (which ain’t much anyway), and I probably never get invited to speak at the Napa Valley Professional Wine Writers Symposium, never meet Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW, never get asked to write for the Wine Advocate’s new website, and more than likely never win a Roederer Wine Writing Award. So maybe it was Riedel’s reaction to the HoseMaster of Wine™ that changed minds and influenced people, in a way satire cannot. And doesn’t intend to.

Gladwell’s podcast is harmless. But it’s certainly not insightful (which, I hear, is how people think of Gladwell, that he’s a perceptive thinker). The premise is false, and so the conclusions become rather useless. Satire is written not to influence people or create change, but to make people laugh, occasionally make them think, and often make them uncomfortable. It may speak truth to power, but that’s simply a starting point, a way in to a place where it can make people laugh at the world, at the constant foolishness of men, at the hypocrisy and lies that take up too much of our time and consciousness. As a weapon of mass destruction, it’s as toothless as a guppy. Satirists don’t want power, Malcolm, satirists despise power. We reap the benefits of powerlessness. Laughter and courage.

There’s great joy in writing satire and making people laugh, making them squirm. Satire intends to be raucous, often tasteless, it intends to be outrageous and fearless. You cannot pull punches and be good at it. It requires a mean-spiritedness that is tempered with truth and laughter. It’s an outlet for the outlier, a way of trying to make sense of a world gone irredeemably mad. That’s enough of a burden to hang on satire. To see its goal as changing the world, influencing people, is simply, well, laughable.

EPHEMERA: The Spirituality of K-Y Jelly

I find myself tuning out the news lately, and reaching for a book. A great book, not brain candy, a work of art. The news is filled with death and stupidity these past few weeks, a gory litany of massacres, assassinations and murders, fueled by our old friends hatred and ignorance. I have been having hard times of my own. Nothing unmanageable or tragic. More the unbearable triteness of being. I don’t have the heart to tune in to every day’s latest expression of hatred, hear how yet another man decides the best way to obliterate the anger and fear in his head is to kill as many people as he can before he himself is blessedly relieved of duty here on Earth. I was an emotional wreck. I felt completely abandoned and worthless. Which is terrible for every day life, but wonderful for writing satire.

You’d think that the uglier the world gets, and it’s particularly ugly now, it might be harder to write jokes. I write about wine and the wine business. Almost nothing could be less important. Maybe awards shows. Or Pokemon. Or cat videos. You know, shit that pinheads like. In the big picture, the picture that includes the ugliness of racism, homophobia, climate change, gun violence, a big dishonest narcissistic prick running for President, religious fanaticism, and Bill Cosby, wine is the playground, it’s never the classroom. It just doesn’t matter. Not the lies of Riedel, not whether wine is natural or not, not whether ratings have meaning (they do not),  and not how many fucking initials are after your sad, forgettable name. On HoseMaster of Wine™, I’m just kicking down sand castles in the playground sandbox. None of it matters. Which is why, of course, this blog doesn’t matter either.

In my desperate hours, as I mentioned, I reach for art (if you are a literary sort, and you haven’t read Elena Ferrante’s four novels in her Neapolitan Quartet, you must—her brilliant works of literature changed me forever). I don’t instinctively reach for a glass of wine. I’m not someone who has ever believed that winemaking is art. It’s not art any more than fixing automobiles is art. Though, to their credit, I’m not sure I have ever heard a winemaker, not a talented winemaker anyway, claim that winemaking is art. And if one did in my hearing, I’d probably laugh like the maniacal madman I am. In my mind, art needs at the very least to be transformative to the person experiencing it. Inebriation doesn’t qualify. Winemaking is certainly harder than it looks. Anyone who has judged wines as often as I have can tell you that. I hear people parroting all the time the opinion that wines are better than ever. Not in my experience. I’d say that wines are far more mediocre than ever. Maybe I mean there are more mediocre wines than ever. I guess I mean both. There are countless sites that write about “Great Wines Under $20.” Let’s be clear, there are no great wines under $20. None. Must we devalue the word “great” at the same time we devalue “art?”

That winemaking is an art is most often expressed in marketing material. If there is a group of humans less qualified than wine marketing people to be the judge of what’s art, I’m not sure what group that would be. Bodybuilders? Members of NAMBLA? The wine marketing business has always been about selling wine as romance (so, like NAMBLA). I guess you can’t sell it as a really good way to get drunk, though that’s why all of us drink wine. Romance sells. Not as well as sex and fear and death, but pretty well; and winery owners are sensitive souls, just ask them. Well, maybe not the Resnicks, but you take my point. And nothing is more romantic than an artist. So winemaking is an art. Trust me. If you believe Madison Avenue, so is making cars and producing little blue pills that get your dick hard.

If winemaking isn’t art, then is wine art? No, I don’t think it is. Nor do I think it matters. I won’t enjoy Cheval Blanc any less because I don’t think it’s art. Actually, I think I could effectively argue that what’s really art are the fake bottles of wine that have flooded the marketplace in recent years. Maybe Rudy Kurniawan is the wine world’s greatest artist. Vincent van GoghDirectly to Jail, Do Not Collect $200. Wine itself? It’s an alcoholic beverage made from grapes. The greatest beverage known to mankind, with the exception of water, but a beverage still, no more and no less. Oh, we make a fuss about it, but that’s what drunks do. I’m even of the opinion that the overwhelming acceptance of the 100 Point Scale proves that winemaking isn’t an art, and that wine isn’t art either. Art isn’t measurable. That’s stupid on the face of it. If we accept that the 100 Point Scale is meaningful, we must also accept that winemaking isn’t art. It’s as stupid as me giving Ferrante’s great Neapolitan novels numeric scores because great literature is, most certainly, art. Only a pretentious asshole would assign a number to a great work of literature. Volunteers?

I like wine to be wine. I want to love it for what it is, not for some mystical or spiritual reason, not because knowledge of it grants me social status in the world, not because wine is art. I want to love wine the same way I love my wife and my closest friends, unconditionally. I don’t need wine to be more than what it is—a wondrous product of grapes that acts as a social lubricant and brings joy to my life. K-Y Jelly without the guilt. I don’t know why so many wine writers want to hoist wine onto a pedestal, except that it gives the writers more importance. Isn’t it strange that there are so many wine writers who once wrote about sports, or restaurants, or some other less prestigious subject, but yet there aren’t any wine writers who quit to start writing about college hoops, or politics, or vegan Nobel Prize winners. It’s cool to be a wine writer because wine writers venerate wine. Sports writers are Oscar Madison. Food writers are Oscar Mayer. Wine writers are Filet Oscar. I have no idea what that means.

Having an extensive knowledge of wine isn’t something to be particularly proud of. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, but it hardly makes you special. Except among other wine dweebs, it’s a surefire yawn-inducer. Being educated in the history of music would seem more worthwhile. Have the ability to rate Beethoven’s Fifth a 97 and not look like a jackass. Knowing how to nurse babies back to health—that seems undervalued. Writing a blog and pretending you’re a wine authority? You’re just Donald Trump with a drinking problem, truly Wine Folly.

I’m not sure what I’m trying to get at. Maybe it’s that the older I get, the more wine experience I’ve accumulated, the less I enjoy wine writing, and the less I see wine through rosé-colored glasses. I just want to drink my wine. Wine writing these days (especially mine) reminds me of going to see a film I’m really looking forward to seeing, and there are five other people there talking all the way through it, telling me what to look for, telling me how I should be enjoying it. When I read wine writing these days, the words I think of the most often are, “Shut the Fuck Up.” I’m trying to enjoy my wine.

The world and I both had a miserable couple of weeks. So much loss. I reached for a great book to help me though it, and, because I’m the luckiest man on the planet, I found one that did. I also reached for wine, but not because it was going to soothe my tired old heart, not because it could speak to me and help me to understand the currently miserable human condition. I just needed a drink. I didn’t give a shit how many points those wines received. I didn’t care who the artist was who made them. I cared about the amazing people with whom I shared the wines. It’s not the K-Y Jelly, after all, it’s who you lube up with.

Now, I’ll Shut the Fuck Up.

EPHEMERA: Muhammad Ali and Occupational Hazards

You can’t be in the wine business and not know an astonishing amount of people with drinking problems. And yet I cannot remember ever reading about that particular subject anywhere. Occupational hazard? Just part of the job? Is that why we don’t talk about it?

I’ve never been a boxing fan. My ignorance on the subject is boundless. And yet I admired Muhammad Ali. I can’t say that about any other boxer that ever lived. Remembering him this past week made me realize the impact he had on the world, and on me. He was not just The Greatest, he was The Greatest Show on Earth. The only thing faster than his hands was his wit. He was the most famous and admired black man on Earth in his time, which made him, also, the most reviled by the racists among us. When he was on television or in the boxing ring, you could not take your eyes off him. Maybe the most beautiful man of the 20th Century. I’ve been fortunate enough in life to have met many people I admire, many famous people from all aspects of life. Truly, I wish I could say that I had had the honor of meeting Ali. If there was ever a man who embodied dignity, it was Ali. I would have liked to have seen that twinkle in his charismatic eyes in person.

It was the occupational hazard of boxing, the relentless blows to the head from unthinkably powerful men, that ultimately killed him. That was the thought that crossed my mind, and led to thinking about the occupational hazard of the wine business. Alcoholism. If not alcoholism, intoxication. We all know a lot of people in the business who are alcoholics, or who regularly overindulge. We never seem to talk about them.

Growing up, I was very close to my grandmother, who lived with us. She had been widowed in the midst of the Depression, a mother of two and pregnant with a third. She was the only grandparent I ever knew—the other three were dead long before I was born. It wasn’t until long after my Grandmother died that I learned that she had briefly remarried. My mother told me about it one day, almost casually. In an effort to survive in that era with three children, Grandma had married a man who would support her and her children. She couldn’t have had much choice. My mother claimed not to remember his name. An alcoholic, it turned out, who was violent. She left him rather quickly, my mother told me, and moved to a suburb of Chicago. My mother would have been about ten years old at the time, maybe a bit older, but the way she talked about those days, the way she was palpably frightened at the memories and kept a calculated distance from them, made me realize it was a terrible time for everyone involved.

I’ll, also, never forget a conversation I had with my mother when I became a sommelier. I’d had a passion for wine for many years before I landed the job I was to work for nineteen years. She knew I loved wine. Hell, it was all I talked about. But one day, not long after I had begun work as a sommelier, I was having a conversation with my mom, I have no idea what we were talking about, and she changed the subject rather abruptly.

“Are you an alcoholic?” she asked me.

I’m sure I replied with a tiresome quip. I always do. Her silence after that let me know she was serious. After divorcing my father, who I never saw take a drink of anything alcoholic even once (I never saw my mom drunk either, that I recall), my mom had dated a couple of drunks. I’d had to throw a couple of them out of our house when I was a young boy--the joy of being a teenage bouncer. One classy guy, in a fit of jealousy, had let the air out of all four of the tires on my mom’s car one night, given her a "full set of pancakes" in my Boston friend's vernacular, and I had to get up very early in the morning, drive the car slowly on all four flats to our neighbor’s Chevron station and re-inflate them so she could drive to work. She was re-enacting her mother’s choices, of course. My hunch is that when she was confronting me about my drinking, she was worried as much about the women I was dating as she was worried about me.

I think we can all agree that alcoholism is a disease. I don’t intend this to be a conversation about how we define someone with a drinking problem. I have my share of diseases, but alcoholism is not one of them. I assured my mom that I wasn’t an alcoholic. Which is what an alcoholic would say. I’m grateful that I’m not an alcoholic, as I’m grateful I don’t have any other crippling, life-changing diseases. Yet.

I look back at my career in wine, my long life of going to wine tastings, judging in wine competitions, tasting a ridiculous amount of wine, and realize it’s a wonder I’m still alive. How many times have I gotten behind the wheel of a car and risked my life, the lives of my friends, and the lives of strangers? Too many. Most of you reading this are probably nodding your heads realizing you’ve done the same. Occupational hazard, right?

My late fiancée drank herself to death. Intentionally. When she was 36. And without me knowing about it. When she was lying in a coma, her soul having fled, a few days before her body quit, a doctor asked me, “Does Josie drink a lot?” No, I told her. I had put a lock on the wine closet so she couldn’t get to the wine when I wasn’t home, which was often given I was working two jobs. She was suffering from terrible agoraphobia so she would not leave the apartment to go and buy alcohol. And there was nothing in the apartment to indicate she was drinking. So, no, I told the doctor, she only drank wine now and then with me, a glass with a meal, maybe. This very kind and compassionate doctor looked me straight in the eye and quietly told me, “She does drink a lot. It’s why she went into full arrest. When you go home, search your apartment carefully. Look behind the water heater. Look in every place you never look. You’ll find empty bottles.” She was right, of course. There were empty vodka bottles right where she said they would be. Before my eyes, Josie had killed herself with drink. Medicated herself out of existence with booze. Ethanol. What I was selling for a living. I wonder that I survived that very thought. If I even I deserved to.

Whether we admit it or not, the wine we all love is more about the alcohol in it than anything else. Babble about terroir all you want, assign meaningless numbers to every bottle you taste, write poetic descriptions of how it smells and tastes, dream of tasting rare and remarkable wines, but without alcohol none of that exists. There is no wine business. There are no sommeliers or wine writers. Who would give a crap about a Grand Cru Vineyard? We have big debates about how much alcohol should be in a balanced wine, but rarely address how much the alcohol means to us, how much we crave its effects. Somehow, it doesn’t come up in marketing materials.

We’re told endlessly to “Drink Responsibly.” We tell our friends as they leave the party, “Drive carefully.” We pour one more taste for people we know have had too much because it’s easier than cutting them off and facing their indignation. They can slur their words like Muhammad Ali before Larry Holmes almost killed him in the ring, and we give them one more taste. Occupational hazard. They knew it when they became a sommelier, when they decided to sell wine, or make wine, or write about wine, or open a wine bar. They’ll wise up before it’s too late, before that last punch that sends them into an entirely different life. And they’re adults, they get to make their own choices. Just don't worry about it.

I don’t want to be a scold. I’m not a scold. I’m a satirist, and a recovering sommelier. I love drinking wine more than anyone I know. And I’m not about to stop, not for 100 days, not for one. Not until I have to. And when that day comes, I’ll be fine. I’ll have hundreds of memories of all the great wines I’ve drunk, and all the great people I’ve met because of wine. I won’t miss drinking wine in the least. I know that about myself. And, amazingly, I will have survived our occupational hazard. I hope.

I don’t think for a minute Muhammad Ali had a death wish that kept him boxing long after he should have walked away. No one believes that. How many blows to the head would have been OK? Was there a right hand that Joe Frazier landed that was one too many, that guaranteed the Parkinson’s disease that consumed the rest of his life, stole his lightning fast hands and mind? Had he known it was coming, would he have retired? God, I hope so. How much better would the world have been if Muhammad Ali were capable of speaking to the world on behalf of justice and his race and his faith for the last thirty years?

I was recently at the wheel of a car when I shouldn’t have been. A smart and funny fool laughing at that right hand of Joe Frazier. Idiot. It could very easily have been the one too many, the final blow that changed my life forever. Or the life of someone else. It doesn’t matter how great you are, it doesn’t matter how special you are, when that punch lands, you’ll never see it coming, and there’s no going back. An occupational hazard killed The Greatest. What chance do you have?

EPHEMERA: The HoseMaster Answers Three Questions on Vinolent

I received an email a week or so ago from a Brit named Joss Fowler who writes a wine blog called Vinolent. Great word. For many years, Joss has been soliciting answers to Three Questions from noteworthy people in the wine business. A brief stroll through his Three Questions archives reveals a pretty impressive list of folks who have answered the three questions. For some bizarre reason, Joss wanted to screw that up by asking me to participate. I liked the premise, I liked the site, and I liked the company I was going to keep, so I answered Joss' Three Questions.

You can find the very brief post here:

Vinolent

Joss has some very kind words to say about my work in his introduction, for which I am very grateful. I've mentioned this before, but the Brits seem to be more enamored of the HoseMaster of Wine™ than the folks around here in wine country. Not sure why, though they have a long and honorable satiric tradition, from Chaucer to Swift to Monty Python.

Thanks, Joss, it was a pleasure.

EPHEMERA: "UnCorked"--the Heitz of Stupidity

I always hated winemaker dinners. They were more often catastrophes than not. And so were the dinners. Early in my sommelier career, Joe Heitz was the featured winemaker at one. It’s hard to write about the late Joe Heitz without using the word irascible. Late in the meal, as the guests were tasting the Heitz “Martha’s Vineyard” Cabernet and Joe was speaking about it, one of the restaurant’s best customers, a lovely woman whose husband probably spent twenty grand a year entertaining in the place, asked Joe, “Why does the Martha’s Vineyard always smell like eucalyptus?” Mr. Heitz took a short breath, seemed rather resigned, and then told her, “Shut the hell up! Eucalyptus smells like cat piss. My Martha’s Vineyard Cabernet smells like mint!” Joe always hated when people referred to his most famous wine as smelling like eucalyptus. Which, by the way, it doesn’t. Though it may have been more accurate to say eucalyptus smells like koala farts. Cat piss is way off.

I tell this story because it came to mind when I watched an episode of “Uncorked.” In that episode, one of the sommeliers participating in the Top Somm challenge was asked to describe the aroma of a “’68 Heitz Martha’s Vineyard” that he was supposedly opening and serving three Master Sommeliers. The sommelier guessed that it smelled of “spearmint.” The Master Sommeliers pushed him, belittled him, questioned him, until he finally said the magic word, “eucalyptus.” In a brief scene a moment later, after the sommelier had left the room, one Master Sommelier, Laura Maniec, says, “How could he not know that Martha’s Vineyard smells like eucalyptus?”

All I wanted was for the late Joe Heitz to appear and tell her, “Shut the hell up.”

“Uncorked” is the worst hour of television since Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s vaults. Both are utterly and embarrassingly empty. I’m sure most of you haven’t seen “Uncorked.” It’s on EsquireTV. Why is there an EsquireTV? No one has read Esquire since the Kennedy administration. You may as well have LOOKMagazineTV, for Christ’s sake. I didn’t even know I had EsquireTV as part of my cable package until I went looking for “Uncorked.” Fuck me, I did.

I know, I know, “Uncorked” is already yesterday’s blog post. Truthfully, I was avoiding the show. A reality show produced by The Hair and the guy behind SOMM? The whole concept made me cringe. But then curiosity got the better of me. I watched an episode. Then I watched one more (I think there are six). And I fast-forwarded through a couple of others. So remember to take everything I write with that in mind. I’m not a professional reviewer. I didn’t take notes. I didn’t watch every frame. I just couldn’t. It made me want to gouge my own eyes out.

“Uncorked” follows six miserable humans who aspire to become Master Sommeliers. It also features about six miserable humans who are Master Sommeliers. Oh, they’re a lively bunch. The show is edited in the way of all reality shows—that is, in such a way as to make a stereotype of each miserable human competing. The editing is designed to try and construct a narrative out of this mess, giving you someone to cheer for, someone to laugh at, someone to identify with; but the show seems to have been edited by someone suffering from narcolepsy. Scenes drag on and on, and then suddenly the editor wakes up again, remembers to cut, and we move on. The only thing worse is the music. I began to find the music hilarious. In one dull scene after another, the music would try to convince you something dramatic was going on. Yes, trying to guess which of the three Chablis is the Grand Cru is harrowing, and needs three or four cuts to different faces, and an intense musical score to build that suspense. This is high drama, wine’s Sophie’s Choice. Why, it had me on the edge of my coma.

It’s no crime to produce a landmark in dull television viewing. I can’t say that I found “Uncorked” offensive in any way. Well, except for how often a Master Sommelier would say something like, “She did that just perfect.” Perfect? Sigh. There’s something about watching an hour of inarticulate people interacting that grates. I never heard a single person say anything insightful, wistful, original, or, God forbid, funny. Wine terminology they can handle—speaking as interesting, intelligent people, not so much. Well, maybe that was the damned narcoleptic editor.

I don’t want to belabor the subject. “Uncorked” is simply as bad as television gets. I was dozing off when Fred Dame appeared, and in my stupor I thought I was watching an episode of “Law and Order” with the late Fred Thompson. click here Geoff Kruth, for whom this is a vanity project, has the charisma of most game show hosts—he’s essentially Alex Trebek, only not quite as witty. I kept expecting him to ask the sommeliers to put their answers in the form of a question. “What is eucalyptus?” He seems constantly aware that he’s being filmed, always as carefully casual as his hair. It’s a show filled with unlikable people, now forever associated with wine. I was a bit mortified. For me, it was like stepping back and watching your family and realizing how essentially dull and witless and self-absorbed they all are.

But, most of all, the entire series is an insult to wine. Sommeliers, too, but they richly deserve it. In “Uncorked,” wine is nearly joyless. It’s like a cadaver that medical students are dissecting endlessly in order to become doctors. Like a cadaver, the wine is DOA. During the blind tasting segment, where each sommelier has twenty-five minutes to identify six wines blind, Kruth, as the game show host The Hair, explains that a candidate is awarded points for everything correct he says about a wine, its color and aroma and body and blah blah blah, and that if he correctly describes each wine in perfect detail, it can only lead him to one correct conclusion about which specific wine he is tasting. Only a loser unworthy of an MS after his name could fail to make it add up. I wanted to throw my cat at the television, but I don’t own a cat. There it is, wine pared down to its essence, wine made as simple as a box score, all the hundreds of thousands of wines produced in a single vintage easy as ABC to categorize—just check the appropriate boxes on the wine description chart and, bingo, you've pinned all the wines down like butterflies in a natural history museum. It's what death looks like.

If I were a wine novice, I think “Uncorked” would have made me hate wine, and sommeliers. Loving wine was never meant to be the point of the show, I know. The point, I suppose, was to illustrate how difficult it is to become a Master Sommelier, to become Geoff Kruth. But that never for a moment seems like an accomplishment because there’s so little palpable passion for wine shown by anyone on screen. Certainly not any more than medical students show their cadaver. “Uncorked” shows sommeliers as necrophiliacs, the wine just lying there as they fuck with it. It’s not just unsettling to watch, it’s creepy.

“Uncorked,” what I watched of it, left a bad taste in my mouth. I’d call it eucalyptus. The show was the Heitz of stupidity.