There were dozens of those little cards left, staring back at me when I opened my pack.  Cards that I should have given away to friends old and new at the Wine Bloggers Conference in Walla Walla.  The “normal” Joe would have been handing out those cards left and right. Instead, they were practically shouting their futility – after all, what good are they to me? I already know who I am.

It wasn’t the fact that I had been in a new place for the first time, seeing new faces (I’m well used to that scenario); it also wasn’t the fact that back home one of our 100+ year-old trees came down on our neighbors garage in a fierce storm, cleaving it nearly into two (no one was hurt, apart from the trees).  The reason I wasn’t myself was that my teacher was dying.

My teacher was my dog, Sam.  He passed away while I was at the conference (if you were in attendance and I appeared out of it or seemed dismissive, please understand that it wasn’t you, it was most definitely me).

Sam was pretty sprightly for a guy in his 80s (people years, of course), still weighing in at 85 lbs. of mostly muscle.  Still fairly strong, too (he had once accidentally broken my left hand when we were out for a run).  Stubborn, too – in fact, I used to joke that I could sum up Sam’s thoughts in one sentence (“Hey guys – this is what I want to do now”).

Our experience with Sam was more Marley and Me than Lassie – he had a penchant for stealing bread, licking the icing off of cakes on the kitchen counter, eating through metal cans of dog food, and practically destroying the house during thunderstorms.  BUT… he was one of the sweetest souls I’ve ever known.

Sam taught me a lot about how to really appreciate wine (yes, I’m serious – read the post).  But his greatest lessons were in teaching me compassion and patience – the latter being something that I’ve often cited as the ‘secret sauce’ of wine blogging (and life in general, really; yes, I’m serious – watch the vid).

My only real regret is not that I wasn’t there to say goodbye when Sammy passed – it’s that I wasn’t the quickest study when it came to fully grasping all of those lessons in compassion and patience that Sammy tried to teach me.

Here’s to a friend, a sweet soul, an old teacher – long may his lessons be remembered.

Cheers!

1WineDude.com has never (and will never) accept sponsored articles, which means that whatever you read on its virtual pages is purely the product of my somewhat deranged mind.

I do need to feed my family, however, and so I have been taking some paid writing gigs on the side.  One of those gigs has been for the blog of Wines.com, called Wine Crush.  That gig is not promoting individual wines, producers, or brands, and I have free reign on the content for my posts – Wines.com just wanted to add the value of quality wine-elated content for their customers (but for some reason, they still chose me as a contributor…).

Over the last few months I’ve built up some content at Wine Crush of which I’m proud and thought that I’d cal attention to it here, in case it’s of interest to 1WD readers.  Similar voice, of course, but the topics are a bit different than what I cover here and so I think they’re complimentary (the Wine Crush content is meant more for those at the start of their wine journey, while 1WD remains more in what I like to call the “Intermediate” space, though all are certainly welcome, newbies and experts alike).

Anyway, check it out if you’re so inclined:

http://www.winecrushblog.com/search/label/1WineDude

Cheers!

(images: winecrushblog.com)

“A bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson had it right about special wines being eminently memorable, though he forgot to add the part about how wine tasting, like a hot date, owes so much to anticipation.

And as much as I like to think that I am inching ever closer to the Zen mystery, it’s really difficult not to put expectations on a tasting in which magnums of 1995 Champagne and Graham’s Vintage Port (1977), as well as bottles of 1981 Vieux Chateau Certan, take second billing.

Which is exactly what happens when you have a bottle of (genuine) 1929 Haut-Brion in the lineup.

That’s because the 1929 Haut-Brion is one of those extremely rare triple threats: world-class producer, renowned vintage (before every other release was deemed “vintages of the century” in Bordeaux) and rare old wine (in decent condition).

Or so we had hoped, anyway.

As it turns out, that fabled bottle that had me (and several other guests at the Columbia Firehouse restaurant in old town Alexandria, VA) buzzing with anticipation last week had apparently leaked at some point in it’s 81-year history.

Uh-oh.

We (a group of about 15 people) were assembled as the hand-picked guests of my buddy Jason Whiteside, DWS (Washington Wine Academy instructor, friend of the Dude and frequent guest poster here) to celebrate the achievement of his WSET Diploma in Wine & Spirits (a pre-req for entrance into the Masters of Wine program).  It’s a difficult and hard-earned achievement, well-worthy of opening some special bottles.  As our generous host put it after inspecting the most special of that night’s bottles, “this wine could be deader than Lincoln”…

Haut-Brion, of course, has been special for a long time, having first come to the attention of the wine-loving public outside of France in the 1600s – or so goes the story as taken from the diaries of Samuel Pepys, who on April 10, 1663 recorded his first encounter with HB:

“…a sort of French wine called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most perticular taste that I never met with.”

Haut-Brion kept up its reputation into the 1800s, being classified as a First Growth in the oft-cited but never-intended-to-have-any-staying-power 1855 classification of Bordeaux wines (the only producer outside of the Medoc to be included in the top tier).  Most  modern critics agree that Haut-Brion has been consistently stellar since the mid-seventies.

1929 is widely regarded as a special and superb vintage for Bordeaux, and it’s been speculated that the dry and warm conditions that year created an almost “cooked must” situation during fermentation that is partly responsible for the longevity and aging potential of that year’s wines.  Rainfall was about half of its normal amount that year, and the temperature sum was 103% of the average at the time.  According to HB itself:

“A hot, extremely dry year, the driest since the start of the century. The juices were very concentrated and the wines characterized by an enormous richness of tannin. Wines slow to mature, but with exceptional structure.”

Now, you’re patiently waiting for the tasting note on that `29, right?

But the theme of this article is anticipation, remember?  So, you’re gonna have to wait.  I know, I’m incorrigible…

Retail prices of the 1929 Haut-Brion reflect its rarity and the general perception of the vintage’s quality.  Expect to spend somewhere around three grand USD for a 750ml bottle (if you can find one).

It was a long lead-up of excellent wine and food pairing courses to the “main event,” and we tasted several stellar wines from Jason’s stash; not that you care, but here’s the list (you see, not unlike those really lengthy and dramatic Catholic weddings, I’m all about keeping you as long as possible from the “consummating act” of this article):

• Bollinger NV Special Cuvee Brut (tasted from magnum) – Green apple, bread, and a ridiculously luxurious finish
• 1995 Pierre Moncuit Champagne Blanc de Blancs Grand Cru (tasted from magnum) – Sour red apple dominated, still very fresh & fruity
• 2005 Domaine William Fevre Chablis Grand Cru – Refined and smooth, with citrus & tons of minerality; beguiling, really, apart from some unpleasant reduction notes
• 2006 Bouchard Père et Fils Santenay – Stellar; very “feminine” with a light touch of bright red cherry fruit and smoke
• 1981 Vieux Chateau Certan – Major-league earth, cigar & tobacco, with a killer palate of savory soy sauce
• 2002 Geyser Peak Reserve Alexandre Meritage (tasted from double magnum) – A little heavy-handed but I found it quite solid with good black fruit notes and not too extracted; it was clearly despised by a majority of my Francophile dinning partners, however, for its blatant “California” / New World style
• 1977 Graham’s Vintage Port (tasted from magnum) – Dried fig flavors were prominent, but it lacked the velvety texture you’d expect, and was very “spirty”on the palate

Which leaves us with that `29 HB.

Fortunately, the tales of this wine’s demise were greatly exaggerated.  Improbably, the wine was not only still drinkable, it was downright lively and it still had perceptible fruit.  At 81 years young.  I know, right?!??

Here are my (expanded) tasting notes:

“Visibly aged but still has some shine. The first sniff is a huge whiff of crushed walnut shell that I will probably never forget and will clearly be a reference point for any long-aged wines that I taste from this point onwards.

Seems impossible but there are notes of dried cherry fruit still on the palate once the walnut action calms down, and the fruit is very pure.  A hint of soy on the nose, with smoke and some game, followed by truffle.  Palate is very, very savory and the mouthfeel is really smooth.  “Elegant” and “stately” come to mind.

The most improbable aspect of all is the acid. This wine, at 80+ years on, has enough acid that it could easily be paired with food, which is by any practical measure a chemical miracle. I’m shocked – and would have considered it an impossibility after seeing the crumbled cork and leakage when the bottle was opened.

Still strong after about 20 minutes, but the savory notes are beginning to take over.  Will be gulping the last remnants down before it turns into vinegar in the glass.”

And I did, in fact, gulp the remaining bit down in one big slurp – better to do it then, I figured, and enjoy it, than to wait until it was nigh-undrinkable.

I’m tempted to say that this was a once in a lifetime experience, but I think that Jason has a second bottle in even better condition… so I plan on staying on his good side for the foreseeable future…

Cheers!

Put your high-school chemistry goggles on (you know, safety is paramount, right?) and join me today on Corkd.com for a look at the wine flaws.

I’ve been asked by Cork’d to contribute to their Cork’d Content feature, which showcases original content from different wine bloggers each day on a variety of wine topics, with the goal of adding fun, informational / educational wine content for Corkd.com users.

I’m excited to be contributing to  Cork’d and to be apart of the vibrant wine-reviewing community over there.  I’ve also been thoroughly enjoying the articles already posted at Cork’d that were written by friends of mine, like Robert Dwyer and Hardy Wallace.  

My article focuses on the particularly egregious  wine flaws that, while not common, nonetheless create unforgettable moments of awful stinkiness that can abruptly and totally destroy your wine-drinking  experience if and when you do encounter them.

Should be fun!

Cheers!

Well… does it?

I ask myself this question whenever I receive a review copy of a wine book, which has been… a lot lately, it seems.

So here comes four-time James Beard award-winner Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, and her new book Drink This: Wine Made Simple.  Another entry in a (very) crowded field.  It also happens to be excellent, so I suppose the world could use another wine intro book.  Drink This is excellent primarily because Grumdahl’s prose is lucid and entertaining.  Her writing is also down-to-earth.

But excellent writing chops wouldn’t matter a hill of pomace if Grumdahl didn’t know what she was talking about, or if her method for learning about wine proved too rudimentary, too complex, or hindered by some wine-related prejudice.  Thankfully, none of that proves to be the case.  In fact, Drink This is so good that its overall quality makes up for the fact that Grumdahl uses the word ‘varietal’ as a synonym for grape variety (which it’s not).  In fact, she does this so often that I nearly threw the book across the room (I say ‘nearly’ because my sample copy is a hardcover book, and I didn’t want to damage my living room drywall).

The thing that makes Drink This so compelling is that Grumdahl knew writing long before she knew wine. As a result, her method for learning wine (more on that in moment) is likely to  work, because it’s the method that she used herself.

The method?  Well, it’s a variation on simplification…

From the Introduction:

“Trying to learn everything at once is the major thing that keeps people floundering around in the world fo wine and never making sense of it. Most people try to learn about wine by trying something here, something there, something else another time. This is like trying to learn the day’s news by randomly plucking a hundred sentences from a hundred newspapers.”

In other words, learning to appreciate wine is no different than learning any other discipline (take playing a musical instrument, for example) that can be enjoyed with a little bit of knowledge but takes an entire lifetime to truly master.  It takes time, and in order to get started you need to, well, start somewhere.  Grumdahl’s book is more-or-less dedicated to this principle of simplification, and to stepping readers through different grape varieties and the best ways (in her experience) to taste and learn about the varietal wines made from them.

What I most like about Drink This is the fact that while it’s useful for beginners, Intermediate wine lovers (those oft-ignored oenophiles who are past the introductory stages of wine appreciation and are the primary focus of this blog, after all) can find much useful content between its covers, especially in the interviews with wine and food personalities (like Randall Grahm, Thomas Keller and Robert Parker) sprinkled throughout.

It’s not all lucid perfection, however.  Wine geeks will appreciate Grumdahl’s detailed take on wine prices in the chapter titled Money, Money, Money, but newbie wine lovers are likely to  find it confusing.  Her “Wine Drinker’s Bill of Rights” has some interesting and relevant ideas (I’m particularly fond of “The Right to Wine Served at the Correct Temperature”) but many of the other rights read like an expensive nightmare for restaurants that are having a tough time in today’s economy.

Minor cavils, really – I’d recommend Drink This to any budding wine lover serious about learning more (and wants a helpful reference that offers a bit of knowledge room into which they can ‘grow’).

Cheers!

And that is, the rapid-fire assessment, review, and perfunctory judgment of any given wine.  We are judge, jury and executioner of the glass’ contents, often within the span of two minutes.

We see this happen all the time – in fact in some cases (like certain Twitter Taste Live events, or the “speed dating” wine blogging at the Wine Bloggers Conference), it’s encouraged and necessary.  I often participate in and have grown to love those events, provided that we don’t take them too seriously.

And we shouldn’t take them seriously, at least as far as true wine appreciation is concerned.  Why?  Because every glass of wine, from the pedestrian to the sublime, is speaking to you, trying to tell you something about itself – you need only take the actual time to listen to it.

In the case of many wines made in the ‘Old World’ style (what my compadre Randall Grahm calls Modernist), where typicity of place and nuanced complexity are the goals, that message may be “Come back later.”  New World (Postmodernist) wines usually (and probably unfairly) fare better in rapid-fire evaluation scenarios, precisely because they more often offer their treasures quickly and liberally – “Hey! Over here! I’m talkin’ to YOU!”

In a globally-connected, information-based economy like ours, we are progressively programmed with positive reinforcement to spend as little time as possible on something – in fact, we’re rewarded for doing many things at once, and the more quickly we can shove them into the same time slot, the better.

The trouble is, if you want to appreciate wine fully, you need to dump the Speed Racer + Multitasking Pro persona.  Pronto…

The strange (and wonderful) fact is that you owe it to the wine in your glass to give it your full concentration, even if only for a minute or two.  It will, I promise you, tell you something during that time – you need only have the patience to listen.

How is it that you come to owe a glass of wine anything? Well, you know how people often quip that “everything happens for a reason?”  They’re right.  Sort of.  The Universe has, though a series of progressive events, lead you to this moment, with a glass of that new wine in your hands.  The journey that the wine itself has taken to be in front of you is a kind of miracle, from bud to grape to fermentation vessel to bottle… and let’s not even get into the dust of the stars settling to Earth from the Big Bang to create the molecules that eventually came together to form your glass.

And no, I am not drunk right now – the entire history of the Universe is coming together in this moment between you and that glass, and the meaning of life in any given moment is that given moment. So how could you not owe the moment with that glass to at least some degree?

If that’s too much Zen Wine for you, then here’s another take:

I often hear from budding oenophiles that they “could never pick out those nuances in a glass of wine” and that is best left to some sort of trained professional, as if they were scared of extending a gas line as part of a DIY home project.  It’s times like these when I need to suppress the urge to deliver a Chuck Norris-style roundhouse kick to the side of their faces (that would be rude, of course, since it would likely spill the wine in their glass).

That approach is total crap – if it was legit, it wouldn’t warrant the Chuck Norris face kick.  Anyway, if you pay attention, that wine in your glass will tell you everything that you need to know about it. No license required.

Paying attention to that wine, with total focus, will do more for your wine appreciation skills than reading 5 years worth of any wine periodical. 

So put the Chuck Norris smackdown on your wine multitasking!

Cheers!

It’s often said that imitation is flattery in its most sincere form.

Imitation is also a way of making a quick buck, and in the case of wine has sometimes been used to dupe even the world’s most influential palates and wine writers.

Counterfeiting, in the U.S. alone, is about a $200 billion a year business, and it’s been estimated by Wine Spectator (yeah, yeah, I know…) that 5% of old/rare wine sold on the “secondary market” is fake.  Faking a wine isn’t necessarily easy, but somewhat ironically the job gets a bit easier for those trying to fake rare, older wines – simply because most people haven’t had them, so there are few barometers to judge how they should or shouldn’t taste.  In some cases, as detailed in Benjamin Wallace’s The Billionaire’s Vinegar, the rock stars of the wine tasting world may in fact have based their tasting notes of older, rarer wines on fakes.  Examining a bottle to determine if it’s a fake can be a time-consuming and difficult process.

The reason I’m telling you all of this?

I think I recently just may have had my first faked wine…

I’m not certain it was a fake, mind you.  In fact, the only thing I’ve got to go on, in terms of justification, is my gut.  All the other evidence points to the fact that the wine was legit.  But… my gut just won’t let this one go…

First, a little backdrop: one of the greatest things about the Wine Bloggers Conference (for me) is the simple joy of networking; catching up with old friends, making new ones, generating connections.  The networking leads to after-after-parties, during which may generous people share wine from their PR, public, or private stock, most of it good, some of it downright great.  It was during one of these after-after-parties a few weeks ago in Sonoma that I encountered my possible fake.

The generous guy who supplied the wine is, in my experience, beyond reproach and is a well-respected tech and wine geek.  He shared the wine as part of several excellent wines that he’d brought to pour with the conference participants.  It was a fantastic time, if a bit chaotic and noisy, during which we passed glasses around and shared in the joy of, well, sharing.  And of course, drinking.

Despite the fact that the Mutineer Magazine guys had encouraged my to swig absinthe with them prior to this impromptu tasting, I hadn’t totally lost my senses yet when I encountered the magnum of Sterling Vineyards 1977 Cabernet.

It’s not that the wine was bad. The trouble for me was that the wine was really, really good. Superb, actually. It was, in my mind, impossibly good, young, and vibrant.  Dark fruit to spare, good acid balance, tannins that were starting to smooth out but still had some firmness, and just a hint of secondary aromas and flavors, like graphite pencil and earth.

When you taste wines that are going on 40 years old, you need to draw deep from the memory banks and compare them to other old wines that you’ve tried.  I’ve been lucky enough to taste a few older wines in the same time frame that were legit (at least, they were believed to have come from private collections and purchased relatively close to the wines originally release date).  This Sterling tasted nothing like those older Cabs I’ve had.

In my brain, I immediately compared it to a 1967 Latour that I’d tasted a few years ago. Latour is built to age, almost like no other wine – it’s one of the heftiest wines in all of the Medoc.  That wine had almost no fruit left. The secondary aromas and flavors had almost totally taken it over – at the time, I noted that it tasted like “a nuclear family’s kitchen garbage bag contents: cigar, black nuts, pencil shavings, game, “slim jim,” earth (aka ‘dirt’)”.”  It was a very good wine, but it had probably peaked a few years before I tried it.

Now, that `67 Latour was a normal sized bottle of wine.  The Sterling was a magnum – larger volume, but same amount of air in the bottle, so theoretically it could have aged more slowly. But… The `77 Sterling didn’t taste anything like that `67 Latour. My gut told me that the wine in that bottle tasted maybe 6 years old, not 30+.

I followed up with the guy who’d poured, to ask him where he got the magnum:

“K&L had them just a few years ago, direct from sterling’s cellars, oddly not $$$. They made great, age-worthy wines back then, and it was impeccably stored in a magnum at the producer…”

I’ve no doubt this guy believed the wine to be legit, and I’m fairly certain he’d never knowingly buy a fake much less pour one.  I touched base with Sterling, who confirmed that the did bottle a few magnums in `77.  I’ve no opportunity now to inspect the bottle, and I suspect I wouldn’t know what the hell I was looking for even if I did get a chance to inspect it for authenticity.

Anecdotally, it wouldn’t stand to reason that someone would go through the trouble of faking a Sterling magnum versus, say, one from Chateau Petrus – they’d stand to make far, far more on a fake of rare Bordeaux, for example.

The evidence supports that the wine was 100% legitimate.

But my gut… my gut tells me that I had really, really good wine that night from the magnum labeled `77 Sterling.

It’s just having trouble accepting that the wine was a `77 Sterling.

Cheers!

(images: toplessrobot.com, diageowines.com)

Back in March, I pondered if wine appreciation was becoming cool, drawing a parallel between wine’s place in the cultural lexicon of recreation beverages and the newfound popularity of the long-running Canadian power rock trio Rush – or as I like to refer to them, The Greatest Band in the History of All Mankind.  The comparison seemed apt to me, as Rush’s front man Geddy Lee is a huge wine geek (and I’m a big Rush geek).

Word on the street (well, maybe on the street named “RUSH NERD BLVD”) is that Geddy’s favorite wines come from Burgundy, specifically the region’s ultra-premium Pinot Noir.

Lucky for him that he was invited to Barberian’s Steakhouse for a lavish shin-dig that was hosted there three weeks ago to celebrate the 150th birthday of Burgundy producer Maison Louis Jadot (apparently it was also the steakhouse’s 50th birthday).  I use the term lavish loosely, as some of you might not consider a four-course dinner that includes “vintages easily costing hundreds, if not thousands, per bottle,” “wild asparagus Fed-Exed from France,” bottles of ’78 Gevrey-Chambertin and ’69 Clos Vougeot, and a parting gift of “a magnum of 2007 burgundy packed in its own wooden box” to be “lavish.”

By some strange oversight, I don’t seem to have been invited.

Anyway, sounds like it was quite a night.  Though I’ve heard no reports if the ultra-premium Burgs being poured caused anyone in attendance beak into a spontaneous acapella rendition of Red Barchetta…

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Cheers!

(images:torontolife.com)

“Did we really tell lies
Letting in the sunshine
Did we really count to one hundred?”

- Jon Anderson, Long Distance Runaround

If you’ve been on the “global interwebs” for any appreciable amount of time, and you like wine, you’ll already be familiar with the Wine Century Club.  If not, here’s a short primer: the WCC is an organization that seeks to promote wine appreciation by offering you bragging rights after you successfully taste 100 or more wine varieties.  Download the application, fill it in, send it to the WCC, and then you’re a member.

Of course, there is the matter of tasting the required 100 or more wine varieties. 

I’ve got a buddy who I’ve known for over 30 years (since I was five years old, actually) who is not a wine geek per se, but he does enjoy wine and he loves to learn, and he especially likes collecting categorical experiences.  He recently asked me about the Wine Century Club after seeing that I was a member, generally inquiring about how to go about tasting the 100 different wine grape varieties required to gain membership. 

My buddy is not the kind of guy to get daunted by a challenge like tasting 100 different wine grape varieties, but while being a fantastic idea and also clearly in the camp of spreading wine appreciation to the masses, the WCC doesn’t exactly do itself any favors in terms of encouraging membership when it publishes this sort of warning on its website:

“It’s a simple idea, but it’s not as easy to become a member as you may think. One Master Sommelier could only come up with 82. Of the thousands of applications downloaded, less than 3% are completed. If you feel up to the challenge, have a look at the application!”

With all due respect to the WCC founders, I’ve got to go ahead and disagree on that.  I think my buddy is exactly the kind of person that should be shooting for WCC membership.

In fact, it’s my belief that anyone who wants to learn more about wine should become a Wine Century Club member.

It’s not difficult at all to do this (hell, even I did it).  It just takes patience (I said it wasn’t difficult – I didn’t say it was quick).

If you’re someone who wants to learn about wine, you’d do far worse than seek out 100 different grape varieties to try – you’ve got nothing to lose except time (and a little bit of money), and you stand to gain an immeasurable amount of quality wine experience along the way.  There is no faster way to learn about wine, after all, than to taste it.

So I thought I’d offer some advice on how you can get to the 100 and join the WCC yourself.  The competitive among you (like me) won’t have any trouble motivating yourself (“I will get me 100 grape varieties, dammit!!!”), but if you need even more incentive, how about this: did you know that one of prog rock pioneers Yes’ greatest songs, Long Distance Runaround, from their landmark 1971 LP Fragile, was written about the Wine Century Club (even though the WCC wasn’t founded until decades after the album’s release)?*  How friggin’ cool is that?!??

* – This statement has not been verified by any reputable source and is probably totally false.  But Yes kicks ass, can we just agree on that?

Anyway, onto the advice…

3 Easy Ways to Get to 100 and Join the Wine Century Club

1) Take Stock

If you’ve been drinking wine for a while, likely you have tried more grape varieties than you realize (if you suffer from having a spouse / main squeeze that only drinks one style of wine… I feel for you but you need help if you’re gonna get crackin’ on the 100).  For WCC membership, blends count, so take a few minutes to think back on how many varieties you can check off from those blended wines.  If you’d had a Southern Rhone wine anytime in the recent past, look up that sucker on the web, because you may have tasted upwards of a dozen varieties in that one glass.

2) Take a Class

Wine classes are a great way to up your wine IQ (well… duh…), but they’re also the kind of setting where you often get to try wines that are off the beaten path.  If you don’t know much about a particular wine region, it’s a great excuse to get yourself to a wine class and get educated.  It’s also an opportunity to tick off a likely more than a few varieties on your way to the 100.

3) Take a Trip

When you travel, try wine – preferably local wine.  Tasting wine in its home region, paired with its “home” food, is really experiencing wine in its natural element, and it will seriously expand your wine knowledge.  Of course, traveling is also an opportunity to try funky local wines that might not otherwise be available to you.  Here’s an example: Italy has hundreds of wine grape varieties, so a short time in Italy would get you ticking off wine varieties on your WCC application like… well… like a thing that speedily checks stuff off applications.  Anyway, if you lived in Italy, you should be able to complete the WCC application before your twelfth birthday.

So there you have it – nothing difficult about it.  Well, nothing difficult apart from having the patience to let your wine journey unfold naturally so that you experience the wonderful world that it has to offer you…

Cheers!

(images: amazon.com ,1WineDude, melaman2.com)

Before I get into the topic of today’s post (which, I’ll tell you now for future reference is “why and how even preeminent wine authorities can be duped”), I first need to give you some background on the world of wine fraud.

A few years ago I was on a business trip to Russia (before the Caucasus conflict last year), and some of my co-workers were getting together one evening during my visit to share a meal at the rented house of one of the local IT managers, an expatriated British friend of mine.  Being the only person in the group with a wine certification, my task was to obtain some wine for the meal.

I accompanied one of the local guys on our team to “downtown” Stupino, which is basically a town square with some shops strewn about, to seek out the wine.  He acted as my translator since I spoke a paltry amount of Russian.  Being relatively close to Georgia, I told him that I’d love to seek out some Georgian wine for our meal that evening.

That’s when he face took on a grim countenance and he was visibly torn between wanting to please the boss (me) and not wanting to embark on a torturous sideshow of navigating what was then a very ripe market of fake Georgian wine.

The issue was that each year far, far more “Georgian” wine made its way into the Russian market than could ever possibly be produced by Georgian winemakers.  Most of these were faked – some could even be poisonous, according to my Russian co-workers.  I was insistent, seriously underrating the amount of effort it was going to take to find a genuine Georgian bottling at the local market.  I think we examined about a dozen bottles, during which I had no idea what I was looking for in terms of validating the provenance of the bottles in front of  us, and a line of increasingly solemn and angry Russian shoppers began to form behind us at the shop counter.  All the while, my co-worker was repeating “Нет, не это” (“no – not this one”) to the shopkeeper, while loosely explaining to me in English why we shouldn’t accept the last bottle as the shopkeeper reached for the next alternative.

“This can’t be Georgia wine,” he said, “the shape of bottle is all wrong.”

We did eventually succeed in purchasing a genuine bottle of actual Georgian wine, and enjoyed its ripe, peppery red fruit with dinner.  I think we also succeeded in pissing off a good number of the local shoppers in Stupino (though they are Russian, so they should be used to standing in lines, right?).

The bottom line is that fake wine is very, very real and endemic problem in some markets, like Georgian wine and really, really old French bottlings from top Chateau.  Most of you reading this aren’t ever likely to encounter a fake, but if you ever want to splurge on one of the big boys, you should at the very least inquire to the shopkeeper about the history of the bottle.

Even though we’re about 600 words into this post, I’ve only just gotten started – and we’re not going to talk about fakes.  We’re going to talk about why smart, talented people get duped by fakes.  Sort of like MTV’s Punk’d, but for wine, and on a massive, multi-millions dollar scale.

People like Robert Parker (the world’s most influential wine critic), Jancis Robinson (one of the wine world’s top writers), and Serena Sutcliffe and Michael Broadbent (who headed the international wine departments of auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s, respectively).

The names above constitute a large part of what could well be considered the High Priests of wine (more on the religious overtones – which are fundamental to the issue of being duped – in a moment or two).  And all of them were duped by a man named Meinhard Görke, better known as Hardy Rodenstock, widely considered to be the perpetrator of the most expensive wine frauds in history – a story told with expert prose and excellent research in Benjamin Wallace’s The Billionaire’s Vinegar.

How were these people duped?  I don’t think it was by Rodenstock.  From where I’m standing, these wine gurus duped themselves – whether it was from hubris, greed, or simply being starstruck (more on all that in another moment or two).

I won’t spoil the details of The Billionaire’s Vinegar – you really need to read this cover-to-cover and detailing too much of it would dilute a good deal of the pleasure you’ll derive from it – but in summary, Rodenstock’s fake wines seem to have been expertly executed, culminating in an over-the-top, several-day-affair 1998 tasting of 125 vintages of Château d’Yquem.

The tasting notes and auction logs of Sutcliffe and Broadbent came to rely more and more on wines poured at Rodenstock’s opulent tasting events, which were also attended by Robinson and Parker, with Parker famously giving some of the likely fake wines 100 point (‘”Perfect”) scores.

One possible (but unlikely) explanation for why four of the most preeminent wine authorities came to be so duped by what were likely fraudulent wines constructed by one man (who never charged them directly for the ancient vintages of wines he poured them at his garish tasting events) is greed and hubris (or is that technically two explanations?).  Even though it’s not a likely explanation given the body of work of those wine personalities, it’s worth exploring.  Their livelihoods, at the time, all centered around the marketing of exceptional wines as rare and expensive commodities, and probably depended at least somewhat on that view.  No one wanted to question the illusion, or even whether or not they should have been at the tasting events in the first place – too much was at stake for them:

1. Parker’s reviews drove wine prices globally;
2. Robinson’s reputation and book sales relied on the bedrock of her authority on all things wine-related, which could be questioned if she was suddenly tasting fewer rare vintages of famous French producers than rich collectors who weren’t officially in the wine business;
3. Sutcliffe and Broadbent had made millions for their auction houses over the years selling wine, and both pawned off extremely expensive likely Rodenstock fakes.
4. We can throw in famous Bordeaux Chateau like Y’quem, Mouton, and Lafite as well, who for years did little to nothing to combat fraud while they enjoyed skyrocketing prices for their wines brought on by the publicity of the tastings and the subsequent tasting notes of the wine elite, whose words the affluent wine-collecting public followed blindly in lemming-like droves.

In other words, even if they suspected something was amiss, they were all in too deep.  Interestingly, their responses (especially those of Parker and Robinson), centered around the fact that they were duped, but duped by excellent wines.  Robinson offered this in one of her on-line reactions to the “Rodenstock Affair”:

“As the auction and other secondary markets’ greed and status values continue to nurture conditions for forgery, which feeds on skyrocketing prices, in the future many more high- and-low rollers will depart salesrooms wondering if a not-rigorous-enough front office is taking them to the cleaners.”

This could be considered an exercise in ass-covering, because it’s kind of embarrassing that these wine High Priests should ever have been at the opulent Rodenstock tastings in the first place.  Why do I say this?  Because wines from Lafite, Mouton, Petrus, Y’qem – we could go on and on listing the most famous Bordeaux houses – are kind of like works of art.  Yes, they are meant to be consumed, some several decades after release.  But a wine that is hundreds of years old from these producers?  That is a piece of history, not a prop for a select and affluent few. Like paintings from famous and loved artists, or the manuscripts of history-making political figures, don’t these items take on something more than just a collector’s fancy?  Aren’t they artifacts that somehow belong to the collective history of wine?

In my view, attending a tasting of 125 vintages of Chateau Y’qem is almost obnoxious.  You might as well pair the wines with braised cuts of meat from endangered species. Robinson, Parker, Sutcliffe, and Broadbent are amazing talents and great writers – but did they also, even if only subconsciously, “rape & plunder” wine history?

[ This begs the question of course, when and how should an historic or rare wine be consumed, if at all?  I don’t know the answer, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.  I’m pretty sure it’s not during an elitist affair held by possibly the biggest fraud in the history of wine. ]

Consumers tend to take the word of these High Priests on total faith, and like many religious-like followings those words can blindly guide the spending choices of millions and millions of dollars.  Also not unlike many major religions, the power in this Religion of Wine sits in the hands of a few people who have access to a rare commodity and, in part, build their financial power and prestige based on talent, but also based on ensuring (whether consciously or not) that the commodity of some fine wine is available only to those who can afford their own tropical islands.

Which is all a very long-winded way of saying that maybe they had a vested interest in keeping those rare wines, well, rare.

Another explanation, and one that is probably much more plausible given the significant contributions that Parker, Robinson, Sutcliffe and Broadbent have made to the wine world, is that even talented and intelligent High Priests of wine can be starstruck at the idea of being included among the chosen few who would sample ultra-rare, ultra-expensive specimens of wine high art. Who wouldn’t be at least tempted and intrigued by the offer to sample wine from the 1700s and 1800s, to partake in an ephemeral bit of history?

Don’t act like you wouldn’t at least consider it.

Hell, I would, at least for a moment or two – and that’s even after my self-righteous diatribe about the raping and pillaging of wine’s history.  Things probably look very different when you have the opportunity to see them from the viewpoint of the pillagers…

I suppose the moral of the story, if there is one, is that even the best in any field are only human.  As a wine consumer, there is much you can learn from the likes of Robinson, Parker, Sutcliffe, ad Broadbent.  But infallible gods they are not.  The best thing you can do is to use there work as Parker himself recommends – as guideposts for your own journey into wine.

Cheers!

(images: amazon.com, stern.de, slideworld.com, crimogenic.blogspot.com)