Chow Assholes, Charlatans, and Bores: Welcome to the World of Fine Wine
posted by on September 11 at 10:29 AM
Also: have you read the piece about Thomas Jefferson’s wine in the most recent New Yorker? It’s a delightful parade of jackasses and snobs, which makes all the cheating and double-dealing especially delicious.
There’s this guy:
Koch may be as compulsive about filing lawsuits as he is about collecting. He waged a twenty-year legal battle against two of his brothers relating to the family business. (The matter was settled in 2001.) He sued the state of Massachusetts over an improperly taxed stock transaction and won a forty-six-million-dollar abatement. When a former girlfriend whom he had installed at a condo in Boston’s Four Seasons hotel refused to leave, Koch took her to housing court and had her evicted. He talks about “dropping a subpoena” on people as if he were lobbing a grenade.
And this guy:
Starting in 1980, Rodenstock began holding lavish annual wine tastings, weekend-long affairs attended by wine critics, retailers, and various German dignitaries and celebrities. He opened scores of old and rare wines, all provided at his own expense, and served in custom-made “Rodenstock” glasses that were supplied by his friend the glassmaker Georg Riedel. Impeccably dressed, wearing stylish Rodenstock eyeglasses and shirts with stiff white collars, he bantered with guests, exclaiming, over an especially fine bottle, “Ja, unglaublich! One hundred points!” He was punctilious about being on time, barring latecomers, and when serving older wines he banned spitting, which prompted some guests, alarmed at the number of bottles they would be sampling, to hide spittoons in their laps. “You don’t spit away history,” Rodenstock admonished them. “You drink it.”
Oh, and then there’s this guy:
During his first term as President, Jefferson spent seventy-five hundred dollars—roughly a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in today’s currency—on wine, and he is generally regarded as America’s first great wine connoisseur. (He may also have been America’s first great wine bore. “There was, as usual, a dissertation upon wines,” John Quincy Adams noted in his diary after dining with Jefferson in 1807. “Not very edifying.”)
The story is here. You should read it.
yes, that article was delicious. i love the fact that the auction houses and the rich pricks who bought the bunk wine would rather not know that it was fake. it's like, a perfect marxist allegory or somethin.
I put the Hard On in Chardonnay!!!
Ja, unglaublich!
I did read that New Yorker piece. Sehr interessant, although my favorite part was the photo of the ancient bottle. Toll. (Is the new hip thing to spout German phrases? Because I can do that all night long, baby.)
I enjoy drinking wine, but I don't "enjoy wine". I understand the social aspect of any pastime, but being really, really into wine is beyond my comprehension.
What was that documentary that came out a few years ago that prostelitized wine experts don't know what they're talking about.
You still think of rich boring snobs when you hear the world wine? Seriously?
http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/travel/09Journeys.html
where you been the past few years? West Virginia?
@5 yeah, I'm a wine fan and I'm also poor, so #1 I love Caffe Presse where the wine goes for $4 a glass and you can also buy it by the demitasse! #2 I have several "cheap wine reviewed!" sites bookmarked. #3 I'm always looking for deals. It's not hard nowadays to find decent wine for under $10 a bottle, and if you're willing to go up to $15 a bottle there's some STELLAR stuff available at your local QFC. That's $15 for a bottle of great wine!!
I depend on birthdays and traveling parents to send better stuff my way, and so far so good. There's table swill (JW Morris Cab! Trader Joes for $4 a bottle and it's far better in terms of swill than the Three Buck Chuck shit) and there's special occasion swill (Desert Ruah cab, $13 right now at QFC) and there's giddy exciting times swill. I won't even name names there. Wine has such a large variety of tastes and quality that it's mostly about adjusting your expectations to meet your budget, while still keeping your eyes peeled for deals on the good stuff.
Don't buy all the JW please, supplies can be limited and we're all sharing.
I'd like to add, I HATE wine glasses. They are stupid. They are shaped wrong, well, for anything (I know, but all that swirling really does make you feel like a snob). Wine right out of the bottle is great, however, and lucky for me being 6'2" and having a pretty high metabolism, a single bottle is the perfect serving amount.
#6, I applaud your work on the cheap, good wine info. Every once in a while I'll buy a $25 bottle just to see if it's somehow better than that from the $3 bin at my corner store - sometimes it is, often it isn't.
I sound like I'm being being cantancorous for the hell of it, but I'm being honest here.
LOVED this article! Gun-toting American scions collecting wine like baseball cards, German con artists, gamma rays, and the Corning Museum of Glass! HATE American wine critic talk, which has nothing to do with how wine actually tastes but has become as codified in its way as a formal programming language. V++. Its authors nervously looking over each other's shoulders, each knowing he's full of it but suspecting the others might know something he doesn't. That IDIOT Koch. Even his Ross PEE-ro decision to change the pronunciation of his name to "Coke"--he even got that wrong. And so Atlanta.
This article was one of the most delicious reads I've had in a long time. Enjoy it with a chilled bottle of four-dollar 2006 Venetian Gaetano D'Aquino pinot grigio from Trader Joe's, while the summer weather lasts.
Did Jefferson use all that wine for syllabub or did he drink some of it straight?
I usually reserve mad contempt for the New Yorker, but I love me some fine wine (and depending on the paycheck, some not so fine wine -- a toast to Katelyn and Dougsf, I'll drink a glass with you any day). Thanks for the link Brendan, it was a great read and a better tip. Airplane fodder for the weekend!!
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