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...

Say it ain't so...

If you think that my "normal posts" are circuitous, this one will stop even my most devoted readers in their tracks follow along. A while back, I met my friend William Bellomo through a handful of mutual friends from Philly. We actually didn't put this together until much later, because at the time, we (myself from the City of Champions, my friends from the City that Celebrates Fictional Boxers for lack of anything to actually Celebrate and occassionally William) used to regularly gather on Fridays to have dinner parties: the only requirement was to bring a bottle of wine.

Well on Saturday - would that have been 2002 -- during the winter Olympics, I sat with the Fictional Boxer Idolators and actually rooted against Mario Lemieux. The USA was playing Canada in the Olympic Hockey tournament and I was being forced to root for John LeClair to defeat Mario Lemieux. It was very much akin to picking the grey Army Men instaed of the Green ones or (for you females) trying to hook up with Blair rather than Jo from the Facts of Life with the Dreamie guy. Simply unheard of.

So then it happened. We thought it might. The #8 Budweiser car and its driver (along with it's current and exponentially increasing $2Billion in merchandising) joined forces with Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson - a fate truly worse than death. I strongly considered buying a case of Miller Lite rather than one of cool, crisp mildly-hopped refreshing American lager with nuances of beechwood aging. But I instead began to consider the other, more likable options. Being an emotional person, I considered the immediate purchase of #11 FedEx Merchandise, but cooler heads prevailed (although I have not eliminated the possibilty).

(Here's the point at the end of my seemingly random session of complaints.) Do you know what a corked wine is? A lot of people don't. Let's review. You're at a restaurant. The sommelier offers you a taste of the wine that you are about to consume. You don't like it. Do you send it back? The answer is emphatically no. The waiter allows you to taste the wine to ensure that it is not flawed. If he recommended it, and you detest it, you drink it and never come back. You are given a taste of wine to check for flaws, not quality.

I once submitted a bottle of wine to a journalist that I thought was best in class. (The wine was 1998 Fleurie, Vieilles-Vignes, Domaine Bigot/Alex Gambal.) It was truly unbelievable Beaujolais. The journalist brogught the bottle back to me the nest day and said "Taste this". It was floored. I gave him another and a few hours later he called me to tell me that it was one of the finest under $15 bottles of wine he had ever experienced.

When a wine is "corked", it smelles of wet cardboard. It's a little hard to describe until you experience it, and honestly that bottle of Fleurie was on of the most corked bottles of wine that has ever been. The wine itself is good, but a bacteria gets in the cork and permanently taints it.

This causes a lot of problems for wine geeks because somewhere between 5 and 10% of all wines experience cork taint - and it's completely random.

So to return to Mario Lemieux and Dale, Jr., recently a few producers of Grand Cru Burgundy have decided to begin bottling their Grand Cru wines in synthetic corks - that is corks that are not susceptible to being corked.

My opinion remains: wine is a living breathing thing. There is a better chance that I will drink a wine with the wrong dish or at the wrong stage in its development than pull the cork on one that is flawed. Call me traditional, but when I open a 30 year old-bottle of Vintage Champagne I want to hear a (rather improper by Sommelier's rules) pop. Somehow a screwtop doesn't cut it - even if there's a 10% chance that the cork will fail me.

I want a cork. I don't look down on a screw top - rather I evaluate a wine on quality alone: the importer doesn't matter, the price doesn't matter and the type of encolsure certainly doesn't matter. But do I really have to root for Jeff Gordon?