A Visit to the Napa Valley Old Wine Critics Home

“You want to know what really drives me nuts?” Sam Euthanasia, World’s Oldest Wine Critic, tells me, “The whole place smells like pee. It’s like spending the day judging goddam supermarket New Zealand sauvignon blanc. And if I wanted to smell Band-Aid, I’d buy wines Neal Martin recommended. I’m old, but I can still smell, for Christ’s sake. I can’t remember what it is I’m smelling, but I can smell it. I’m turning into Laube.”


A peek into the future, and a visit to the Napa Valley Old Wine Critics Home. My old friend Sam Euthanasia gives me some insight into what it's like at the rest home for iconic wine critics. As ever, use the link to read the rest of the piece over at Tim Atkin's site. And, as ever, please feel free to leave a response, a comment, a fond wish that I'd finally really retire. Every little bit helps. Or, of course, your comments are welcome here. Perhaps one day you'll be eligible for the Sonoma County Old Common Taters Home.

TIM ATKIN MW

Sam Euthanasia, World's Oldest Wine Critic, on the Napa Valley Auction

When I think of June, I think of weddings, Father’s Day, and the Napa Valley Wine Auction, none of which has any importance to me. I’m rarely invited to weddings, my father died in 1980, and if I want to see rich people pretend to be charitable I can watch Congress on CSPAN. This year’s auction raised $15.7 million for charity, a bargain compared to what the folks bidding should actually pay in income tax. I didn’t attend the auction (yes, I know, that’s a surprise), but I thought I would check in with Sam Euthanasia, the World’s Oldest Wine Critic, and ask him what he thought about the whole thing.

“I only went because Francis Ford Coppola was the honorary chair,” Sam told me. “I went up to  him and said, ‘Smell that? You smell that? Napa, son. I love the smell of Napa in the morning.’ That’s a quote from one of his movies. I think the actor who said it was Clos Duvall. I could be wrong. I’m old. But, anyway, I thought an ‘Apocalypse Now’ reference suited the occasion. War is hell, and so is the goddam Auction.”

Sam Euthanasia, a spry and incontinent 95, has been covering the Napa Valley Auction since its inception in 1981. “Back then, I think they raised a 100K. That’s chump change now. Jean-Charles Boisset spends that on sequined Depends. All I remember about that first auction is that it was hotter than tasting-room-only dessert wine, and stickier. I was sweating like a Treasury shareholder. Jesus. But it was fun. Mostly just normal people there. I think the highest bidder was a drifter who thought the paddle was for swatting the flies. It was pretty casual.”

“It’s perfect that Coppola was the honorary chair. Overstuffed chair, for sure,” Sam went on. “The Napa Auction is turning into the Oscars of the wine world, may as well honor Francis. It’s about wine about as much as the Oscars are about movies, which is to say, not hardly at all. The wine is basically the equivalent of the designer gowns and borrowed jewelry—just there to make the players seem like they have taste. If you’ve been a wine writer as long as I have, and I covered the wine by-the-glass choices at the Last Supper, Jesus White and Jesus Red, the Auction is the worst weekend of your year by far. It’s even more fake than en primeur week in Bordeaux. Just so much wine business baloney.”

Sam can be a bit cantankerous. I told him that at least all the money raised goes to charity. He stared at me for a minute, chewed on his ever-present cigar, and said sarcastically, “Yeah, the money goes to charity, and that’s why people attend. Like the reason there are beauty pageants is because of the scholarship money. Don’t be a putz. It’s another kind of beauty pageant. People competing to look more beautiful and giving than others. They sell overpriced wines to other rich people, auction off trips and dinners like a Silicon Valley ‘Price is Right,’ give the money to charity, and take a big tax write-off. They’re just tossing crumbs to the poor unfortunates the guy they voted for wants to send back where they came from. All the folks who tend their vineyards and pick their grapes. It’s modern day Marie Antoinette saying, ‘Let ‘em eat Cakebread.’”

“Listen,” Sam continued, “I’m all for charity. The money from the Auction has probably done a lot of good. How can you be against that? But how sanctimonious can it get? Isn’t there a way to do it with some dignity? Don’t these clowns see how the rest of the world perceives their annual wine debauchery? The Auction intends to help Napa Valley’s image. It intends to show how compassionate the wineries are, how much they want to do good in the world, how they want to help those less fortunate than themselves. By opening hundreds of large bottles worth unimaginable sums, getting lavishly shitfaced, eating meals that would shame the Roman emperors, and dancing to recording stars? By auctioning off trips around the world on private jets? Hey, why don’t you use those jets to bring in more people to pick Cabernet? Easier to get through security, and you’re going to need them. Is auctioning off priceless overpriced wine in huge bottles accompanied by dream vacations with other wealthy people the image that sells Napa Valley as a caring and compassionate community? It’s a public relations nightmare, only they don’t see it. They only see how wonderful they are, how caring, how generous. I had no idea Narcissus could see his reflection in a lake of Chardonnay.”

“You want respect for your charity, Napa, tone it down,” Sam continues. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t brought up the subject. Sam looks like he’s going to have a heart attack. He’s chomping at his cigar like it’s an aspen and he’s one pissed-off beaver. “Have some dignity. Make it about wine, not consumer excess. Make it about heart, not about wallets. Then regular people might see it as beautiful and heartfelt. Yeah, you’re the big boys in the wine auction world, your wines cost the most, your Auction makes the most money for charity, take your bows. Just stop waving your dicks around like size matters, and waiting for the admiration to begin.”

Sam Euthanasia probably won’t get invited to the Auction next year. I don’t think he cares.

“Frankly,” Sam tells me, clearly exhausted from his tirade, “I’m too old for all this. I mean, there I am in Napa Valley, once this beautiful and humble agricultural Eden, looking at a huge hot air balloon in the shape of Marvin Shanken. I was so depressed. How much more self-indulgent and self-congratulatory can a charity auction get? Really, it was horrifying to me.

“And then a ray of hope! Turns out, it wasn’t a hot air balloon.”

Sam Euthanasia, World's Oldest Wine Critic, on 2016 Bordeaux

While other critics try to be the first to publish scores of a new Bordeaux vintage, Sam Euthanasia, who, at 95, is the World’s Oldest Wine Critic, as well as the most influential, takes his time. “Listen,” he tells me, “I’m in no hurry. I sit on my scores like I sit on my bedpan. Sometimes it takes a while for my scores, but the result? Hell, it’s Bordeaux, it’s en primeur, it’s a carnival sideshow—no matter how hard you push to get the scores out of your ass, it ends up just the same old shit.”

I have become rather fond of Sam Euthanasia, the World's Oldest Wine Critic. First of all, there's a lot of competition for that title among regular wine reviewers of the most famous wine publications. I couldn't exactly make him 75--I think a bunch of them are older than that. Or seem like it. I thought it would be fun to check in with him about the highly-touted 2016 Bordeaux vintage. He has a lot to say about the en primeur tasting, but you'll have to head over to Tim Atkin's prestigious site to read what Sam has to say. Feel free to engage Sam with your comments over there, or return here and write your comments really loudly so that Sam can hear them.

TIM ATKIN MW

Sam Euthanasia--The World's Oldest Wine Critic

“I remember when the ’45 Bordeaux were first on the market,” 95-year-old wine critic Sam Euthanasia tells me, “the tannins were harder than Rubik’s Cube for the color blind. I said then, and I’ll say it now, those wines will never be drinkable. I had the ’45 Mouton just the other day. Tasted like goddam Polident. It stained my teeth, which weren’t even in my mouth at the time.”

If your business is the business of wine, then you know Sam Euthanasia. He’s been the most powerful wine critic in America, and the world, since 1952, and shows no signs of slowing down. A favorable score from Euthanasia means certain success for any new winery, while a scathing review can doom even the most famous. “I fart and they add more sulphur,” he has famously said. During my interview, he demonstrated. “What does that remind you of?” he asked, “Yellow Tail Shiraz?” Indeed.

Though there have been questions about Euthanasia’s faculties, he says any fears are unfounded. “95 is the new 70—just like wine ratings!” In a recent issue of his influential publication “The Wine Euthanist,” Euthanasia rated nearly 75 Napa Valley Cabernets 100 points. “What can I tell you,” Sam said to me, “it’s the greatest vintage of my life. You can’t be scared to give 100 points to a wine. I don’t care what anyone says, wine critics today are pussies. Afraid to give 100 point scores, like that devalues ratings. Imbeciles. When I was a young wine critic, wines pretty much sucked. They had more faults than the Trump Cabinet only they didn’t make you want to hurl. Or move to a real democracy, like Myanmar. Now I taste a vintage like 2013 in Napa Valley, and, hell, the wines all taste great. They all taste the same, but they all taste great. What’s a hundred points, anyway? It doesn’t mean a wine is perfect. I don’t know where people get that idea. Honestly, 100 points just means I don’t give a fuck what you think.”

The internet has revolutionized the business of selling wine. Where once it was only Sam Euthanasia’s opinions that mattered, now there are endless resources and ratings for consumers to consider. And there are a lot of surveys that conclude that Millennials no longer look to the elderly for their wine buying advice, they look to their peers. “Hell,” Euthanasia rants, “I don’t care about internet surveys. There are surveys on the internet that prove monkeys masturbate more than winemakers, and nobody believes that. If Millennials want to ignore the 65 years of experience that I bring to the spit bucket, that’s just fine and dandy. I don’t need them. I’ve got 50,000 subscribers to my website! Though, I have to admit, their average age is the Jurassic. Only dinosaurs care what I think. But that’s the wine business. We like our wines young, and our critics old. I think of myself as an aged Claret. More often than not, I suck. But there are no refunds.”

Euthanasia’s enduring power and influence baffle his fellow wine critics. “I wish he’d die already,” James Laube told me. I think he was talking about Euthanasia, but, hell, now that I think about it, maybe not. His head was down on the bar and I may have misunderstood. Robert Parker told me, “Sam is a powerhouse. Amazing. And to think he’s doing all that on his fifth set of kidneys, well, I stand in awe. His doctor told me his liver is the size of an iguana. When he dies, his tongue is going to the Smithsonian, right next to Monica Lewinski’s and Nixon’s forked one.” Hugh Johnson simply told me, “Sam’s taste buds died in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.”

Sam doesn’t think much of today’s wine critics. “Most of them, they don’t even taste blind. They sort of imply they do, but they don’t. I taste blind. I can’t see a fucking thing. And I taste deaf, too. I can’t even tell if it’s a cork or a screwcap. And I’ve been tasting out of the same wine glass for forty years! So you know it’s not Riedel. That crap is more brittle than my hips. Oh, that reminds me, I need to wash my glass this month.”

“There are no real wine critics today,” asserts Euthanasia. “They’re all phonies. They have agendas. They don’t rate wines for the common person. They try to taste everything, they try to rate every wine available, but spend more time on the wines from their advertisers. It’s all a game to them. Slick lifestyle crap. Wine as a fashion accessory. ‘Look, a bottle of Harlan Estate makes your balls look bigger.’ The only balls I care about anymore are the tennis balls on the tip of my walker.”

If you really want to get Euthanasia wound up, all you have to do is ask him about whether or not he is losing his senses of smell and taste. Most experts agree that by the age of 70, smell and taste have significantly degraded. What must they be like at 95? Wouldn’t the biggest, sweetest, most intense wines get the highest scores? Just like the volume on Euthanasia’s television is perpetually set at “Heavy Metal?”

“Why are you asking me?” he rants. “All the other damned bigshot critics are nearly as old as I am. Parker, Laube, Steiman, Jancis, Olken—they’re old enough to be my kids. Nobody asks them about how degraded their olfactory bulbs are. Trust me, their warranties ran out years ago. They’re NOT running on fumes. And so you know, I had a new olfactory bulb implanted. It’s state of the art. It’s an LED olfactory bulb. Uses a lot less energy.

“And, besides, I don’t need to be able to smell and taste that well to accurately review a wine. In fact, it’s a huge advantage to have a poor sense of smell and taste when you’re judging wine. It really helps when you review natural wines. Oh my God, does it help. People think it’s hard to review wines. It’s not hard to review wines! Every jackass with a smartphone is reviewing wines now. ‘Wow, look at me, I have 3000 reviews on CellarTracker!’ That doesn’t make you a wine critic. That makes you a pretentious prick. Which is the first step to being a wine critic, but only the first step.

“Everybody thinks I should retire just because I’m old and think my house doesn’t smell like cats. I only have nine, how much can they smell? A great wine critic doesn’t need his full set of senses. Three out of five is plenty. It’s experience that matters, not performance. Which is what old guys always say. I’ve gone beyond judging wines for subtlety and nuance. Honestly, I judge them now for revenge.”