Lo Hai Qu on What Marsupials Want From Wine

Lo Hai Qu has been bugging me to let her write another post on HoseMaster of Wine™. Three days a week, she’s here at Clos du Hose cataloging the pallets of wine I receive as samples, answering my fan mail (you can’t believe how much ricin I go through), and organizing my panty drawer. Qu does this simply to sit at my feet and absorb my wine wisdom. I think of her as Human Depends. But every now and then I give in and allow her to voice her opinion in this prestigious space. Qu is representative of the generation known as Millennials, so named because they grew up around the year 2000. I’m part of the generation known as the Boomers, so named for the hot, fetid gas we explosively propel from our butts, which we refer to as “wisdom.”

So here is Lo Hai Qu on What Millennials Want From Wine.


I think about wine, like, a lot. Me and my friends think it’s the coolest way to get drunk. Other people my age (I hate that “Millennials” tag, it sounds like we’re insects) like to get buzzed on craft beer. Fucking craft beer! Isn’t that some kind of oxymoron? This guy I know, he’s one of my Friends with Benefits, though I’m thinking of upping his co-pay, is all proud that he knows a lot about beer. Who cares? It’s beer. Like he’s some kind of beermelier, all snobby and shit about beer. Beer is lame. I mean, horses drink it, what does that tell you? That beer only tastes good with fucking hay.

The HoseMaster wanted me to write about what Millipedes want when it comes to wine. He’s an asshole. Thinks he’s all funny and smart, but, actually, he’s old and boring and smells like he drank Ann Coulter’s leg bag. But he lets me taste the wines, and I’ve learned a lot. Mostly that there’s a lot of crappy-ass wine out there, and a lot of it is expensive.

OK, first of all, so what my friends and me want is wine that’s authentic. You know what they say about authentic, right? That if you have to say you’re authentic, you’re probably not. So it’s like saying you’re sober. Which you never are. So it’s the same with wine, it’s almost never authentic. But that’s what we want anyway. See, I think about this, like, a lot. And what we Monarchs actually want is to be convinced that a wine is authentic. It doesn’t really have to be. Duh. We just need to think it’s authentic, and then it is. This is how we roll. We have 578 Friends on FaceBook, and 2500 Followers on Twitter. We don’t care if they are actually our friends or followers. “Friends” is a meaningless concept to us. Our only real friend is our iPhone. It actually talks to you, and not all judgmental like your parents do.

Wine experts, and they’re all dead to me, like every time I see that awesome show “ The Walking Dead” I think it’s all James Laube and Robert Parker and Steve Heimoff come to suck my brains out and I’d like to kill them but they just won’t die (which is what wineries think too), anyway, wine experts like to think they know authentic wines. As if knowledge is the only way to know stuff. We don’t need knowledge, we have Google. Besides, me and my Mealybug friends can tell from the label. If it’s got some fancy looking chateau on the label, or if the label is kind of boring and just has a bunch of fancy script-type writing on it, no pictures, or if it’s from some place that our parents buy a lot of wine from, it’s not authentic. Authentic wine has cool names. And it’s not stacked up in Safeway. It has to be stacked up in Whole Foods. Or one of our friends put a picture of the label on their FaceBook page and it has like 120 likes. Then it’s probably authentic.

Anyway, we can take our best friend out of our pants and look it up. Because one of the other things we Mantises want is a story. We buy wines with good stories. Like the winemaker really cares about the land. That’s a good story. We know it's just a bogus story, but it's real. I read that story a lot when I read about wine. Or another good one is, the winery makes the best wine they can that expresses the place it’s from. See, that’s what I want. I want wine to express where it’s from, though I haven’t the faintest fucking idea what that means unless I look the appellation up on Wikipedia. If a wine expresses where it’s from and the winemaker cares about the Earth, and he doesn’t do all this chemical, modern, technical manipulation of it, it’s going to be real and authentic. And that’s what I want; and I’ll use my iPhone to Google it and get GPS to the nearest Whole Foods that sells it. I want it to be natural. I mean, really, how hard is that to understand?

And I guess we have to talk about price. Marsupials (those are insects, right?) don’t have a lot of money, mostly. I mean, I went to a good college, so I’m in debt up to my blowhole. The minute I read about a wine I want to try and it costs more than $20 my eyes glaze over like I’m watching porn with my dog. I see the prices on all these samples that overflow at Clos du Hose and I’m wondering, like, who buys this shit? First of all, how can “real” wine be expensive? Look at food. OK, so how much does an organically grown peach cost? Like two bucks tops? But Peach Melba at some stupid restaurant? Like $15. Which is more authentic? Millennials (those are insects, right?) aren’t really asking for much. What’s all the fuss?

Millennials want wines that are authentic, that are unique expressions of interesting varieties grown by dedicated vintners who spare no labor or expense, who love the land and cherish the Earth and all its resources, who never, they swear to God, never manipulate the wines, who we feel a connection to because of their story so we want to support them, and, finally, the wines are also delicious and compelling, get you drunk, and don’t cost more than $15. Fucking simple.

And you douchebags think we’re spoiled.

The Old Sommeliers Home

I’m not sure when I first noticed the problem. It only slowly worked its way into my conscious mind. I think the first incident was an old guy I saw standing along Highway 29 just in front of Opus One holding a sign that said, “Homeless Somm—Looks of Disdain 25¢” I was being tailgated by a limo filled with a bachelorette party, Feels on Wheels, so I couldn’t stop. But the sight of him, unshaven and dirty, like a nominee for a Country Music Award, extending his empty tastevin pleading for quarters, stuck in my mind. And once that happened, I began to notice them everywhere.

Leaving the grocery store parking lot a few days later, there was another old somm, distinctive in his worn tuxedo, looking more like an attendant at a funeral parlor in Appalachia than a sommelier (he should be working at French Laundry, I thought), pushing an old, wobbly dessert cart filled with his last earthly possessions—a few corkscrews, a copy of the 1984 edition of Parker’s Buying Guide, several logo hats from varied wineries around the world (I noticed one that said, “Chapeau Souverain”), and an autographed and well-worn photo of Robert Lawrence Balzer. He was clearly mad. I walked over to him and, as inconspicuously as possible, dropped a dollar bill into his tastevin.

“Thanks,” he said, “that’s usually where I urinate.”

Why, I wondered, were homeless old sommeliers turning up everywhere? It’s understandable that they’re unemployed. They got old. Their senses of smell and taste had abandoned them, all the bluffing and prevaricating in the world can’t stop the march of time. Old umpires go blind and live off their pensions. Lame ballerinas open dance schools and torment young anorexics. What does an old guy who’s lost his sense of smell and taste do? All the major wine critic jobs are already taken. But I thought there was a Home for Old Sommeliers. I was sure there was, but why, then, was I suddenly seeing the poor old wine stewards out on the streets begging for food, work, shelter and the latest issue of Mutineer Magazine (apparently, very absorbent)? I decided to find out.

In San Francisco one breezy afternoon, I spoke to an older gentleman who was approaching strangers and trying to sell them old corkscrews for a dollar apiece. “I must have had a couple of hundred of these when I retired from the restaurant,” he told me, “but now I’m down to about twenty. That doesn’t auger well for me.” He chuckled at his own pun. Asshole. So I kicked him. You know, no matter how many times you do it, it just feels right to kick a sommelier.

I asked him how he ended up on the streets after a lifetime of service. “I spent twenty-five years as a sommelier, worked in some of San Francisco’s best restaurants, talked down to its wealthiest residents. In fact, I was the guy who first marked up wine list prices 400%! That was me. Before that, hell, you could pay a few bucks above retail for a wine in a nice joint. I should have trademarked the idea. Everybody stole it. And do you know who created the first wine-by-the-glass? ME! Listen, I told my boss at the time, you’re screwing ‘em on the cocktails, we can do the same damn thing with wine. It doesn’t even have to be good wine! If I tell ‘em it’s good wine, they’ll believe me. I used to sell White Zinfandel for eight bucks a glass. Then it was Chardonnay with residual sugar. Now it’s Moscato. The public doesn’t get any smarter, you know.”

He was very articulate, and, at first, didn’t seem at all mentally ill. But then he told me he’d been married to both Jancis Robinson and Jay McInerney. McInerney I believed. He also claimed that he loved orange wines. I wondered how a guy with mental issues like that could survive on the streets.

Had he ever tried to get into the Old Sommeliers Home? “Oh, for Parker’s sake,” he told me, “yeah, I was in that loony bin for a couple of years. Have you ever been around a bunch of old sommeliers? Hell, man, they can outbore Michel Chapoutier. You fart and they all start to chant, “Mercaptan, O My Mercaptan.” That they can smell. They endlessly bitch about the wines they serve at the home. Like you really need Sancerre to wash down lung oysters. It’s horrible there. And the nurses treat you like crap. Taunting you all the time. ‘How’s your worm workin’ now, old man?’ I just up and left one night. Besides, I hear they closed the place. Ran out of money. Turned ‘em all out into the streets to fend for themselves. Bunch of old guys with no usable skills at all. Sommeliers don’t have skills, they don’t do anything useful. They get people drunk and take their money. Know what we used to call that profession? Father O’Reilley.”

I decided to check on whether the Old Sommeliers Home had been closed. He was right, it was gone. No one had noticed. But I guess there just weren’t that many sommeliers to put there. There just weren’t that many sommeliers in the United States thirty years ago. Americans didn’t buy wine in restaurants, not unless it featured some sort of colored person—a Blue Nun or a Green Hungarian or a Zeller Schwarz Kat. Yet it won’t be long before the need for an Old Sommeliers Home will be desperate. In recent years, there has been a huge infestation of sommeliers. Where will they go when their noses fail, their tongues become as tasteless as Verdicchio?

There are more sommeliers now than ever before. More degrees, more letters to append to your otherwise worthless name, more hubris walking the restaurant floors than a stadium filled with Grammy Award winners. You have a “well-chosen” list of 20 Italian wines in your wood-fired pizza joint—you’re a sommelier! You took an online test and passed the fifth time, you’re a Level One sommelier! You work in a wine bar with eleven different wines that you buy from a different broker every month because you owe all the other ones money—you’re a sommelier! The world crawls with them now. They have Journals and conventions, they’re rock stars and gatekeepers, they’re winemakers and tastemakers. They’re this generation’s deejays.

I asked the old sommelier in the park if he had any advice for all the new, young sommeliers out there. Any words of wisdom from all his years being a sommelier.

“Being a sommelier is like a Riedel wine glass—it’s beautiful and clear when you first pick it up, but everyone can see through it, and, eventually, you can be sure, you will be a victim of  planned obsolescence.”

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The M.S. Conspiracy

Here's the first chapter of a Pulp Fiction novel starring the HoseMaster that I first published on September 29, 2009. Written in a strange style that's sort of a cross between Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane, the form is the perfect platform for one-liners and outrageous plots. I wrote fourteen chapters of this very shaggy dog story, and never concluded it. But, man, they were fun to write. Here, from the Golden Age of HoseMaster of Wine, long since past, is The M. S. Conspiracy.



A HoseMaster of Wine Pulp Fiction Classic

Chapter 1 Strange Path


I'm a dick. A private dick, but a dick nonetheless. I make a living as a dick, if you call digging through people's trash for private information about them living. You should see what people put in their garbage. It's disgusting. You can tell a lot about a person sifting through their garbage. You see everything that fills their rotten insides, all the filth and refuse they fill their lives with. In fact, life is like a garbage pail, you fill it with useless and stomach-turning stuff and then pay people to haul it away. But not before the putrefying smell of it sickens everyone. I'm the dick who gets paid to sift through life's disgusting garbage. Which is how I got involved in the worst case of my career, a case that nearly got me killed, a case that led me to depths of inhumanity I didn't know existed, which is like Sean Hannity discovering a whole new level of stupid. I thought I knew about garbage, about conspiracy, about evil. But then I got involved with a group that changed me, that filled me with a loathing for people I'd never felt before. Where do I begin?

I don't know how these people find me. I've got a rundown shithole of an office in the sleepy little wine country town of Healdsburg, a town so dull the main hobby is going down to the local hospital to watch folks having contractions. And those are at the proctology ward. Healdsburg is a tourist town now. Once upon a time it served the farmers in the community, now it serves expensive wines and fancy meals. Healdsburg has more tasting rooms than Dick Cheney has condos in Hell, but I like it here. The landscape is beautiful, and when the urge hits me it's the easiest thing in the world to find a drunken tourist in a see-through cotton dress to come home with me and learn how to spit. I see it as a public service.


I'd just wrapped up my recent case involving the Illuminatti, the Freemasons and the Osmond Family, having successfully foiled their plans to prove Michael Jackson was married and had fathered several children and primates and that the titles to his greatest hits were actually an anagram of "Diana Ross is Mary Magdalene's daughter with Thomas Jefferson," when she walked into my Healdsburg office. She smelled dangerous with a pinch of crazy, but I like that smell. It's like Ann Coulter farted on Lou Dobbs--you get the same smell in a good vintage of Silver Oak. But she was gorgeous--blonde and busty with the kind of legs you get in Tokaji Essensia--long and oily. I've seen puttonyos before, and she was way more than five.


"Are you the HoseMaster?" she asked.

"Sure," I said, "how can I help you?"

"I'm told that you know people in the wine business, important people." I was having trouble looking her in the eye. I hadn't seen jugs stacked that high since I bought my wine at a gas station.

"Yeah, I know some important people. Who is it you're looking to meet? And don't say James Laube. I killed him two weeks ago. It was self-defense. He threw his 100 point scale at me--it was banged up, utterly useless, but it damn near killed me. So I plugged him. Just heard they're giving me a James Beard Award for it."

"No, you misunderstand." She sat down across from me and when she crossed those legs I'm pretty sure I got a glimpse of the Sacramento Delta and most of its tributaries, but it was hot enough to be Lodi. "I want to hire you to help me join the secret society of M.S."

I'd heard those evil bastards were going to be in Healdsburg. Recruiting. Their rituals, their "tests," were secret, and they were very careful about who they allowed to pass, who they allowed to join their putrid ranks. But I'd heard stories, horrifying stories, stories that revolved around ritual disemboweling, waterboarding, and Evan Goldstein lectures. Why would this babe want to be an M.S.?

"From what I know, Ma'am..."

"Call me Veronica."

"From what I know, Veronica, the Master Sommeliers don't like women, don't really want women in their ranks, make the whole thing a nightmare for a woman to join. And that's if I can even get you in the door. Do you have the faintest idea what it's like to be an M.S.? Do you really know what evil those people are capable of?"

"I know more about it than you can even imagine, HoseMaster. I have no fear of them, I know exactly who they are and what they stand for. Now, can you help me or not?"

"Oh, I can help you alright, but it comes with a price."

"My friends and I are willing to pay any price to penetrate the M.S. society. Name it."

I paused, took another sip of my Merry Edwards Sauvignon Blanc, noting the lovely Musque fragrance. Or was that Veronica? "Let's just say I want to dredge the Sacramento Delta when all this is through."

"You're a strange one, HoseMaster," Veronica said, leaning over my desk and giving me a view of the Cote Blonde and Cote Brune, making me think of Guigal and his Bodacious La-La's, "but I like you."


To Be Continued

Or Not.

My Comic Hero

Jonathan Winters died yesterday. I have had a handful of comedy heroes in my life. Jonathan Winters was one. He was the comedian’s comedian. All the great comedians of his era worshiped him. Mostly because he was just brilliantly funny and fearless, with a gift for voices and improvisation that no one could come near.

Jonathan was one of the many regulars on Jack Paar’s talk show. I was a kid, twelve years old or so, when I first saw him perform. I’d already fallen in love with jokes and comedy, memorizing comedy albums and practicing my timing by simply learning the pace of each comic I admired, from Woody Allen to Bill Cosby to Tom Lehrer (who recently turned 85—Happy Birthday, Tom, you’re another of my personal comedy heroes). Jonathan Winters was a whole different game.

You could see that Jack Paar was thrilled, and scared to death at the same time, to have him on his show. Paar often said that he never wanted to know what Jonathan Winters was going to talk about, or how he would look when he walked out on stage. And when Jonathan Winters got going, the tears of laughter would stream down Paar’s face. Mine, too. As soon as he walked on stage, I began to smile. It made me want to be funny.

Winters once walked out as a “faun,” announcing Spring. With a silly accent, he proceeded to do about ten uninterrupted minutes of pure silliness and genius. Or he might appear in drag as Maude Frickert, the World’s Oldest Airline Stewardess. Maude was a hard-drinking old woman based on Winter’s Aunt Lou, the classic Dirty Old Broad. There were seemingly hundreds of people living in his brain, and you never knew which one would be in charge.

Genius is rare in any field. Winters was a comic genius. He didn’t tell jokes, he didn’t really have punchlines. He created a world and you were immediately drawn into it. He could make you laugh with a simple look on his face, or a tone of voice. Jack Paar famously handed him a stick on the air one night, and Winters did five minutes of brilliant and funny improvisation with that simple stick. It’s wondrous to watch even now. There is no one like him--a simple definition of genius.

I always wanted to meet him. Just to shake the hand of a great, genuinely great, comic mind. One of my most valued books is a book signed by Jonathan Winters, a book he wrote entitled “Winters’ Tales.” That’s as close as I’ll come.

Throughout his life, he famously battled his demons, was in and out of treatment for mental breakdowns. He must have known great heartache and struggle. But he had a great influence on me. It was Jonathan Winters’ example of fearlessness, his ability to just let it fly, say and do whatever your comic mind told you to say, that I always tried to emulate. I stayed up late whenever he was on Jack Paar, or Johnny Carson, or anywhere else. I’m not sure anyone has made me laugh more, and laugh in a way that isn’t about the intellect, but about silliness and childishness and imagination.

Our heroes get old and die. But Jonathan Winters was forever a child. And it’s always that much more tragic when a child dies. I’ll be on YouTube watching him. The tears will be from laughter. I like to think that’s how he’d want to be remembered.

Here's a short tribute that might make you laugh: Jonathan Winters