What I've Learned

Don't start a blog that requires you to purchase an expensive beverage regularly. Talk about something that's free, or something that you were going to do anyway.

Like, for instance, I probably eat fast food as much as four times a week lately. That would be some good blogging. Hey, JITB, ease up on the mayo, OK?

Or, perhaps, I can write about not going to the gym. I have been not going to the gym every day for a month. That's like 30 blog posts about what I am doing not at the gym. I could talk about my Netflix addiction, or the fact that my room is really, really clean.

I could talk about moving—yet again—across town. Again.

I could tell my adoring public that I'm broke. But hey, everybody's broke right now.

Fact is, I drink wine now and then, but it isn't my life. Credit cards are my life. Rent is my life. Trying not to get fired is my life. And nobody wants to read about that.

And if they did, they'd check me out on facebook.

Cheers!

Yellow Hawk Cellar Kick-Ass Red 2006

Ah, gentle reader, there is no better time than the New Year for talking about the dark side of being a wine charlatan: addiction.

The possibility of addiction is a demon that stalks everyone who enjoys the pleasure of a good drink—be it wine, scotch, light beer or cola.

Long before I became a wine charlatan, I had discovered my addictive tendencies. Even as a child, I was powerless to resist certain urges. I struggled with this financially crippling and socially debilitating problem well into college, and even now I occasionally overindulge myself. But it isn’t booze that I’m talking about—it’s Breyer horses.

I love my plastic ponies. And sometimes, when I’m feeling down, I’ll zip over to Bi-Mart or the feed store for a quick fix. Sometimes I just go to look at them. Sometimes I’ll drop some cash so I can take one out of its box and inhale the sweet scent of freshly molded cellulose acetate. The very sight of those yellow boxes transforms me into a hybrid of my current, socially acceptable grown-up self and the unibrowed, orthodontia-enhanced, horse-crazy, 12-year-old self I once was.

The thing about addiction is that even when you deny yourself the primary substance, you often have a “next-best thing” that you still allow. For a food addict, it might be a fat- and sugar-free version of her favorite snack. For the cigarette addict, it might be nicotine patches. For the Breyer horse addict, it is anything (ANYTHING!) with a picture of a horse on it.

And that, my friends, is how I happened to be drinking the Kick Ass Red on Tuesday night. I came home late from work, we had company over, there were three bottles of wine on the counter...and one of them had a picture of a horse on it. Ergo, I drank the horse wine.

No matter that the horse was a mule (shades of Fiddler on the Roof?). It was equine-ish, and therefore more desirable than any other available beverage. Which is not to say that it was good. In fact, drinking it while eating a brownie was my single worst wine experience ever. If you ever meet anyone who has never thrown up and they ask you what vomit tastes like, please direct them to take a bite of a Duncan Hines brownie and then a swallow of Kick Ass Red. I hope they will thank you for the vividly realistic experience (perhaps even followed by an even more realistic experience) before un-friending you on Facebook.

PRICE: $20-ish
DRINKABILITY: I don't think I really gave it a fair shake. For one, I'm one of those people who can't stand chocolate and fruit in the same bite. For another, I wasn't drinking this with a real meal (maybe good with something savory?) or by itself on a clean palate.
SNOB VALUE: Something about the label makes me associate this wine with redneck-ism. No offense to all you mule lovers out there.
WHERE TO FIND IT: Yellow Hawk Cellar
FAMOUS LAST WORDS: A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!

2007 Charles Smith Wines Kung Fu Girl Riesling

So when I pulled this bottle out of my wine rack (OK, to be fair, my “wine rack” is two cardboard boxes in my bedroom closet) my first thought was, where can I get a tripod and timer? Because, obviously, the only possible picture to accompany this review is of me breaking a board with my forehead.

Alas, after several “practice runs” karate-chopping household items (easiest: reduced-fat Triscuits; most difficult: slate-top coffee table) I decided that “Kung-Fu Girl” was not a nickname I’d be earning anytime soon. Maybe I could illustrate the post with pictures of my bruised hand.

So, with preliminaries completed, I unscrewed the bottle and took a long pull.

What follows is a transcript of my thoughts:

• “Hmmmmm.”
• “Huh?”
• “Oooooh.”
• “Ahhhh.”

Kung Fu Girl is most aptly described as “refreshing,” I think. I don’t know what other people taste, but in general, I find riesling to be very apple cidery. In fact, if you put this next to a glass of Spire and blindfolded me, I’d probably not be able to tell that they weren’t from the same family of beverages.

Which isn’t to say that it is an oversimplified flavor. KFG can be quite complex and tangy. It has hints of vinegar (not in a bad way, mind you), lime and pear.

When pitted against a dinner of grilled sweet onion and bleu cheese on a bed of mixed greens, it held up surprisingly well. (Far, far better than those Triscuits held up against my fists of fury.)

PRICE:$12
DRINKABILITY: I don’t even know why I include this category. For the right kind of person, everything is drinkable. I’d drink straight Windex if it came in a glass with three olives and an umbrella.
SNOB VALUE: Check out the ratings. Charles Smith can do no wrong.
WHERE TO FIND IT: K Vintners and any grocery store in eastern Washington state.
FAMOUS LAST WORDS: In Chinese, “Kung Fu” refers to one's expertise in any skill, not necessarily martial arts. Time and again, regardless of the label, Charles Smith has Kung Fu-ed his way through the grapes of eastern Washington. Hieeeeee-yah!

Taking off my 'lecture hat'

I had to take a little break from drinking wine for the blog. I would say it was for financial reasons, but really, it had more to do with being a little on the moody side for the past couple of weeks. Nobody wants to read tasting notes that read like a cry for help.

I was simultaneously very occupied and very restless. I wanted to drink for non-educational reasons. Thus I found myself “tasting” pitchers of Bud Light over games of ping-pong. (From my notes: “Wait, there was beer in this cup? I could have sworn this one was the urine sample.”)

I did drink some wine since the last post, of course. It can’t be helped. I had a nice 2005 Syrah from L’Ecole. I had two quite decent Napa wines and one undrinkable Australian in a blind tasting with friends. I downed half a bottle of real champagne one eventful Friday night.

None of this taught me anything. Nothing I can say about it will enlighten you. Maybe you’ll come away from this post wondering what exactly I’m getting at.

So I’ll tell you. As I read back through these posts, they seem more and more pretentious. So I’m trying to get back to my roots. Take my word for it: I don’t know any more about wine now than I did six months ago.

Also in the category of things I don’t know much about:
• African colonization in the 18th century.
• String theory.
• Milan Kundera.
• Internal combustion engines.
• Men.

This is my pledge to you, dearest reader: July will be a month of hilarious, lighthearted posts. No more wallowing around in the interior wasteland of my personal life.

Less thinking, more drinking. I promise.

Exceptional wines under $150? Who is he kidding?

"Great Wine Bargains" in Slate

Mike Steinberger drives me crazy. Slate’s wine critic almost always looks eastward for his “bargain” picks—and by eastward, I mean Europe. In his previous column, which showed off great wines going for a tenth of the price of today’s picks, he didn’t pick a single Washington wine. Oregon was as close as he got.

In today’s column, there is (I kid you not) only one American wine. And it’s from California. That kind of thinking is so 15 years ago, Mike. Napa has sold out, people. California wine is The Man’s wine now. You’ve got to come to the Northwest to have an authentic, down-home, small-grower experience these days.

I’m not some kind of tree-hugging antiglobalization wacko, but I do find it hard to believe that only one American wine was good enough to make the list. If there’s one thing that writing this blog has taught me, it’s that there are really fantastic local wines in Walla Walla—and 98 percent of them fall into the (huge!) category of costing between $15 and $150 retail.

For example, I had a glass of Walla Voila chenin blanc with dinner on Friday. It was, in a word, transcendent. I don’t dare tell you what the bottle costs or where to get it, though, lest Marty should run out of it and ruin my summer.

So keep tasting locally, friends. We can prove Mr. Steinberger’s eurocentric picks to be myopic—one bottle at a time.

Boomtown (Dusted Valley) Syrah 2005

So I sat down to watch Sideways for the first time with my trusty bottle in hand. (Yes, I am four years behind. This is why I am the charlatan and you are not.)

And actually I had a glass. And not just a glass. An actual piece of stemware! Thank you, Crystal, for ending my "champagne from a paper cup" days.

So, in that newly acquired glass was Dusted Valley Boomtown Syrah 2005. Next to it was a pile of whole-wheat flatbread, dried apricots, a surprisingly good Spanish olive oil and a cheap balsamic vinegar.

I point out the vinegar because having it really helped with mellowing the drink (or deadening my palate—you choose). So did the copious amount of parmesan cheese I plopped on each of those warm, chewy bread triangles.

God, I love food.

So, talk of food and slow indie movie making you sleepy? Just put a little Boomtown under your tongue. The burn will bring you back down to earth.

PRICE: $15 at Walla Walla Wine Cellar
DRINKABILITY: Quaffable, but... uh... far from transcendent.
SNOB VALUE: Ninety points and top 100 value wines of 2008 in Wine & Spirits magazine
WHERE TO FIND IT: Walla Walla Wine Cellar
FAMOUS LAST WORDS: I'll let Paul Giamatti take this one.

NY Times neglects to interview the charlatan

Carly sent over a link—from the online edition of the NY Times—to an article I wish I’d written. It discusses some fairly high-profile studies (blind taste-tests really) that seemed to show that wine snobbery is all in our heads. But as the Times aptly points out, the people who preferred the Two-Buck Chuck were not necessarily “experts.” They were just average charlatans like yours truly.

One favorite (and quite telling) passage:
“…But assuming for the moment that it’s true that most drinkers prefer the cheap stuff, why does anyone bother buying $55 cabernet? One answer is provided by a second experiment, in which presumably sober researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Business School demonstrated that the more expensive consumers think a wine is, the more pleasure they are apt to take in it.”

And while that’s a good point—certainly there is a placebo effect to swilling a bottle so expensive that it makes me late on my rent—I think that pricing isn’t entirely an effect of the winemaker’s ego. Something the Times article doesn’t really touch upon: There are higher production costs for better grapes.

But the writer does hint in that direction, invoking context as being an important (and perhaps the most important) part of enjoying a bottle.

What can context do? A wimpy Rose that I would normally scoff at becomes really quite drinkable with the addition of quick-witted company and an artsy period drama. A $10 Italian table red drunk with the accompaniment of s’mores is almost transcendent. Champagne bought in gallon jugs became an indulgence when it poured from a rented fountain at my best friend’s wedding.

So, my darlings, please try not to drink alone in dank basements. Find a sunny spot in the yard or lay in your truck bed looking at the stars. Wine is only as good as the place where it’s consumed.