Chinese Proverb

"Once upon a time I dreamed I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I woke, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man."

When it comes to wine or anything else, I prefer quoting Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the Chicago Nobel Laureate and my idol in re-iterating the Mahābhārata:

The Simple is the Seal of the Truth.

My first job in my entire life was working for a chemical processing company called Vertex Image Products. I thought I was smart, but more often than not the partners and shareholders in the company proved me wrong.

Im sure that to this day I don't undertand what went on behind the scenes. I'm also sure that my opinion didn't matter because I was the one person who had the least understanding of what was going on. In fact, I didn't know what the hell we did and when we were slow and I worked on the farm cows scared me.

I find myself in a weird position today in that it seems that no one in the wine industry knows what's going on. I truly believe that. The proliferation of "independant analysts" and bloggers and blah blah blah annoys me extensively.

I LOVE the fact that your hobby is wine, I LOVE the fact that you drink expensive wines daily because you are affluent, but frankly my opinion is that you shouldn't listen to the majority of the people that talk about wine.

Reviewers try to justify themselves through playing the reverse logic theme. "I have no professional affiliation, so I am unbiased." Rubbish. If you buy wine from someone ask of them not how much they know, but whether or not they have SOLD wine.

Any stock trader will tell you they learn more from their losses than their gains. A wine merchant, although there are seemingly none left, sometimes wins, sometimes loses; he evaluates what you like and don't like and hopefully in a case of 12, 7 are enjoyable to you. He goes from there.

The proliferation of wine has allowed lawyers, bankers and everyone in between to criticize outstanding wines from around the world. Let me give you a tip - blog frequency does not verify quality of opinion.

Ask questions. Have you visited these wine regions? If so, did you taste the best and worst producers? Why is this better than any other wine from that region? Wine professionals travel to France or California to reassure their opinions; tourists go to brag and eat expensive dinners. I prefer trusting people that havr looked at the bad and the good and know that their choice is the best suggestion. I would also prefer for possibly every person in New York to leave the wine business because frankly I don't need a retail employee to spit out facts they learned from a wine's distributor...