While you’re reading this, most of the U.S. will have just crawled out from under some of the most bitter winter cold to hit the country in over a decade. Not so much cold that gets into your bones so much as cold that gets into your soul, the kind of cold that embitters otherwise cheerful people towards life itself. This is Chill, With Extreme Prejudice.
I mention this “so frosty, this blows” scenario as contextual backdrop, because I couldn’t find a wine to match it in the sample pool. I had to turn to spirits to get my insides even close to a state resembling warmth.
Spirits are an appropriate choice, I think, for weather that cares not whether you live or die. And that’s because spirits aren’t drinks that care, either.
Really, if you try to imaginatively personify anything over 20% alcohol by volume, you come up with something that really doesn’t give a rat’s tookus what you think about it. When you get to 80-proof distilled spirits, you’re entering the honey-badger-don’t-give-a-f*ck territory of drinks.
“I’m not sure I like it,” my wife told me when we cracked open the most gaudily impressive sample of cognac that I had on hand, Frapin’s Extra Grande Champagne “Premier Cru” Cognac. “It makes me make ‘a face’,” she quipped, scrunching up her nose. “That’s okay,” I answered, “don’t feel bad, it doesn’t give a damn what you think about it…”
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By now, you’ll probably have heard that alleged fine wine counterfeiter Rudy Kurniawan has been found guilty of fraud in court (well, he was found guilty of wine fraud during trial in court, not found guilty within a court, although technically actually he was found guilty within a court room… oh, forget it).
You’ll also, no doubt, be nursing a raging New Year’s Eve hangover. So I’ll try to make this pithy since most likely I will also be nursing some manner of raging NYE hangover.
In the event that you’re a self-professed wine geek who hasn’t yet gotten up to speed on the whole Kurniawan Kerfuffle, I recommend taking a quick diversion over to the fine summary of Kurniawan’s alleged fraudulent activities at NPR, so that you can do a rapid catch-up.
All set? Good. Now I can explain why Kurniawan’s guilty verdict means almost nothing whatsoever to the fine wine market, and why I think it will almost certainly not even make a dent in the purchases of fraudulent wine worldwide.
But, in order to do that, I first need to explain why the collecting of rare fine wines is like having sex with animals…
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Instances and identification of the Wine Snob in the wild
The wine snob is easily encountered but often difficult to successfully identify in the wild. This is because the wine snob in almost all salient ways physically resembles the human homo sapiens. Often, the only way to successfully identify the wine snob is via verbal cues.
The wine snob, isolated, is rarely dangerous and poses almost no immediate threat apart from annoyance. There are cases in which it has been reported that the wine snob will “leech” onto an unsuspecting person and follow them incessantly, carping verbal nonsense – the phrase terroir (tear-WARW) is often repeated – and requiring the person to physically remove themselves from the area to abbey the threat. However instances of bodily harm in these cases is statistically quite rare, and most “threats” from the wine snob have been completely overblown in the modern, scandal- and –shock-hungry press.
Identification of the wine snob cannot be successfully confirmed based on the presence of wine alone. This is an important enough point that it bears repeating and additional emphasis: not all specimens possessing a wine glass in the wild are wine snobs. The instances of wine snobs within any given wine-drinking population are still quite rare. Again, verbal confirmation must be obtained, as the presence of the wine snob also cannot be confirmed via nesting ground, habitat clues, tracks, diet or scat.
Wine-stained urine is not a reliable identification measure.…
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