I love reading wine descriptions. The best I every saw was one wag who
said "it's an impetuous wine, a wine that deserves to be slapped." In the
last 20 years, particularly after the rise of Robert Parker (and his now famous
newsletter, The Wine Advocate) and the simultaneous distribution of tasting
kits, there has arisen a certain precision in wine caricature. On the
numbers end, there is RP's famous 100-point scale. Only a handful of wines
get the vaunted Wine Advocate 100 point designation, and many years no wine is
sufficiently transcendent to achieve the distinction. On the description
end, there is the never-ending quest to find metaphors to match the nose and
palate sensation of a wine. Here's a partial list of what you will see on
any given day in any of the wine mags, in attempting to describe a wine, usually
described as "notes": toast, vanilla, charcoal, licorice, graphite,
blackberry, hoisin, cherry, berry, truffle, bitter chocolate, tobacco, hot
stone, cassis, floral, pencil lead, peach, bell pepper, chile powder, cracked
pepper, fennel seed, lime, apple tart, clove honey, red apple, lemon, exotic
flowers, cinnamon, rose petals, boysenberry, smoke, meat juice, citrus pit,
cherry jam, spice cake, evergreen, dark chocolate, pear, melon, acacia flowers,
roasted herbs, pink grapefruit, guava, grass, wet stone, oyster shell, lemon
peel. And that's only a limited example. The bad news for people who
paid $8,000 a case for the Premier Cru from the vaunted 2005 vintage is that
their wine is worth probably half that much as we speak. The good news is
that all great wine is now on sale everywhere (for all I know, Maybachs are
being discounted too). The Premier Cru is French designation dating from
the mid-19th century, which includes Lafite-Rothschild, LaTour, Margaux, and
Haut-Brion. In 1973 the French powers-that-be added Château Mouton
Rothschild to the list, bringing the total to five. Not that there aren't
fabulous wines in the same class, year after year. Even in France, there
are wines that are known to be beyond the pale. The best Montrachets, for
example. And the best Pomerols, which are probably the most expensive
wines on earth (a bottle of 1982 Château Petrus will set your back $8,000 at a
good Las Vegas restaurant). And how can you ignore Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, whose ethereal
Burgundies will transport you to another dimension, while putting a nice
fraction of $1000 on your Platinum AMEX (here's a
site auctioning a case of DRC with a starting bid of $25,000). In
fact, here's the description of only one of the bottles:
"Medium ruby color. Initially, this is aromatically tight and closed but after 2
hours, it absolutely explodes from the glass with a breathtaking panoply of
Asian spices, exotic fruit aromas and a touch of earth followed by rich, lush,
almost opulent flavors that melt in the mouth and coat the palate with a layer
of velvet on the fantastically long finish. This is a dramatic wine in every
sense of the word yet it's not at all showy but rather discreet and understated.
I particularly like the sense of inner power and purity of expression and this
is as good a post '45 DRC as I ever hope to drink. It should last for another 50
years and if you ever have the chance, don't miss it! "
Really. "Inner power". See, these wine guys just go nuts.
And they like the fact that the tannins and other wine mojo will make the bottle
sit there and get better for decades, even though they're going to do what I did
and get funky and decide to drink the sucker one night, well before its
expiration date.
Oh, and Château d'Yquem, the fabulous Sauterne. I bought a bottle of that in
the 80's at an Orly duty-free and finally sold it a couple of years ago for $500
and donated the proceeds to somebody (Human Rights Watch? ACLU? I
can't actually remember, but I think I mentioned it on the blog). Italy
has the phenomenal Gaja contributions. Spain contributes Vega Sicilia.
A bottle of the 1985 vintage (Unico) will set you back over a thousand dollars.
And Australia checks in with Grange Hermitage, a wondrous Shiraz by Penfold's
whose 1986 vintage will cost you about $500 a bottle. I should know, I
owned a case once, though I think I paid about $50 a bottle for it, and then
methodically drank the lot over the course of a couple of years. I never
did that with Vega Sicilia. I would pick up 3 or 4 bottles in Spain and
give one to Cath and another to a friend and drink the other one or bring it to
a party. Then, there was the case of 1985 Château Margaux that I bought at
auction. It runs about $500 a bottle now, even in these difficult times,
and I drank all of that too.
Bad Whimsy.
~~
Still, you have to wonder. Has this recession/depression put the brakes on
collectibles prices? Sure it has. Wine, rare stamps, vintage
Ferraris, the whole lot. Rare coins seem to be holding up, but
only-somewhat-rare coins seem to be taking a beating. Makes me want to go
buy a case of 1998 right-bank wine wonderments, actually, but Sweet Junie thinks
that saving for Paris may be the wiser idea.
~~~
Well, I got ACELP to work on our system, but there's still a little buzz out of
the speakers. When I redirect the output to a file instead and look
at it with Sony Sound Forge, it's solid, no problems, the real deal. So,
I'm figuring that it's the output queue to the DAC or something that is creating
the occasional hiss and pop. It's going to be a bitch to correct, though,
because it's all time-dependent and every depends on everything else of course,
and the system is swapping in code segments and I don't have a lot of control
over that. Plus Our Chip Vendor's support is out of China, which means
that every question I ask generates two more questions, and in the end I usually
have to figure out the solution myself.
~~~
So, GM filed for bankruptcy. Could the world get any weirder? My son
has his hours cut back, but I'm pretty much swamped with work. Not that
that couldn't change in a heartbeat, but it's hard to figure where one is in
this current debacle, right? I went to the monthly board meeting of the
arts association, and it sounded like more of the same: contributions
down, funding sources tight, artists of all stripes needing more help. One
guy on the board is retired from a large consulting firm, presumably with a nice
pension, something that will be extinct in 10 years. He shows up at all
the committee meetings, usually with a take-out package of Thai noodles and
chopsticks, which tends to irritate the hell out of me for some reason.
Eat it in the car while you're driving here, I think, can't be worse than
texting, I think.
I'm probably just getting testy with the years.
~~~
Dima and I worked all weekend helping a client who makes this little thing that
routes the audio and video from your PC (which has presumably downloaded content
from Netflix or Hulu or whatever) to your "stereo system", which is ancient
jargon for whatever mega-HD contraption you have hooked up to your 52-inch
Panasonic LCD. We're working on the details of upgrading the software in
the little thing, which happens over WiFi and has to be reliable.
The bad news is that Dima missed a tennis match and couldn't spend a lot of
time with his grandchildren who arrived this weekend from Russia. the good
news is that we bill by the hour.
~~~
Couldn't bring myself to watch the last half of either Denver-LA or
Cleveland-Orlando, which turned out to be therapeutic, as both were miserable
exercises in futilty.
~~~
I received yet another email from Zia Parker. She is the queen of aqua
therapy. I have no idea why she continues to email me, as I have no
interest in this particular Bouldereque inanity. She is always taking
large groups to some foreign venue to float in some small body of water and
center one's self with the North, East, South, West / fire, water, earth, air
orientation of Gaia. Here's a typical quote:
"Bill Mollison, the founder of Permaculture, points out that design is the most important aspect of human settlements and production of
foods.
That is because design can double or even quadruple the efficiency of a system.
No fertilizer can do that. Even the most efficient mechanical device known,
which is the water wheel, if it is designed well--operates at 95%
efficiency--far from the 400% possible with a good design."
Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ. Somebody has to tell Zia that 100% efficiency is
about all you can do, and even that would probably violate one of the laws of
thermodynamics.
~~~
OK, I'm done kvetching. See you tomorrow. And I mean that
whimsically.
Laos
Mongolia
Tajikistan
Kyrgyzstan
Montenegro
Guinea
Rwanda
Malawi
Barbados
Fiji
Mauritania
Togo
Swaziland
Suriname
Central
African Republic
Sierra
Leone
Cape
Verde
Lesotho
Eritrea
Belize
Bhutan
Maldives
Antigua
and Barbuda
Guyana
Burundi
Saint
Lucia
Djibouti
Liberia
Seychelles
The
Gambia
Grenada
Saint
Vincent and the Grenadines
Saint
Kitts and Nevis
Vanuatu
Samoa
Comoros
East
Timor
Solomon
Islands
Guinea-Bissau
Dominica
Tonga
São
Tomé and Príncipe
Kiribati
I
finally got the time to check out Mousavi's Facebook
