May 14, 2008 by Thomas.

Well, now I am awakened. My last entry received more responses than all my earlier blog entries-some responses online, and some via email.

Generally, I have been supported, yet mildly taken to task for being cynical and giving up. An email I received this morning from another Finger Lakes-based writer made a good point about my cynicism, not to mention the relative difficulty in posting a comment on the Worpress version of Vinofictions, as opposed to the ease of doing so on Blogspot.

Unfortunately, the Wordpress version is more prone to spammers, and I am a simple writer. I don’t want to spend my time fending off spammers and various forms of sludge. Hell, I don’t even want to take the time to look into the stats to find out how many and who is reading this blog. I just want to write. So, I take the easy route. Maybe I should shut down the Wordpress version—maybe I will.

I’ve decided not to quit, but I will have to scale back my entries for the summer. My wife and I are erecting a greenhouse plus, we have various guests coming from the world over throughout the season.

For now, let me say a few words about why I made the previous entry. Primarily, it was because of the wine forum Websites. I read them in the hope of gaining information and to keep up with events, but I generally am sick of most of them. Not only are the conversations circuitous and repetitive, they are often abrasive and obsessive. But what truly gets to me about them is that the majority of their habituates seem comfortable with their myths—impervious to greeting a fact and shaking its hand.

My other problem: too many people don’t seem willing to take their own initiative, to go out and explore wine for themselves. They need one or two critical palates to guide them. Being a general “do it my way” kind of guy, I admit to finding the lemming trait offensive. But I do understand the argument that there is so much wine out there it is impossible for any one person to find them all.

I understand that argument, but I don’t buy it. In the immortal words of Dick Cheney: so what?

Once you realize that there isn’t enough time in your life to drink them all, it doesn’t mean you need to let someone else direct you to the wines, and it certainly does nothing to change your tastes, provided you are willing to trust your own taste and not the taste of the self-anointed.

Then there’s the argument that “I have only so much money, I don’t want to waste it on buying wines I may not like.”

First, a review and a high rating maybe helps, but it’s no guarantee. I’ve never thought that I need anyone else’s palate to guide mine, and I don’t believe anyone else does. Consuming wine is a matter of personal taste.

Second, so much that we spend our money on comes with risk. As an example, take the Maytag dishwasher that I am throwing out the window this week.

Remember those TV commercials with Jesse White playing a Maytag repairman who sits alone most of his life because the units don’t need much service?

I stupidly bought into the Maytag reputation (not realizing that the company was sold to Whirlpool). I might as well have taken the $500 I spent on that dishwasher and lit it in the fireplace—that way I would have gotten something for my money. In other words, I took the easy path, didn’t do my own homework, bought from reputation and suggestions. What I got didn’t work (in less than four years, I had to replace the control panel three times!).

Buying anything comes with risk. High ratings and high praise do not negate that risk. In fact, if you look at it another way, they probably increase the risk by creating complacency, a sense of false security.

Sure, we’ll never get to taste every wine in the world, but we can have fun finding them on our own and trying as many as we can. In fact, sticking to one style or one place creates a stagnant taste preference. What fun is that?

I believe that with all the wines available to us, obsessing over the possibility of missing one of them means needing help, but not in wine buying…

Thanks to all who slapped me a little. You made me realize that there is an audience for my ramblings, and even if it is a small audience, it’s a fine one.

PS: To Tom Wark I have a suggestion (and to anyone else interested). Maynard Amerine once wrote a beautiful essay concerning wine quality: how to evaluate it and why it can and should be done. Try to get your hands on a copy of it. Look up Wayward Tendrils, a California organization of wine book collectors. Someone there might be able to help you find the essay, which Tendrils covers in its latest quarterly.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
May 2008. All rights reserved.

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May 11, 2008 by Thomas.

So, I’m sitting in my chair facing my keyboard and looking at a blank screen—that’s today’s version of a writer facing a blank page.

In this case, the blank screen is because I am no longer sure what to say about wine online.

A number of adjectives describe what the online discourse about wine sometimes does to me. This week, I stumbled upon one too many adjectives, along with one too many jerks.

It saddens me that so many times those who voice their self-righteous proclamations seem to know just enough about wine and winemaking to be dangerous and not enough about humility and the general way that people need to act toward one another in order to peacefully share this planet.

In other words, a hell of a lot of wine geeks should never have been let out of high school!

How did it come to pass that people use the gift so pleasant as wine to bring attention to their status, to their self worth, and to their self-appointment as arbiters of taste? They subvert the goodness of wine. They claim they speak and consume wine out of passion. What comes through to me is obsession. Passion is an emotion of the heart—obsession is an emotional illness.

In any case, wine geeks never were my intended audience for Vinofictions. They are not my whole problem.

I aimed for the general wine consumer. My aim was to use Vinofictions to educate to the extent of my knowledge, which in wine amounts to about 26 years of study and experience in the business, from grape growing to winemaking to wine selling and wine writing, alongside decades of wine consumption that reaches back to age seven.

I am fully aware that, while I may have learned things through study, I don’t know it all, and so I also hoped that through dialog on Vinofictions I could continue to learn from others while they learned from me. But Vinofictions hasn’t really captured much attention and has generated even less dialog.

Wine writers with more than just opinions can help others come to their own decisions by giving them an understanding of the facts. But that doesn’t appear to be what gets the attention. What seems to get attention are wine writers who issue proclamations and position subjectivity as if it were information. I don’t do that kind of thing well because I do not believe in it.

I am suspending Vinofictions for the 2008 summer while I consider if I have anything left to say and also to find out if what I have to say has much of an audience. Right now, I’m of the opinion that the audience isn’t nearly as large as the time and effort warrants.

The blog will remain online so that the archives will be available to sift through and read.

A few of you have been kind enough to take part in this blog and to throw me encouraging words. I thank you. I wish there were more of you.

And to prove to you that I am not a saint, and that I, too, have something to sell: my third book is scheduled for an autumn release. Hope you all read it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
May 2008. All rights reserved.

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May 6, 2008 by Thomas.

It’s probable that every one of us has had the experience of a wine that tastes different from glass to glass over an evening. We call the phenomenon evolving, and by that, we generally mean that the wine evolves. But could it be that the taster is also evolving?

Surely, exposure to oxygen changes a wine; how much and how fast it changes I suppose is determined by the wine and the amount of oxygen to which it is exposed. But it’s highly possible that as the wine changes, so, too, does our perceptive capacity.

Maybe something volatile in the wine’s aroma that is subdued by time also hits a threshold point that subdues our aroma receptors. Or maybe what we taste first is still slightly closed; opened, it may offer more, but what if that excessive offering happens to land on a dull palate? Will it make for a good or a bad perception?

These kinds of concerns (and further myriad possibilities) may prevent from ever producing a definitive answer or an answer that even satisfies. You’d have to track every oxygen molecule and every person in the room to do it!

What about the other perception phenomenon, the one where you taste a wine today that you had tasted two weeks ago from another bottle but within the same box, and the present taste seems quite different from the previous one? Is it that the wine has changed, the bottle is a variation, or is it something about you or the conditions that causes the change in perception? Or maybe after a lengthy time span you simply can’t recall a taste exactly .

This subject came up recently on the Robert Parker Web site (see link below). Along with the usual unsubstantiated opinions that many provide about wine-related phenomenon, the thread received many considered responses, some of which come with a tinge or at least the possibility of truth.

See if you agree or not, but reading the thread reinforces the conclusion I came to a long time ago: the reasons are many that cause us to remember a past taste as different from the present taste of the same wine. I don’t think it’s either a good or a bad thing—just the way things are.

What the variance tells me is to enjoy the wine in front of me, if I enjoy it, and dislike the wine in front of me, if I dislike it. That’s another way of repeating that, “there are no great wines, only great bottles of wine.”

Looking at this subject objectively, it’s obvious that collecting wine can produce future unintended disappointments. I’m so glad I stopped collecting wine.

TasteThread

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
May 2008. All rights reserved.

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April 29, 2008 by Thomas.

One afternoon a number of years ago, a local restaurateur came into my winery to order some wine from me. During the conversation, I asked if he had anymore of an older wine left in inventory. He said he wasn’t sure, since his cellar was so full that he had to develop another cellar in his basement to keep the inventory that was spilling out—then, he complained about slow wine sales.

I knew that this fellow charged too much for wine at his restaurant and so I asked if he ever considered lowering his prices. He looked at me as if I had just cursed his grandmother.

Here’s how the rest of the conversation went.

He, “If I lowered the price I’d lose money on each wine sale.”

Me, “But you just said that your wine sales are slow.”

He, “Yeah, the wine doesn’t sell as fast as I’d like it to sell, but that’s no excuse to give it away.”

Me, “You wouldn’t be giving it away. You’d be charging a little less so that you can sell the wine faster.”

He, “So what would be good about selling it faster at a lower price? Speed up my losses?”

Me, “First, you’d lower inventory carrying costs. Second, faster sales will likely increase wine sales over the course of the year, since the price will induce more people to buy more wine from you. In retail, the idea is called volume selling—you move more units and so in the end, you make less percentage per unit but more profit on overall sales.”

He, “That’s plain stupid. If I can’t get my full mark up, I’d never make a living.”

Me, “Right. I’ll see you in a few months to sell you another case of wine.”

These many years later, this fellow’s wine pricing remains disgusting. His formula is to price wine at triple plus one-half retail. For instance, he had a Vinho Verde on his list recently that retails for $7.00 a bottle. His price was $25.00 a bottle—he rounds up the half, of course.

Most restaurants aren’t as greedy as triple plus half—they usually go double plus half retail, which still is absurd, in my view.

I’ve heard the arguments from restaurateurs: they have glasses to clean and wine service to account for. But I don’t accept those excuses. Simply put, restaurants charge what consumers allow them to get away with charging. It will be interesting to see if this period of economic woe will have an effect on wine prices if restaurants start to sell less, but I doubt it.

To be sure, the price of wine in restaurants is a tired subject. I know, I’ve been talking about it for twenty-five years, much of that time trying to persuade restaurateurs when I sold them wine that they should consider reducing their prices. But like just about everyone else who complains to restaurants, I failed at persuading them.

Yet, every so often a smart restaurateur comes around and does what other restaurant people probably view as either stupid or insane—he or she prices wine a little better than the competition.

Recently, a wine bar called Terroir opened in Manhattan’s once grungy but now fashionable East Village neighborhood. The bar is owned in part by one of the city’s truly successful and innovative wine purveyors, Paul Greico.

At Terroir, Greico offers wines that are mostly under the radar, the ones that most critics and obsessive wine hobbyists don’t seem to care about but regular people who consume wine not as a hobby but as part of their daily routine do care about. When you search for or consume wine regularly, as opposed to collect wine or buy what you are told to buy, it pays to keep searching for new products and at new prices.

Greico’s wine prices are as under the radar in Manhattan as the wines, and I wish him all the best for his effort.

You can get a nice glimpse at his place by following the link below. The link will also give you a glimpse into what some wine geeks think about such matters. Pay special attention to the person who wanted to know if Terroir allows BYO.

I can think of three reasons to go to a wine bar and want to bring your own wine:

1. You are cheap.

2. You are uninterested in exploration.

3. You think that your wine cellar is the greatest thing since wine was invented.

If you fit any of the above, it’s probably best that you stay home and drink from your cellar. You probably neither will be nor have any fun at a wine bar.

Terroir

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
April 2008. All rights reserved.

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April 22, 2008 by Thomas.

It was quite a trip. My latest sojourn to New York City lasted three days. In that time, I crammed numerous meetings. Sadly, none of the meetings were wine related and so, I also managed to miss my daily muse.

Then, upon my return, I read a few blog entries by Tom Wark, at Fermentations. It seems that Tom is in a philosophical mode—and a deep one at that.

Tom’s postings concern the value of establishing a wine quality parameter. He seems to think that the task is insurmountable.

Tom’s basic point, I believe, is that quality is put forward in such a subjective manner by wine reviewers and critics, as well as by wine consumers, that an objective measure simply cannot be pinned down.

I agree, and I disagree—how’s that for being unequivocal?

First, I agree with Tom because he’s gotten it right: self-appointed arbiters of taste are forced to make definitive proclamations. If they don’t, why would anyone listen to them? And the only way anyone can make a definitive proclamation, especially when that anyone has little or no technical training, is to be subjective.

The fact that wine reviewers and critics can lure others on board their ship of fools is because so many of us are insecure about our abilities. One of the most distressing revelations I gained while operating a wine tasting room was how often people seemed proud to proclaim their lack of knowledge.

Even regular wine drinkers often started out by saying that they didn’t really know much about wine. I countered with, “You know what you like, and that’s all there is to know.” And then, I shamefully proceeded to tell them what I thought they should know. This is the same methodology that critics use. I call it gaming the consumer.

The result of such a situation is reams of paper and digital print about what “I” find appealing and little discourse concerned with what it might be that “you” want. And why not? The words of critics spring from self-assurance, they have no need for another opinion; discourse is not their modus operandi. Under such conditions, quality is a moving target.

Where I disagree with Tom, is that I believe there are ways to establish quality parameters for wine. The point is, though, that they must be established and agreed upon.

Many wine consumers would agree that the smell of TCA is not part of quality in wine. Many probably would agree that wine isn’t supposed to be vinegar. Even the most self-assured critic is likely to agree that wine isn’t supposed to taste like Coca Cola—well, most critics might agree…

In my view, the best way to establish quality is to codify the technicalities of wine. The only way for that to happen is through an organized effort of technically trained people to create and agree upon technical parameters. Following that, an organized effort must make sure that wines are measured, and the parameters are met before they are subject to analysis by critics and reviewers.

Consumers are then assured that every wine that is reviewed has been rigorously passed through a quality analysis, and that the reams of paper and digital print produced by reviewers and critics are in fact what they have been all along: a bunch of subjective opinions. It might be fun not to let reviewers and critics in on the result of the technical analysis—a method that should underline their subjectivity.

Establishing quality parameters and exposing subjectivity for what it is are actually the easy parts. The more difficult task is the one that I believe Tom’s posts truly address—a few questions.

Do we have or should we have a relationship with wine? Why?

Why do we feel the need to agree or to disagree about wine?

What is it that makes us think that others should heed our proclamations?

What is it that makes any one of us imagine that he or she is the arbiter of taste?

Why do so many of us seem to need the approval of someone else before we can enjoy a glass of wine?

When did wine become a subject of philosophical thought rather than merely the lubricant that allows philosophy to flow?

Why can’t we simply enjoy something without having to dissect and obsess over it?

I’m sure Tom has other, more important questions in his head. In fact, I think that for a fellow whose function is to create and write PR for others in the wine industry, Tom may be thinking too deeply. If he keeps it up, he may find himself writing good books instead…

Tom Wark’s blog

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
April 2008. All rights reserved.

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April 11, 2008 by Thomas.

Wayward Tendrils describes both the way of the grapevine and a wonderful little group of wine bibliophiles—yours truly included.

Most members of Wayward Tendrils are serious collectors of wine and food books and other writings on the subjects. As I am with all my interests, I don’t get too geeky about it: collecting books isn’t as much fun to me as reading them, and so I can live without owning an out-of-print book that I know is available at my local library.

Still, some things are unapproachable and because of that, they are more intriguing. Such is the case with Inaugural Medical Address About Wines, by John Michael Schosulan; Vienna, 1767.

Until the 19th century, especially in Europe, but also in the U.S., the custom was to study and write about medicine in Latin. To gain a doctorate in medicine in Europe required a thesis written in Latin. That is what Schosulan’s medical address was, a 55-page thesis concerning the properties of wine.

A Danish physician, Erik Sklovenborg, introduced 22 paragraphs of the dissertation in the latest Wayward Tendril’s Quarterly, a publication for members. Piero Perron, an Italian nuclear engineer with a “Jones” for Latin studies, translated the thesis.

Much of the medical benefits of wine that come to us today as news, were already believed in ancient times. Certainly, Schosulan believed much of it in 1767. Perron is also president of an Italian beer brewer’s association, but he admits that after translating Schosulan’s thesis, he developed a respect for, and began moderate consumption of wine.

In the translated thesis are wonderful passages about wine’s workings through our digestive and circulatory systems. Not to mention the marvelous things that wine can do for us (there is, however, mention of the downside of over imbibing). One of the many insights that caught my eye was Schosulan’s mention of the use of sulphur (we know it as sulfur dioxide, SO2).

Schosulan talks about protecting wine from the degradations of oxidation, which he quaintly refers to as “air.” He talks about topping up casks and adding olive oil as a film on top, of aromatic spices sprinkled on a cloth and then lit, or of lighting distilled alcohol, presumably to use up the air around the wine. Of all the methods, however, he points out that sulfur dioxide alone makes all other methods needless. Where have I heard that before?

I suggest anyone with an interest in wine books and wine history sign up for membership in Wayward Tendrils—it costs no more than a bottle of wine for a one-year subscription to the quarterly.

Being made up of a bunch of bibliophiliacs, Wayward Tendrils doesn’t seem to have a Web site. But there is an email address: tendrils@jps.net.

On another note connected to writing, Mike Steinberger has a fine piece of writing in Fine Wine Magazine, a truly expensive but well executed wine-centric periodical from Britain that, sadly, for me, I have yet to infiltrate as a writer.

Steinberger’s piece is about the wine critic/writing world of today. My only beef with the piece is that, like most, he seems to equate wine criticism with wine writing. I view them as separate functions.

The article has stirred a lot of online talk. Take a look at it for yourself, at:

FineWine

PS: I’ll be traveling next week. Will post my next entry the following week. I hope to have something to say after a few days in New York City.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
April 2008. All rights reserved.

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April 4, 2008 by Thomas.

Slowly heat up some sugar to 300-plus degrees Fahrenheit and you will soon have yourself some caramel; slice an onion and slowly cook it in almost the same manner and you will have caramelized the sugars in the onion; bake a head of garlic at 350 for about 40 minutes and you will get yourself a caramelized aroma plus a wonderfully sweet taste.

Cook a sweet brandy-fortified white wine at about 105 degrees Fahrenheit for a few months and you will have created a cooked wine called Madeira, which, to me, smells an awful lot like caramel.

Over on Robin Garr’s Wine Lovers Web site forum we’ve been discussing the subject of cooked wine. It’s quite a discussion for two reasons:

First, for an online discussion, it is tame, showing what adult communication can provide. With one or two exceptions, Robin’s Wine Lovers site is normally inhabited by less confrontational wine geek than on many other sites—certainly, it doesn’t suffer from a divisive moderator.

Second, after going around a few times with the discussion I have come to the conclusion that the word “cooked” to describe a wine that has been heat damaged somewhere in the traffic between producer and consumer may be a quick and easy way to describe the problem, but it may not be an accurate description.

Many wine geeks claim that a cooked wine smells like sherry. What they mean is that the so-called cooked wine smells oxidized. I am not so sure about that.

Granted, a wine that is exposed to heat will oxidize quicker than it normally would, but a cooked wine is exposed to excessive heat, to the point of Pasteurization.

To me, the overall smell of cooked wine is a pleasant kind of burnt sweetness. The overall smell of oxidation leans more toward acrid or decaying.

To my nose, the aroma of a truly cooked wine supersedes its oxidized component. When I smell the purposely-cooked Madeira, the more prominent among the aromas is caramel, with a hint of sulfurous reduction that reminds me of cooked onions—I pick up the oxidation but underneath the caramel.

In the first thread on this subject, someone mentioned that he has smelled butterscotch in heat damaged wine but never caramel. I find that interesting, too, because to make butterscotch you cook sugar as you would to make caramel but you add cream.

A major component in cream is lactic acid, which happens also to be a component in finished wine that has gone through malo-lactic fermentation, converting malic to lactic acid. So, it makes sense to me that the smell of butterscotch would show up in such wines if they become cooked.

Also, as a way of seemingly refuting my claim that caramel describes the smell of cooked wine, the gentleman who mentioned butterscotch also pointed out that caramel requires not only cooked sugar but also cooked amines (I presume in the sugar).

I accept that. I also accept that wine contains amines as well as sugar and ethanol, the alcohol in wine, which, when cooked, has a vaguely sweet smell. Wine that undergoes natural malo-lactic fermentation normally has a high amine count (Wikipedia provides a pretty good definition of amines—click below).

In the second thread on this subject, I recount a wine cooking experiment that I did the Cooked 2 link below.

All of this leads me to believe that when people identify a wine flaw with the descriptor “cooked,” they likely aren’t always talking about a wine that has been cooked. The question then is: what are they talking about?

Amine

Cooked 1

Cooked 2

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
April 2008. All rights reserved.

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March 30, 2008 by Thomas.

A couple of months ago researchers at the University of California, at Davis, in conjunction with a Master of Wine (and maybe promoter) announced the “Budometer,” a device that built on findings that there are three classifications of tasters in this universe: tolerant, sensitive, and hypersensitive.

Contrary to the way they appear, the hypersensitive is not the one who is supposed to be great at picking out the many nuances in wine.

In fact, according to the press release, hypersensitive tasters are more likely not to drink wine; they have an “aversion to bitterness, and favor delicacy over intensity.”

I guess you’ve got to give some slack to California wine researchers—maybe the many 95-point, high alcohol, bombastic wines on the Left Coast makes them unaware that there is such a thing as delicacy in wine. But let me not quibble—not right now, anyway.

The press release went on to talk about how this new discovery of our collective taste buds will revolutionize the way wine competitions are held. The theory is that if the judges can be tested in advance using a simple drop of blue paint on their tongues they can be classified in groups so that the wines will have a “fair shot” in competitions.

In other words, judges will evaluate only wines they are likely to appreciate.

Since when should wines have a fair shot in competitions? Is this some sort of offshoot of the new parenting concept: that all children are stars and that the idea behind a game of baseball has nothing to do with the better team winning but more to do with just playing the game?

That’s a great concept, except that the idea of the game, which is a competition, is to win. If you don’t play you can’t lose. But if you do play, you ought to be good enough to have a shot at winning, and that’s as fair as your shot gets.

Besides, a wine competition is not supposed to please the judges; their job is to evaluate each wine on its technical merits. To accomplish that, judges should be trained not painted blue.

No matter. Based on my sampling of the Budometer, the thing will likely prove itself for what it is: a gimmick.

According to the online Budometer test that I took, I am supposedly a hypersensitive taster, which means that I prefer sweet wines over dry, dislike bitterness, and favor delicacy over intensity—getting one out of three right does not make for a stellar performance. Even the one that the test got right is up for grabs: yeah, I like delicacy, but I can also cotton to intensity, provided the wine has balance, which leads to another issue.

I don’t think the description of tasters in this system says anything about balance or nuance or anything interesting at all, really. But judge for yourself. Go to the link below to read the story. There, you’ll find a link so that you can take the ridiculous test.

On the heels of the Budometer comes a news report that people given electro shock proved to have a heightened sense of smell.

Can you imagine what the next gimmick will be?

All I can say is that if wine judges are going to have to agree to have their tongues painted blue and then submit to electric shock before the competition begins, I’m going to start turning down wine judge invitations…

Budometer

Shocked!!!

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
March 2008. All rights reserved.

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March 25, 2008 by Thomas.

Those who read Tom Wark’s blog, Fermentations, already know about the annual American Wine Blog Awards, or whatever he calls it. Seems a rather straightforward thing: a few rules for bloggers, a few nominations called for, a few votes for those nominated, a few winners—and a lot of losers.

You are of course reading the blog of one of the losers. I managed one nomination—from Jack, at Fork and Bottle. I have a suspicion he did it out of pity, since I wasn’t faring too well in the nomination camp, nothing like the outfit that had all its friends and employees submit not only nominations, but glowing reports on the outfit’s stellar station in the universe (I do think Tom should have zapped that nonsense from the nominating process, but, hey, that’s only my opinion, and if I go on, it will seem like sour grapes.)

Not winning is one thing, but learning from the loss is quite another. For instance, if it wasn’t for the award loss, I would never have found out that wine blogging is an industry. I found out because of a discussion that took place online—see below.

Incidentally, you may have noticed that I place all my reference links at the bottom of the page. I do that because I am one of those nuts who hates the links inside the text; it creates the desire to click on it, and that creates the condition of either losing my place in the text that I was reading or being taken so far away from it that I don’t go back to it. It’s reading-interruptus to me.

It’s these kinds of opinions that probably lost me the nomination, let alone the award!

To be serious (did you know that I wasn’t being serious?), the wine forum world seems to have again had an implosion. Small as it is—the implosion, not the Internet world—the happening kind of supports my position in my last blog entry, when I said that in wine geekdom, it’s often about the geek rather than about the wine.

On the Parker/Squires/Leve site a long-standing member has been banned—again. This time, he was banned for responding to the ramblings of the moderator. I’ll probably get banned for saying this, but Squires really ought to bow out from being a forum moderator—he’s too divisive for the job and he’s too ready to pounce on diverging opinions, not to mention that he seems touchy about criticism, which isn’t unusual.

It seems that critics are quite thin-skinned about being criticized. I believe it has something to do with the fact that they believe that they are the answer, so how is it possible for them to be criticized?

Then, over on Therapy, something happened, and I swear I cannot figure out what it was, to cause one of our own bloggers and wine people, Lyle, to pack his bags (RocksandFruit.com link below).

I don’t know what’s going on: two implosions and someone so eloquent as I can’t win an award. Could they be related???

Nah, it was just the full moon.

While you ponder that lofty possibility, think about this:

In my world, Chardonnay should be crisp, clean (sans a lot of that oak thing). The wine should show one of the singular traits of that grape: a malt-apple quality (if you’ve ever tasted the grape off the vine, you’d know what I mean). Those melon-like Chardonnays are to me what a pizza topped with pineapple is—yuck!

Last night, I found a Chardonnay that made me smile with pleasure. Cuvee Delaye, 2006 Saint-Veran (Les Pierres Grises). It’s exactly how I like my Chardonnay and it was great with a sage chicken breast breaded cutlet.

The wine cost me an unbelievable $13 after discount. I think its listed price is closer to $17. The wine is imported by Michael Skurnick Wines, NY, a company that often comes up with winners.

Fermentation.blog

RockssandFruit.blog

OpenWineConsort.blog

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
March 2008. All rights reserved.

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March 19, 2008 by Thomas.

The first time I went sailing as a crew member for a friend who owned a schooner, I did everything that I was told to do—everything that I understood, that is. By the end of the day, before I passed out from overwork, I had dubbed sailing talk as “jiberish.”

Every hobby has its own language, acronyms, initials, and probably a secret code or two. But I swear, after reading the language of online wine geeks I wonder if many of them have any fun at all drinking wine. The language that ranges from the pompous to the unintelligible speaks to obsession. But to joy? I don’t know.

It seems as if many geeks are in the game for a pleasure other than the sheer joy of a solid, subtle, “perfect with my food” wine. They want to be blown away, not only by the wine and its unreasonable price, but also by reaching a level that eludes mere mortals—indeed, that mere mortals may never understand.

A geek dissects, analyzes, splits hairs, argues, confuses opinion with fact, jumps on others who disagree, demands some sort of special treatment—especially in restaurants—and all around seems to revel in obvious self importance. It’s no wonder that us regular folks find something elitist about wine geekdom; as the saying goes, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Good luck to anyone with a subjective opinion about a wine. There’s always a geek to disagree and challenge. But challenge what? The only kind of person who challenges subjectivity is someone too cocksure for me to want to get to know well.

A gathering of wine geeks, with its talk of tannins and integrated oak, of calibrating palates, of intensity and power seems always to come with an edge. The conviviality may at times even seem contrived, as if you are being set up to say something others lie in wait to challenge.

Sitting around a table with a bunch of geeks greedily tasting and spouting off often reminds me of my Brooklyn neighborhood, when the mobsters shot high stakes dice on the street corner.

The mobsters knew the game inside out; they spoke insider’s language, too (a hundred says he fours or eights, it’s a snake, I’ll cover him, etc.). These guys hung out together, robbed together, and some of them even killed together. They were a dysfunctional family. When they gambled with great intensity, it was like a contest of the fittest, a challenge to the top dogs.

The crap game produced a great degree of noise but, win or lose, you’d have been hard-pressed to identify as joy what the players expressed—obsession, maybe; desperation, to be sure.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
March 2008. All rights reserved.

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