February 2 2007
We’re officially in the midst of football mania in Indianapolis.
I haven’t seen anything like it. In the ’99 – ’00 season the Pacers made it to the NBA Finals before losing to the Los Angeles Lakers; in ’02 the Indiana Hoosiers basketball team made it to the NCAA Championship game, every year we have the ‘Greatest Spectacle in Racing’ with the Indianapolis 500 and every few years we have the NCAA Final Four in Indianapolis. None of those events have contributed as much pure frenetic energy to Indianapolis as the Colts being in the Super Bowl.
I kind of feel like drinking some tiny bubbles and sipping on some champagne—a response that might be some sort of associational DNA coding to a celebration.
But, I don’t want to get the cart ahead of the horse (bad cliché choice, I know) just yet. There is some business to take care of—notably some food and drink to be imbibed before, during and after the game. Oh, and a game to win for the hometown Colts.
Just in case anybody was wondering, going to the grocery store is an exercise in peril akin to the rush at the store when a big storm comes and people maniacally buy 19 gallons of water and flashlights, just in case.
Except this time its grocery carts full of chips, beer and other football victuals. You know something weird is going on when the Guacamole flavored Doritos have been picked over.
It’s unfortunate that wine isn’t a better match for football fare. I’ll be drinking wine, though. I haven’t picked out the bottle(s) just yet, but I have a hunch it’ll be an inexpensive Riesling like the Jekel and probably a nice Zinfandel. Perhaps, I’ll pick up another bottle of the Kickin’ Ass Colts Cuvee—a wine now getting more than its fair share of promo on Good Grape.
Wine Spectator (WS) and the San Francisco Chronicle both weigh in with football food pairings. An informal tasting panel at WS tried non-vintage Champagne, White Wines (Riesling, Chardonnay and Sav. Blanc) and some hearty reds (Malbec, Cab blend, Shiraz blend, Crianza, Spain Shiraz). Overall winners, according to WS are Chardonnay’s and New World Reds.
At the Chronicle, they make the pairing a bit more tangible and neutral by offering both a beer and a wine pairing. The best pairing suggestion is for chili:
Wine: If your chili recipe is fairly mild, plenty of wines can cozy up to a simmering bowl. Bold wines and delicate wines do not blend well with chili. If you go red, keep the wine young and fruity with good acidity to match the acid in the tomatoes. An Italian-style Sangiovese works well. A somewhat sweeter Zinfandel, like some of the Zins produced in Sonoma, will stand up to the spice in the chili. Think contrasting flavors—spicy and sweet. If the chili is really hot, try a sweeter white wine.
And, At least the Miami and South Beach is getting broken in this week in advance of the South Beach Food & Wine Festival taking place February 22 – 25th. Some of the wine “personalities” that will be in attendance can be found here. Overall, they pale in pop culture stature to their food brethren. Peter Mondavi, while a nice guy for sure, can’t hold a candle to TV titan Al Roker in terms of mindshare.
Over at Wine Spectator, James Laube dropped an interesting factoid—it seems James, a graduate of Chapman College, and a Chicago native, was invited to a tryout for the Baltimore Colts way back when … he got some good natured cocktail party mileage out of intimating that he was drafted. While coy on his pick for the Super Bowl, my hunch is that the pull of a childhood in the Windy City means that Laube is pulling for the Bears.
My prediction for the game? #1, the wine will be very enjoyable. And, I’ll be very happy to win a friendly wager with Dr. Vino by a big Colts victory.
Colts 26 Bears 16
Super Bowl MVP: Colts Rookie Running Back Joseph Addai with 130 yards rushing and 2 touchdowns
Go Colts! And this will be the last Football related post (except for either a personal back-slap or a licking my wounds post for the result of the Dr. Vino wine/football entanglement).
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January 31 2007
The venerable Dr. Vino, or Tyler as his friends call him, had a post on his site on Wednesday morning that gives something of a primer on betting lines and the moneyline in the world of wagering. Dr. Vino’s post is a precursor to THE GAME.
THE GAME, of course, is Super Bowl XLI—the Indianapolis Colts vs. the Chicago Bears.
Of course, our hometown team here at Good Grape is the Colts and they are favored by a touchdown. Dr. Vino is, naturally, a Bears fan, a Chicago transplant living in New York, but still occasionally teaching in Chicago.
The gist of the deal with a moneyline is if your team is the underdog (just ‘dog to be hip with the slang) it lets you make a bet straight up and increase your potential winnings, as opposed to taking a betting line that gives you the benefit of a point spread.
So, for example, if Notre Dame is a 9 point underdog in the Sugar Bowl and you really think they are going to win, than a $100 dollar bet would pay off at $325. Pretty good. But, if they lose within nine points then you might wish you had the point spread because your bet is a loser. Not that I know anything about the moneyline or anything. I certainly don’t know anything about a winning moneyline, being a Notre Dame fan and all.
Tyler and I exchanged an email engineering, in the vein of the Governor’s from our respective states, a friendly little exchange.
Though, it will hardly be as glamorous as the food exchange that’s going to go down between Indiana’s Gov. Mitch Daniels (nicknamed “The Blade” by President Bush when he was Director of the Office of Management and Budget in ’01 – ’03 for his desire to cut social services, rankling Dems along the way) and Gov. Rod Blagojevich from Illinois. Gov. Daniels was wagered caramels and chocolates from Abbott’s Candy, organic cheeses from Traderspoint Creamery, a 15 bean soup pot from N.K. Hurst and shrimp cocktail from the legendary St. Elmo Steak House. Daniels, it should be noted, doesn’t appear to be using the corn pone Midwest hick drawl that won him office these days. Not that I keep track of such things. Blagojevich has staked his wager to Lou Malnatis’ deep dish pizza, Eli’s cheesecake and a some assorted treats from the Illinois Nut and Candy shop.
Incidentally and ironically, when the Colts beat the pants off the Baltimore Ravens, they used the facilities at the non profit that I volunteer at to cook up a bunch of crab cakes. So, these things really do get done beyond lip service.
And, it is going to get paid off for ol’ Jeffro, too. Because I don’t think the Colts are going to lose. This is Peyton’s year—Peyton with the laser rocket arm.
In the event that I do lose, I have offered Tyler the wine moneyline on the game. In lieu of points, I’ve offered to double the value of our exchange. I’ll send him at least $50 worth of wine in the event that the Colts lose and he’ll pick up the tab on a $25 bottle next time I’m in NYC if the Colts are victorious. I’ve offered a 2000 Franciscan Magnificat Meritage blend (a nice bottle in the $45 - $55 range) and a bottle of the Kickin’ Ass Colts Cuvee from Cherry Hill Winery in Oregon. I wrote about them a week or so ago in a post that can be found here.
Tyler is a good sport and one thing I can be certain of is his wine will be tasty in victory! Go Colts!
UPDATE: The interesting, though less material, portion of my prize offering is the Kickin’ Ass Colts Cuvee--something of an Indianapolis Colts specific vino made by an Indiana native at an Oregon winery. Dr. Vino, to his credit, went to some lengths to try and find something that was akin to a Bear. And, he’s gracious enough to not get me four bottles of Toasted Head with the bear on the label. But, even better for me, I get to pick something out from Crush Wine & Spirits that falls in line with the moneyline spirit. I trust his palate, so I may want to take a recommendation, but I’m also inclined to snatch up another bottle of the 2000 Tulocay Zinfandel to add to the two I bought last week from Crush and the one bottle that I’ve already polished off. It’s good stuff. And, to make matters more interesting, I do need to divulge that I grew up about an 1.5 hours away from Chicago and grew up a Bears fan. The Super Bowl Shuffle Bears are a fond memory, but I’m now a Chicago turncoat having converted to the Blue Nation years ago by virtue of zip code. Do the Blue. Make it Personal. Go Colts.
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January 17 2007
If we find a mentor in this life, a trusted confidant that can guide us in matters great and small, a careful, unjudging, unflinching, kind and generous sort who is well-versed in numerous subjects then we have found a great gift.
Robert Parker is my mentor. No, not just a mentor in wine, but a mentor in a number of subjects. You see, he is causing me to look beyond the glass and do research into fields I would have previously considered uninteresting—the fruits of southeast Asia, botany, toast of French origin, and other vast fecundities of modern life …
As some matter of happenstance, similar to finding Parker as my mentor, my wife and I recently took a jaunt over to Cincinnati, OH to go to an International supermarket—emphasis on “super” as this place, Jungle Jim’s, is about 10,000 square feet and has just about every imaginable international food you can imagine and thousands that you didn’t imagine.
It was at Jungle Jim’s that I found canned lychees in the Asian section—my first time ever seeing this elusive fruit. It was kind of like seeing Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster or a Unicorn. I’ve heard about Lychee’s so often, seen pictures even, but they existed only in mythology, never appearing in a tangible form. I was familiar with Lychee’s because of my mentor, Parker.
I’ve had this mild pet peeve for years with some of the descriptors used in tasting notes that use reference points that border on the absurd. The Wine Advocate, in particular, is educational to me not for the insight into producers and wines that deserve my attention, it’s educational because I have to figure out what the hell some of the notes Parker picks up are and where they come from.
Lychee’s (or “Litchi’s” as the US FDA refers to the fruit) is a fruit that is native to Southeast Asia and is grown very selectively and rarely in California, Florida and Hawaii. In my estimation, maybe, at the best, 10% of wine drinkers have ever enjoyed a lychee in order to use it as a reference point.
Ahem. I’m cracking that club.
When I expectantly opened the can I was somewhat disappointed. Lychee’s, in case you have never had one, look like oversized pearl onions with a texture that is similar. They taste, however, like pears … so this is what Parker is always referencing.
Mystery solved. Not that big of deal. Kind of like how frog legs taste like chicken. I might just say it has some pear notes and call it a day.
I had another epiphany, too. Parker, in addition to having one of the finest palates in modern wine history, also is something of a botanist. I mean, I understand the reference to pain grille—sure, if I’m a Francophile using a fancy word for toast makes some sense to me; same for camphor as a descriptor to describe some earthy sweetness. But, Parker described the Abreu Cabernet Sauvignon Thorevilos as having notes of Acacia Flowers.
Acacia Flowers, for the same uninitiated folks who have never had a Lychee, is, according to Wikipedia, a flowering shrub:
There are roughly 1300 species of Acacia worldwide, about 950 of them native to Australia, with the remainder spread around the dry tropical to warm-temperate regions of both hemispheres, including Africa, southern Asia, and the Americas.
Kudos to Parker for his depth of knowledge on all sorts of things scent related. Little did I know that Parker, in addition to educating me on wine, would also provide me a liberal arts education and mentorship delivered six times a year on parchment colored paper with black ink.
I’m still working on “forest floor,” however.
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January 11 2007
I’m a bit of the self-aware sort, so I asked my wife at the end of the night if I was out of line, or even slightly too “in-the-know” and therefore exhibiting a pattern of behavior that could cause an eyeball to roll and be considered off-putting. She said no. And, trust me when I say my wife has no issue with calling a spade a spade and telling me exactly how she feels.
I leave it to you then, dear reader, to help me understand if I was dealing with a boor, or if in fact I was off-putting with an eagerness to express a shared understanding about a shared area of interest.
It’s kind of like the old poker axiom: when you size up the table you always try and find the sucker, the rube, and if you can’t find him, then you’re the sucker. Kind of like that, except this was a game of “find the boor.”
I recently had occasion to be a guest at a holiday mixer. The party was filled with folks who were familiar with each other but largely just acquaintances. This generally leads to lots of small talk and brief asides into a re-occurring conversational thread for the night. For example, roving rounds of conversation around the recent re-decorating, or how much time it took to get the house ready for the holidays, or the traffic at the mall for shopping, etc.
You’ve been to these parties, trust me.
At this particular party the host had a wine cellar that she was showing off to a wandering band of minstrel guests. That was the re-occurring conversational thread. “So, you have a cellar.”
The hostess is about 25 years my senior and was not aware that I drank wine any more than she knew about Jane down the streets odd predilection for vintage fiesta ware—this is to say, she had no knowledge. You have to understand then that contextually the loose outline of the conversation thread that follows would be prefaced by no baseline shared understanding of wine with the person with whom I was speaking.
Presumably, if somebody says something that remotely resembles some level of knowledge indicating a higher-level of interest than a rapport might start to develop.
In the cellar, which was a nice 7 or 8 hundred bottle area the size of a small walk-in closet with temperature control, I immediately noted the Saintsbury Pinot Noir.
Good Grape: That’s a nice bottle. I have a friend whose wife is Asst. Winemaker there.
You would think that might elicit some follow-up. You would be wrong. Cricket. Cricket.
Good Grape: (eyeballing the Silver Oak): Silver Oak is nice, do you get shipments?
You would think that might lead to a conversation about sourcing and the twice annual releases, but nah.
Good Grape: (eyeballing the Bordeaux cases): Do you drink Bordeaux? Every year I think about getting futures, but, boy, this year the prices are just crazy.
You would think that might lead to a conversation about the two dozen bottles from 1999 and 2000 that were sitting in neatly packed boxes. Nah. Distracted silence.
And, so on and so forth for at least another three comments/observations/questions. Basically everything I said that was an attempt at some level of shared understanding was a non-sequitar to something else, and so on and so forth.
I, unfortunately, left the conversation shaking my head wondering if she was just a completely self-absorbed wine snob, or if perhaps I was trying to hard to demonstrate my wine chops and therefore was coming off as my own sort of jerk.
Later, after I had excused myself to go back upstairs and get another house pour (which was pretty good, by the way) I asked my wife I was out of line or off-putting and she said no that the hostess was very rude for not picking up on the verbal cues to have an advanced conversation.
So, I leave it to you, reader. Was I a “check out the big brain on brad” or was the hostess either A) a clueless wine wannabe or B) An in-the-know wine wannabe that didn’t suffer fools? And, have you ever been in a situation like this at a party? Leave a comment.
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January 8 2007
Tim at Winecast offers up some excellent predictions (found here) on the wine world for 2007 and one of his predictions has to do with a blogger going mainstream. He says,
At Least One Wine Blogger ‘Goes Pro’ - One could already argue that some wine bloggers have made the move already with Alder speaking at Antonia Allegra’s Symposium for Professional Wine Writers this year and Lenn introducing his own wine club, but I think a wine blogger will be hired by the established wine press in 2007. My money is on the Wine Spectator to be the innovator who will bring on this blogger as a “guest” but they will remain blogging there long-term.
One of the most under-played stories of 2006, before we get too far away from the year that was, has to be Robert Parker’s re-jiggering of his critics line-up. Kevin Zraly, David Schildknecht and a guy named Neal Martin, who was formerly a pro-am blogger in the U.K. via his www.wine-journal.com site, all joined Parker’s line-up of writers and critics with seemingly minimal to no disruption to the business at hand.
One might say that Neal Martin might be the benchmark for wine bloggers going pro, having already made the jump mainstream for the blogosphere.
Martin flew under the radar and out of the stream of consciousness of the U.S. wine blogosphere, but clearly going from being a wine outsider/blogger to a “Critic-at-Large” working for Robert Parker in the span of 48 months is a Cinderella story of some magnitude.
I’ve poked around the Mark Squires boards on the site for Neal’s threads and he’s still in ramp-up mode for sure, but check out his site Wine-Journal site for a three part narrative on the back-story for his ascendance—you can find it here, here and here. I’m providing a couple of excerpts, as well. Martin writes in the affected U.K. manner, rife with pop culture reference and graduate level vocab--similar to countryman Nick Hornby, author of books like About a Boy, High Fidelity and others.
Wine-journal started in June 2nd 2003, written by someone with not a book to his name, no column in a magazine or newspaper, no reputation to build upon. But neither did Robert Parker when he started off in the 1970’s and if he can do it then why not I? Even if I got just a couple of readers each day: that would be an achievement. For the first month I got exactly that, a couple of visits each day, usually myself or my mum checking what I had written about her in the diary. November 1st 2006 and during the 31 days in October I have over 130,000 visits and added another 24,000 unique visits from September. Nearly all through word-of-mouth, barely a mention in the press, without any compromise and without any bold proclamations of greatness. It is a readership, a status of affairs that I could never have imagined when I started.
Wine-journal.com built its success on a budget of precisely £11.49 per month including VAT (cue many webmasters to question the zero’s on their technical support bill.) That is everything, my total cost; so if any aspiring young writer reading this wants to express their adoration of Malmsey or Austrian Grüner-Veltliner or English sparkling wine to the Alaskan extremes, South American deltas or the metropolises on the Eastern Seaboard, then just do it - you will be astonished how simple it really is.
So for now I must bid you adieu. However, it will not be long before the site is transferred to its new home and then it is down to business. So dry your eyes because the end is just the beginning.
Neal hits his stride in the next installment where he recounts receiving an inquiry email from a Parker associate:
I maintain my morning ritual: de-scale my cup that is ossified with tea tannin; crank up the PC, open my in-box and then spend the next ten minutes deleting more spam than you would find in a post-war suburban butcher’s counter. Twenty invitations to enlarge my penis (no need thank you) and similar number begging me to share $10,000,000 from Dr. Ubalubu in Nigeria (still nothing in my account despite all his promises.) In fact, these messages are so profligate that I have a reflex action that deletes them in the minimal amount of time, so much so that have occasionally erased something whose modus operandi is not to clog up my mail-box.
It very nearly happens with one whose sender’s name I fail to recognize and with finger hovering over the delete key, I withdraw for the simple reason that it is highlighted in red and has a little flag that henceforth shall indicate “Do not delete me because I am about to change your life.”
I click enter and read the short but to-the-point message. There is this guy, innocuous enough name, claiming to be an associate of Robert Parker, the crux of which is: “We were wondering if you would be interested in becoming a wine critic and writer for The Wine Advocate.”
Check it out and kudos, as well, to Alder for his invitation to the Wine Writers Symposium--he will in all likelihood be next and the first US blogger to expand beyond the digital realm to full-time wine writing gig, as Tim astutely points out.
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