Good Grape Wine Company

January 29 2008

Music & Tasting Notes

There are no new ideas.  This was re-affirmed for me last week with Jim Gordon’s Unreserved wine blog—and that’s no slight to Jim.  If anything, it is a personal backhanded pimp slap to my own depth of knowledge regarding contemporary wine history, or lack thereof, I should say.

Does subscribing to Wine Business Monthly since 2001 count for some sort of carbon, er, credibility offset?

Last Tuesday, while walking my dog, Coco, the cutest pug/beagle mix in the world, bundled against the Indiana mid-winter chill, iPod earphones in place, listening to Brett Dennen because I roll more on the singer-songwriter side of things, I was thinking about Sacre Bleu wine and Chateau Petrogasm. Sacre Bleu has as the centerpiece of their market engagement a lot of collaboration with bands and promotional events with music.  In addition, while I think Chateau Petrogasm is pretty cool and their visual associations to encapsulate the taste or experience of a wine is novel, frequently I have a hard time translating the images to any sort of understanding of what the wine would be like.  Call me dense, but it is true.  A picture may say a 1000 words, but not all of them make sense together.  However, wine and music … hmm … who doesn’t understand a muscular, sharp, angular, tight red wine, all dissonant, sharp, and angular like Metallica, for example.

So, I got to thinking about a different translation … Sacre Bleu, wine, and music.  Ding, ding.  Man, “that’s what I should do,” I thought.  Wouldn’t it be fun to do a weekly wine review and analogize it to music?  Nowadays, with music streaming technology, you can even link to a song so people can “get’ what you’re saying.

Well, this is all well and good, right?  Last Tuesday this was a good idea.  Then on Thursday, Jim writes the following:

Some years ago, Kermit Lynch, the Berkeley wine merchant and importer, who was definitely not a fan of the points system, suggested in a seminar that people get creative with how they convey the style and quality of wine.  He recommended that people compare wines to art, to architecture and other forms of creativity instead of reducing them to digits.

Jim continues …

But, lately I have tried comparing wines to classic rock sounds. I have two teenage sons, they both play guitars in garage bands, and they love Led Zeppelin (above, Robert Plant, left, and Jimmy Page), Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, the Who and Metallica (classic to them).

So instead of rating them on the 100-point scale, here are some wines I’ve tried recently, and how I’d rate them on the pop-rock scale.

Ahem, within the span of 48 hours I went from being a little onanistic to wishing I had a little more history to draw from in and around wine and the wine industry.

Of course, somebody has hit on this before … of course it would be an industry vet channeling another wine industry vet like Kermit Lynch.

Silly me.

By the way, Jim, it is a good idea!  Wine … music … who wouldn’t get it?  I might steal it.  And for Brett Dennen, I would analogize the 2006 Orin Swift Cellars “The Prisoner” Napa Red Blend.

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