Pointless Commentary

I'm thinking about only writing about wines from now on. You know, endless reviews of wines I taste with really obscure and annoying descriptions accompanied by a meaningless number. (There was a time in my life when I was involved with mathematics, I nearly graduated with a degree in mathematics, and that's why I'm so offended by numerical scores. A number has meaning to me and is supposed to be arrived at through a rigid formula that gives it credence. Sticking a wine in your nose and mouth and declaring "89!" represents nothing but self-importance.) No more satire, no more lame jokes, no more outrageous opinions. It would sure make sitting down and writing this crap a lot easier. I could write a review in the Gary V. style.

"The Kosta Browne Pinot Noir was amazing! Wow, man, you put your nose in the glass and it's like, hey, you know when you forget to clean your oven for a couple of years and then you have to scrape the charred crap out of there and it smells like roadkill on a Texas blacktop, like an armadillo had an abortion on the road and a semi ran over it and then it was hot for two weeks? Kinda smelled like that but in a good way. And maybe a little bit like the seat cushion after Jancis Robinson left, kinda had a hint of that. Gotta be a 92."

This, of course, is the "future of wine writing." Sort of like Saturn was the future of cars.

It's so damned easy to just review wines and pretend everyone cares about your opinion. I love the Vinography approach. Taste 120 wines and list them in number categories. This is about as helpful as putting phone numbers in numerical order in the phone book. And on a ten-point scale, which actually translates to a four-point scale since wines never get below six. So instead of mining the mysteries of how an 88 point wine differs from an 89 point wine, we behold the marvel of being able to distinguish a 7 point wine from an 8 point wine. Apparently, the 8 point wine went for the 2 point conversion. I wish I'd thought of this system when I was a sommelier. I could have broken down the wine list this simple and effective and informative way.

Pacific Dining Car Wine List
Page 1 "Wine Between 7.5 and 8.0 Points"
Page 2 "Wine Between 8.0 and 9.0 Points"
Page 3 "Wine 9.0 and Above"
Page 4 "Wines I Actually Care About"

I love that wine bloggers express their opinions about wines. I don't read them. Nobody reads them. Only wineries with Google Alert read them, and then just for the sheer comedy. I recently read one that said, speaking of some Tandem Pinot Noirs "...tried about a hundred wines, I don't have notes, though I can remember how wonderful they were..." I'm not making that up, friends. (It's from a blog called "Eat It, Atlanta." Don't go there, whatever you do. The blog, or Atlanta.) Makes you want to run out and stock up on Tandem, doesn't it? Probably tastes really good after thirty or forty wines. And, really, notes are highly overrated. That's for, like, journalists and stuff. Real bloggers don't take notes. To begin with, taking notes involves paying attention as well as literacy! Who can be bothered with both?

So maybe I'll just stick to my usual stuff. Writing about wine, the wine biz, bloggers and anything else that annoys me. There is always something to write about in the world of wine and news about wine. For example, I noticed this interesting little news bulletin:

AP--The group Wine Coopers of America announced today that it is officially changing the name of the plug used to seal a filled barrel of wine from the "bung" to the "Beck," after FOX News analyst Glenn Beck. "Hell, no one can tell the difference between Glenn Beck and a bunghole, so we thought we'd just make it official."

Great news, fair and balanced, indeed.

Statue of Glenn Beck at the Wine Cooper Hall of Fame in Butte, Montana

The HoseMaster Sells Panties, Half Off!

What if everything were sold the way fine wines are sold? I was thinking about this recently, struck by the absurdity with which fine wines are marketed. So I started imagining a world where panties were sold like fine wine is sold. OK, yeah, I'm still the HoseMaster after all. What would panty salespeople say to get panty buyers to buy their wares. Their underwares. Stuff like this...

"I love the nose on these panties, you can really smell the terroir."


"Parker gave this pair a 94 and said he couldn't wait to try them again in eight years."


"We entered these panties in a blind panty trial and they beat out all of the best European panties--and all of the judges were French! I just wonder if European in your panties."


"This gorgeous pair of silk panties got 3 Puffs from Connoisseurs' Guide to Panties. And it got a good score too."


"The original pair of these panties came over to California smuggled in a bra from a very famous Italian design house. They're 'Thongs From the Mammaries'."


"We brought in Rudy Giuliani to consult on these panties, and David Abreu did all of the irrigation work."


"You know, I could sell you a couple of pairs of the frilly black panties, but I'd really need you to buy a bunch of the Ellen DeGeneres castoffs."


"The guy down the street bought three pairs of these panties right before lunch."


"No, really, these panties are fine, they've just been open all day."


"These panties are from right next door to Helen Turley's panties...you can literally see her panties from there."


"When Clinton was President, these panties were always served at the White House. And I don't have to tell you how often they were used for Bush..."

Six Degrees of Devastation

Every so often you get the perfect customer in your wine shop. One who takes all of your sage advice, a bit of your parsley advice as well, who is deeply interested in learning about wine, who doesn't seem to care about price, and who is charming company for the entire time you work with him. These kinds of customers are rarer than original thought in a wine blog, but I have a vivid memory of one such customer from my days at Mission Wines.


My partner and I started Mission Wines in South Pasadena in 1993. Like most of the dreamers who start their own wine shops, we actually believed we could not only sell the finest wines but educate people to the joys of great wines at the same time. People would flock to us, drink from the trickle of knowledge we offered, and leave satisfied and refreshed, eager to return. We would be overrun with business, cases of the finest Rhones flying out the door like monkeys in the Land of Oz, tastings more heavily attended than Whitney Huston in rehab, the cash registers singing like the voices in Rush Limbaugh's head. It was a lovely pipe dream. The reality, not so much.


Wine shops are interesting places. You get to meet many of the world's best winemakers and taste an enormous amount of great wine. But you also put a lot of stuff in your mouth you would be hard-pressed to identify as wine. And it all got 89 points from somebody. Or a Gold Medal from the Leavenworth Wine Competition and Parole Hearing. But it's the customers who continually amaze and frustrate and frighten you. In the four years I was at Mission Wines I don't really believe I taught a single soul a single thing about wine. No more than the sales woman at Nordstrom ever taught me a thing about womens shoes, like what wine to drink from them (depends on who had been wearing them last). I wrote endless newsletters, offended nearly everyone who read them (you can only imagine), sold boatloads of wine, but never taught anyone anything. No one cared. I always forget, though the wine shop experience continued to remind me, that wine's primary function is inebriation. Classy inebriation. Go to Happy Hour at your local bar and you're a drunk, go to an afternoon wine tasting at your local wine shop and you're a connoisseur. Drunks are filled with self-loathing and kill people with their cars. Connoisseurs are intelligent and educated and kill people with boredom.


But every so often...


I was manning the store one day when a middle-aged guy walked in and asked me for some wine advice. Very pleasant man, articulate and open, engaged with life, charming and just then discovering a passion for the grape. It was a slow day, midweek, and he and I had a long talk about wine, about what makes a great wine a great wine, about tasting wine, about loving wine. When I realized that this guy was serious about wine, had the right approach to wine (the right approach being the one I decided was the right approach), I'm sure I lit up. My passion for wine surfaced in all its pathetic glory and I walked him around the store pointing out my favorite wines. Chateau Rayas, Rouge and Blanc. Chave, any time, any place, Chave. Spottswoode, then and now the classiest Napa Valley Cabernet. Mount Eden Chardonnay, what I imagine you drink when you get to the Heaven where they don't let the Mormons in. And on and on. And every wine I pointed to he bought a couple of bottles. I didn't care about the sale, I just wanted to turn this guy on to the good stuff, the stuff that works its magic on anyone who has even the tiniest bit of taste and transforms them.


I rang up his wine at the register and he gave me his credit card. Out of habit, I looked at his name. It was David Angell. "Hey," I said to him, "you're not the guy who writes for 'Cheers?'" "Well, yes," he said, "I am. No one ever recognizes my name though."


All my life I had studied comedy writing. I knew all the names of the best comedy writers like baseball fans know the lineup of every baseball team. I knew his name instantly, knew he'd written for "Cheers" and was then producing and writing for "Frasier." I knew specific episodes he'd written. David was very flattered and asked me about my stupid career as a comedy writer. I told him how frustrating it had been, how I'd walked away. Then he told me about his journey.


David and his wife had moved to LA from the MidWest so that he could pursue his comedy writing career. They struggled for years and years, barely able to make it by each month, borrowing money from everyone they knew, never giving up on his dream. Yet they had been about to give up, move back to their home town, they had run out of money, all their furniture was in a storage facility, all their dreams in pieces on the ground, when David got a phone call. He'd sold a script to "Cheers." At the very last minute. He eventually joined their staff of brilliant comedy writers, helped to create "Frasier," and now he was successful doing what he loved beyond his wildest dreams. And comedy writers have very wild dreams, believe me. It was, ironically, one of the classic Hollywood stories.


I saw David quite a few times after that first day. He'd come in and we'd talk wine and comedy. Like most comedy writers, he was quick-witted when he wanted to be, but didn't try to be funny in his free time. He damn near made me go back to comedy writing, but wine had captured my heart and I just couldn't face that kind of return to the scene of my crimes. But I was damned proud to know him, like I was on speaking terms with Koufax or Ali or Thurber, and I always watched for his name on the credits of his shows so I could ask him about particular episodes that I'd liked or disliked.


On September 11, 2001, David and his wife Lynn were on Flight 11, one of the planes that was flown into the World Trade Center. I saw his name on the list of passengers a few days after that horrifying day eight years ago. I learned that he and his wife had flown to New York to accept an award for his comedy writing, a Peabody I think, and they had had to catch an early flight home to Los Angeles so he could resume work. I hadn't seen David or spoken to him since I'd left Mission Wines in 1997, but news of his death brought the entire nightmare alive for me. He was my connection to the murders. Everyone I've ever met seems to have found a connection to that massacre, a human connection through a friend of a friend, or a cousin of a roommate, or a guy who used to date my neighbor, or someone I used to work with at Windows on the World. We search for meaning in an otherwise meaningless tragedy through those connections. Yet eight years later the meaning still eludes me. As it has eluded everyone else.


David's work continues to make people laugh even after his death. I think I'll watch reruns of "Frasier" tonight and David will make me laugh through all the bad memories of this day.


I am reminded when I think of David of the opening sentence of "Scaramouche" by Rafael Sabatini that reads:


He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that was the world was mad.


Thanks, David. Save me a glass of the Mount Eden.

Dirty Little Secret

There are a lot of dirty little secrets in the wine business. Stuff nobody likes to talk about. Some of it is even true. Though it's hard to tell which. Like how common it is in California to pick grapes very ripe and then add water in the winery--it's the Tang Method of winemaking. Hey, if it's good enough for the astronauts, it's good enough for you. But wineries hate to talk about it, are loathe to admit it. And then there is all the hush-hush about how much importers might mark up their wines from Europe. Most folks think they all work on the same margin, but that ain't the case. Someone's got to pay for producing the importer's latest vanity music CD. And then there's the biggest little secret of all, the truth no one likes to read about or talk about or do anything about, the shameful fact of sexual discrimination in the wine business, the unspeakable, relentless, and ongoing persecution of men in the wine business. I, myself, have been a victim.


I don't recall exactly when I noticed it. At first I was treated like everyone else in the wine business who is new--that is, disdainfully. I suffered through the usual hazing. Learning how to remove Champagne corks in the "traditional method" by squatting naked over them. Being forced to prove my loyalty by killing rival wine shop owners with an unregistered price gun. Proving my wine virility by sleeping with six Budweiser girls, three of them Clydesdales. I fell for all of that, and just thinking of it now makes me feel all dirty and ashamed and strangely happy to watch the Rose Parade. But I didn't realize it was just the beginning of my humiliation.


When I was first hired as a sommelier I was told I had to wear a "special" uniform. I didn't think anything of it, really. I had noticed how at the time there weren't any female sommeliers, but I just assumed that was because there wasn't any money or prestige in the job so it was left to men to do it. But the "special" uniform which I was forced to wear began my humiliation as a man in the wine business. Imagine being forced to wear nicely tailored pants, a form-hugging clean white shirt that "accidentally" revealed my hairy chest, and a bright, shiny medallion called, ironically, a "tastevin!" I had to parade around the restaurant every night in front of several hundred people dressed as some kind of Sammy Davis, Jr. impersonator. Women took the liberty of staring directly at the bulge in my pants (I was still packing the price gun for protection) as I walked by, summoning me with their wine lists and asking me, "Could you recommend something big for me?" Night after night I was subjected to this kind of sexual humiliation, forced to bend over a woman's shoulder as I helped her select a wine, her lips next to my neck, her eyes locked on my white shirt, her sizing me up as if I were one of the meat selections on the menu, the one that came with a bone. And I was expected to take this and like it. It's why I only lasted nineteen years.


I came to find out that my experience wasn't at all unique, it was happening to all the men in the wine business. Constantly being treated like we have no brains to offer, just our penises. Assaulted daily by female wine reps who shamelessly use us, treat us as fools and lechers only to further their own wine sales, not caring about us at all, but instead playing us until we drop a three-case load. Enduring the endless sarcastic and sexist remarks aimed at guys who sell wine. "I'm sure you like this wine, that's great, but is there a woman around here who can help me?" "Can you just point me to where the woman who owns the store works?" "Women have a more developed sense of taste, though I love the way those jeans fit you--they're tighter than a newly bottled Syrah." Endless shit like that, remarks that make you feel like you're nothing more than a plaything, a sex toy, a ribbed and lifelike Gary Vaynerchuk.


It's the dirty little secret that won't die. Men in the wine biz being constantly and relentlessly sexually harassed. Look at the endless worship that Jancis Robinson receives compared to the vitriol aimed at Robert Parker. And, why? It's that teeny thing hidden in his pants that Jancis doesn't have. And I don't mean Mark Squires. Women have it easy in the wine business. They have better senses, they aren't subjected to the constant humiliation the men in power endure. They have the gift of invisibility. How I envy them.

The Grapeful Dead

I'm just not in the mood to post. Writing a wine blog is a thankless task, about as rewarding as doing the makeup on cadavers. You love what you do but all you get in return is a lot of blank stares. The usual reaction to the latest HoseMaster So why keep doing it? Well, essentially, you never run out of dead bodies.

The wine business is full of dead bodies. It often feels like nothing new has been said in a hundred years. So I dress those dead bodies up, maybe it's the old Cork vs. Stelvin cadaver or the smelly Wine Competitions are Stupid corpse, sculpt a smile on their faces, lighten up their cheeks a bit with some rouge, and put them on display. We love the gruesome. "Gosh," we say, "it looks so alive, so real," when it isn't. It's as dead as Dick Cheney's conscience, it's deader than Jay Miller's palate, it's starting to smell like editorial meetings at Wine Enthusiast. But we keep poking at it, trying to make it move, see if there's any life left to squeeze out of it. And even when we're certain it's dead, we feel the need to resurrect it by talking about it. So many dead bodies...

Do Wine Bloggers Matter? Deader than Jenna Elfman's career

The 100 Point Scale It's stupid, it's not stupid, it's subjective, yeah, but it's useful, it's just a guide, but it's so easily influenced, blah blah blah--D E A D.

Social Media--For Selling Wine or For Building a Brand? Stillborn. Never had any life. Cute little thing, but never took a breath. So it makes us especially sad to see its little lifeless body lying there mimicking real life. So sad. Steve Heimoff may never get over it. But it's still dead.

Shipping Laws, Boy Do They Suck Yeah, we know, wineries are victims, consumers are victims, liquor lobbies are evil. This should have been buried with Jimmy Hoffa, if they'd found where he was buried. It's dead like Mutineer Magazine's prose style.

The "Sideways" Effect For Christ's Sake, this idiotic piece of crap film is five years old! It had about as much to do with killing Merlot as Son of Sam did. And, sure, it put Pinot Noir on the map, after all, Pinot Noir had only been popular for, oh, a hundred years. "Sideways" is Hollywood, narcissistic garbage that keeps floating to the surface like a Mafia victim in the Hudson River. It's bloated, it's rotten, it's Dead. All the makeup in the world can't make it seem less revolting.

Parkerized Wines Now that Parker is dead, why are we still talking about Him? No one makes wines to please Parker any more! This is the oldest and deadest opinion in the wine business. Get over it, it's dead. You don't have Parker to kick around any more. There's lots of bad winemaking, but, really, it isn't his fault! There have always been lousy wines, always! And there always will be. Alice Feiring loves a lot of wines that are crap, wines that she saved from "Parkerization." (God, please save me from Feiringization, the belief that one is truly inspiring.) You can dress this cadaver however you want to, but it's dead, dead like Phillipe Melka's cachet.

Wine and Music Sort of like people who think Obama's health care plan is Socialism, this is a subject that is simply too stupid to live. Matching wine with music is something akin to matching your shoes to a loaded weapon. This is one of the subjects wine pretenders love because it illustrates not only their educated choices in wine but their eclectic taste in music, sort of like finding out your date not only dresses like a federal inmate he can also wax ignorant about politics! There is no correlation between wine and music. It's dead. Not even Madonna would adopt it.


And the list goes on and on. But once again, I've dressed the corpse up, made it look real, and got you to look. "The HoseMaster of Wine," you say, "it looks better than it ever did when it was alive."