I've now lived through 10 days of travelling around France and not visiting Vinexpo while in Bordeaux.
I'm a tired guy.
This week I am on chemotherapy, which will make me even more tired.
I hope to write more here about our adventures in Bordeaux, but have trouble typing and putting together my thoughts.
I'm reading a book on how to keep up the fighting spirit of white blood cells. Hopefully this will work.
We arrived yesterday and slept a great deal. Or even more than that.
Tonight we are off to the Pierres Dorées region in the Bâtard-Beaujolais and Saturday to Bordeaux to boycott Vinexpo.
I expect to be off this blog for a few days, so have fun everyone and see you soon!
Feel free to call me on my cell phone if you need to get in touch with me:
06 32 34 32 98
We're going to spend one night in Poil Rouge, one night in Charnay, then drive across the country to not attend Vinexpo but to attend all the various "off" gatherings around Vinexpo.
I still keep time as if I am a student. Every year we go to France at the end of the school year and it makes me feel young, still keeping time as if the academic year just ended. We will be returning at the very beginning of September, as if we had to start classes yet again.
The 2008/2009 academic season has been a tumultuous season for me. My major academic work was coming down with brain cancer and having an ailing mother. My cancer seems to be stable but I may spend the rest of my life hobbling around on a cane at the best. Of course, I am trying to see the glass as half full, so at least I'm not in a wheelchair and can still manage to bob around, if just barely. Additionally, I won't be dead from cancer in three months or some other catastrophic diagnosis. The tumor is stable and not spreading.
I have two more chemotherapy sessions this summer and then I will probably be examined every two months for a year to make sure the cancer remains stable. Things could be worse.
My mother has 318 diseases and is old. On the other hand, she is not in pain from any of her chronic illnesses and can still be delighted by having people visit her. Modern medicine keeps the elderly bopping along, the same modern medicine which allows me to travel to Poil Rouge and write this blog, so you have to be appreciative. Even if you wonder if modern medicine is always beneficial.
Denyse has been fabulous with me through all these trials. We celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary recently and renewed our vows and meant every revowed word. A series of friends, led by Donna Siegel and Joe Dougherty and the late Linus Kessler have been incredibly supportive and loving. Not to mention Mike Wheeler and David Lillie and so many other folks.
My son graduated college and my daughter continues her crazy Montréal life. They're wonderful kids because they are not traditionally wonderful. Frankly, they're both crazy and a father's delight.
Louis/Dressner Selections (LDM Wines) continues to prosper. We continue to add a series of fabulous growers in France and Italy and our partner Kevin McKenna has had to shoulder an incredible burden with my illness. Sheila Doherty continues to brilliantly manage our international operations, Shawn Mead has done a great job on the West Coast and Lee Campbell is doing superb sales work in New York. I am very proud of the work we have done to support farmers in Europe and to bring real wine to an American audience.
We were able to participate in the formation of Farm Wine Imports in California, with Keven Clancy and Jeff Vierra. This distributor will handle our wines in that state, along with José Pastor's Spanish wines, a range of wines for Tom Calder, the outstanding California wines of Steve Edmunds and other possibilities from around the wine world. This is a new company and we see great possibilities in the California market.
On a broader scale, the world is insanely screwed up, ethnic genocidal war continues everywhere, and we're now paying for 20 years of allowing greedy Madoffesque figures to dominate the international economy. I'm a Vietnam Era skeptical leftist, but I have to admit that Obama seems an incredibly smart, compassionate politician. I wouldn't want to inherit the problems he's been stuck with, but what a pleasure to actually have someone with an idea in his head and some passion about the world in The White House.
On the glass half empty side, my closest American family has been horrifying. Dr. Barbara Hirsch, the famous Great Neck Endocrinologist, and my brother Ira Dressner continue to be selfish, egomaniacal and petty family criminals who have treated my late father and my ailing mother with contempt and unusually morbid exploitative hijinks. It is shameful to have such relatives and I feel terrible for my mother, to whom Barbara and Ira still matter. Personally, I'm surrounded by people who love me, my real family, not these genetically allied imposter's for a family. Oh well, you can't have everything and some glasses have to be half full or empty.
I need to rest from this hectic academic year. My oncologist told me yesterday that everything is stable but it was unlikely I will regain full use of my right foot and leg. Of course, this means I may never ride a bicycle again, something that would be very sad for me and a major setback.
I'm going to take it easy in Poil Rouge, get some exercise, see some physical therapists, read books on my Kindle, relax, calm down and try to prove my oncologist wrong although I'm certain he is right.
I used to believe in Chairman Mao's fable of the old man who moved the mountain, I no longer do. But perhaps I can still move a small hill.
Have a great summer and I'll be in contact soon from Poil Rouge.
Joe Dressner
Save the date! The first San Francisco Natural Wine Week, celebrating the traditional methods of wine making, will be held August 24th through August 30th, with nightly events and festivities in partnership with several San Francisco restaurants, wine bars and wine shops.
The San Francisco Natural Wine Week will showcase the history and methods of natural wine making and provide education on organic and dry farming, indigenous yeast fermentation and chemical-free winemaking.
Participating Vendors include:
Absinthe Brasserie & Bar
Arlequin Wine Merchant
BiRite Market
Biondivino Wine Boutique
Chez Spencer
Nopa
Terroir Natural Wine Merchant & Bar
The Jug Shop
Uva Enoteca
There will be more information here in the future. Unfortunately, I will be in France and will be unable to attend.
I finally got to try a bottle last night and the stuff is pure genius!
You put it in your hand and something comes over you without even tasting the beverage. The label seduces you and you can't control the urge to hold, embrace and lick the bottle.
You feel like you've joined an exclusive club and all those exotic oriental flavors make your body temperature rise. You hope no one is looking because it is an intensely private and sensual experience. I was happy my oncologist was not around, because the sake2me experience might be too much emotion for someone with a brain tumor who is still on chemotherapy. But I could not stop myself.
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Before you know it, beautiful women come toward you, entranced by the elixir you are holding in your glass. They too, cannot stop themselves. Without knowing it, their tongues reach out to the sake2me. All inhibitions have been set aside, the only thing that matters is this daring new product from the Vine Connection people.
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It was an amazing experience and I can't thank Ed Lehrman and Nick Ramkowsky enough for inventing this product. These guys are geniuses!
Let me also make this clear -- I am a happily married man and I will not let sake2me come between me and my wife of 25 year, even though it is obvious that crafty use of sake2me can have powerful and overwhelming effects on unsuspecting women.
So, what does it taste like you ask? It doesn't really matter, the goal is the package and the product, the overwhelming experience, the tongue in the air.
Yes, it tastes like the the bottom of a slushy gone rancid. Yes, I would ask the guy at the 7-11 for a refund without all the alluring packaging. But who really cares?
The point is to get your tongue out there with everyone else. Suspend your critical instincts and enjoy youself!
My life changed last night. I will never be the same.
I went to visit my mother yesterday and ran into Paula Gerard, whom I saw last week at the Francis Lewis High School 40th Class Reunion.
Ms. Gerard was standing in front of my mother's apartment building and had just visited another member of our graduating class, Gerry Popkin the Dentist, who it turns out lives in my mother's building! What an amazing coincidence!
Furthermore, I received a follow-up e-mail from Ms. Gerard and it turns out that Gerry Popkin DDS knows my mother! Where will this all end!
Actually, I need to see a dentist but have been too busy with my Brain Tumor to make an appointment. This is the problem when you have an extreme illness, you don't take care of all the little problems. For instance, I have not seen a chiropodist since I've been cultivating my brain tumor. My cousin Herschel Dressner is a great chiropodist, although I have to go all the way to Stamford to see him. Hershy, as we call him, was originally just a podiatrist but went back to school to get full Chiropodist credentials.
Many of you are probably wondering what Gerry Popkin is up to these days. According to the Francis Lewis Class of 1969 web site he is dentist and still single, although he has a companion.
Here is Gerry when he was fresh out of High School (the future dentist on the left). Some credit Gerry with coming up with the original idea for sake2me:
Flash forward forty years and here is Gerry with the exact same people pictured above, but all 40 years older:
It is great to see that Gerry has kept his impish smile.
My how time flies!
I'm curious about the genealogy of the family name Popkin. Was that really a name in the old country, whichever old country that happened to be, or is it an Ellis Island amelioration?
My Grandfather Joseph Meyer Dressner came to America as Joseph Meyer Cadwalader. The customs officials on Ellis Island found the name too Protestant and with too many syllables and immediately changed it to something that sounded potentially Jewish.
I'm happy being called Dressner, but I hear that my brother (the dog mystic and coach) is considering moving to Arizona and changing his name to Dr. Ari Cadwalader.
I've written the the Vine Connections people asking them where I can purchase a bottle of sake2me. I'm open minded and am willing to taste this beverage blind, mixed into a group of older vintage Muscadets from André Bregeon.
This way, I will be certain to have no snobbery, no elitism and can make an objective judgement about the product's virtue.
I'm leaving for France on June 17th. Please help.
That's Right!
I have won the prestigious Steven Spielberg Lifetime Achievement Award for 8 Years of Blogging award. I also came in second for the Best Ridicule of Ridiculous Small-Minded Suburban Endocrinologists through a Wine Blog Award!
Frankly, I was stunned to come in second on the Endocrinolist award, but it turns out that Tom Wark over at Fermentations has writter some fairly powerful exposés of the Endocrinology lobby.
I want to thank everyone at the Academy for these awards.
Our fast batch of 'Oiselet 2007 came in and I have already consumed seven bottles in three days. All my myself.
Here I am drinking my fifth bottle.
I love Southern wines with balance, flavor, intensity and delicacy. It is why I've always loved the wines from Marcel Richaud.
Yannick's wines are done at extremely low yields without gimmick -- no extended cold carbonic macerations and natural to the extreme. Almost an excess of nature here.
I see the garrigue spreading on Lafayette Street, right below my office.
Denyse and I are off in a week to beautiful Poil Rouge. Poil Rouge is a hamlet in charming St-Gengoux-de-Scissé, strategically located in the Northern Mâconnais.
The locals describe the Poil Rougien life style as being exquis!
The younger locals describe the Poil Rougien life style as being mega-chouette.
The Famous Louis/Dressner Compound in Poil Rouge Sud
It always takes us a while to get set-up. There are cobwebs (in French, they call this toiles d'araignée, mouse nests (in French, they call this un nid de souris, dust (in French, they call this poussiére), house repairs (bricolage) and lots of mosquitoes (moustiques) to keep us busy during the first few days.
This year, we are only staying for two nights and then going to Bordeaux for Vinexpo. Actually, we won't be setting a foot in Vinexpo, a terrifying exposition dominated by the sake2me people. Instead, we will be attending four "offs" where many great growers will be showing wine.
It is kind of like leading a double life. The French countryside remains largely Android Phone free and there is a whole other culture there. Believe it or not, I'm the only person in Poil Rouge with Brain Cancer and a Blog!
Reader's will remember my recent profile of sake2me from the Vine Connections. This is a delicious beverage that makes beautiful babe and dudes stick out their tongues in delight and lick bottles which might carry life-threating germs.
Vine Connections partner, Ed Lehrman, is sick of all the elitist response to this clearly populist product. With great passion, he asks:
It has been 2 years now since sake2me was introduced, and I am still astounded at the number of snooty looks or comments I get from people I know when I introduce them to sake2me. And why? Because it is an INCLUSIVE product and not something that builds their own self worth due to their mastery of some obscure knowledge. I tell them: hold the bottle, check out the classy label, taste it, and picture how many times your customers would LOVE to have this kind of drink in their hands. And think about how many more people it might appeal to than traditional sake
Mr. Lehrman then goes on to say he only like some of the flavors and that furthermore he doesn't like some of the malbecs or sakes he imports, although he doesn't mention name:
Do I love ALL my Argentine wine and Japanese sake selections? Nope.
Mr. Lehrman's goal is raking in money and even if he doesn't like the malbecs or sakes he sells, someone else might and his company, his personnel and his distributors can make money with things he doesn't necessarily like. In his view, sake2me is a broad, democratic product that promoters can all make big bucks on! Or as a great American once said, no one ever got poor underestimating the stupidity of the American people. On this basis, sake2me certainly qualifies. It is one stupid product.
The argument for sake2me takes takes this even one step further. It is only elitism and snobbism that prevents sake2me from taking over the market.
In a reflective moment, Mr. Lehrman writes of how he wants to sell to the broad masses, and not just be stuck with wine or sake geeks to line his pockets:
A few years ago, it occurred to me, my partner, and a close friend of ours that while Vine Connections was having great success introducing Americans to the delicious artisan sake of Japan, we were still only touching the smallest sliver of people who might want to try sake. After all, our sake are brewed in small quantities, they are fairly expensive, and they really benefit from a bit of knowledge before enjoying.
Too bad someone came up with Yellowtail before these two geniuses had the time to lasso a Kangaroo.
I had a great time at my 40th High School Reunion! There were at least eight out of 400 people I was absolutely delighted to see.
I now realize I'm too negative a person. I'm going to try to think positive.
Yeah!
I took a pill last night and finished my fourth cycle of chemotherapy. I now have three weeks of rest and two more cycles of chemo.
This was a fun cycle. I was very tired and had difficulty keeping my balance in the street. Happily, I was able to stay clear of too many job obligations and rest.
Soon, I will be off to France for the summer. Thank Goodness!
Right now, I'm dizzy and looking forward to my 40th High School Reunion tonight. See below.
Incredibly, I was 14 when I graduated!
I'm expecting to have a horrible time tonight, but maybe I will be wrong and have a blast!
That's right. I'm attending my 40th High School Reunion tonight.
I'm sure I will regret doing so. We had an enormous graduating class and something like 300 people will be attending. I pray to Jesus Christ that they won't be bringing their horrible spouses with them.
My best friend went to high school with me. Every so often, I'm in touch with people I know from years ago. Being a prominent blogger and the cousin of Dr. Barbara Hirsch, the Eminent Endocrinolist from Great Neck, people can find me with a simple internet search if they really want to find me. Like everyone else who went through the anti-war movement in the 60s, I'm nostalgic enough and like seeing old friends.
On the other hand, do you really want to meet people you haven't seen in 40 years? You probably would have kept in touch if you really had that much in common.
Sometimes it is best to have fond memories based on youthful enthusiasm and naiveté. Why ruin those memories?
A lot of middle-aged people are now on Facebook. This way, they can renew friendships with people they haven't seen in 10, 20, 30 or 40 years. This is just another example of the virtual replacing the real. Why revive a past you've left behind because it is easy and takes on no risk when done from the comforts of your keyboard. It is the virtual replacing real friendships, friendships that are often difficult and contradictory, friendships that can involve real, not virtual emotions. In real relations, you can't just take someone off your friends list and move on.
The venue for the reunion is the Laguardia Airport Marriot Hotel:
Doesn't that say it all?
It appears Robert Parker is putting his house in order.
I'm delighted that he is going to insist on journalistic integrity and honesty with his employees. Tanzer does it, other people do it, and it is important to fight for the principle that the press is not on the take.
I've cancelled all my hedonistic dinners with Dr. Jay Miller and I'm glad I can go back to disagreeing with wine evaluations in The Wine Advocate and not wondering who is on what junket.
I do think Parker could have handled this better and Mark Squires did everything he could to alienate everyone possible in their wine world. But the important thing is that Parker is now going to insist on real and reasonable ethical standards.
Now, I would like to see some of the bloggers who were so quick to attack Parker adopt the same standards. Some of these bloggers argue that junkets and payoffs are fine so long as the participants admit they are on the take. Their objection was that Miller and Squires were not publicizing that they were on sponsored trips and junkets.
This logic boggles the imagination. The bloggers attacked Parker's employees for doing what they do because they were not admitting to the public that they were every bit as unethical as the bloggers attacking them. These same bloggers defend their right to be on junkets because they admit they are happy recipients of the largesses of various trade associations.
Maybe I'm too old, but this is so crazy I get dizzy following their logic.
Anyhow, kudos to Parker!
By federal law, the wine industry is split into the Moe, Larry and Curly three-tier system.
You've got to have an importer, distributor and then a retailer or restaurant owner in each of the 50 states. Colorado actually requires four tiers.
The truth though is that the wine trade is now being dominated by enormous companies that dominate every aspect of the trade. Their interest is mass volume and homogenization.
Those of us who are interested in real wines that come from real work in real earth need to get past the three tier system ideology and realize that anyone in the trade interested in good wine has more common interest with us than a fellow Moe, Larry or Curly.
The lines are beginning to blur. Our company is an importer and distributor and who knows if we won't also be a retailer at some time in the future.
What shocks me is when progressive people in the wine trade want to fixate on the old divisions and keep doing business in the same old way.
Let's get everyone who likes great wine together and work together to get great wine out in the market. That's right, be it a distributor, retailer, importer, restaurant, writer or blogger.
We have nothing to lose but our supply chains!
I will no longer attend meetings where someone calls me a "supplier."
I won't attend meetings where people don't call me a "supplier" but think I am their "supplier."
Our vignerons don't make supplies.
They make wine.
We sell wine.
Not supplies.
Let's put the wine back into The Wine Trade.
I'm paralyzed by chemotherapy this morning so I've been reading the University of Purdue Web site. Finally, I understand why everyone is calling us Suppliers these days. According to the University of Purdue web site:
"A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties". Fetishism in anthropology refers to the primitive belief that godly powers can inhere in inanimate things (e.g., in totems).....borrows this concept to make sense of what he terms "commodity fetishism."
The commodity remains simple as long as it is tied to its use-value. When a piece of wood is turned into a table through human labor, its use-value is clear and, as product, the table remains tied to its material use. However, as soon as the table "emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness". The connection to the actual hands of the laborer is severed as soon as the table is connected to money as the universal equivalent for exchange. People in a capitalist society thus begin to treat commodities as if value inhered in the objects themselves, rather than in the amount of real labor expended to produce the object. "The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things". What is, in fact, a social relation between people (between capitalists and exploited laborers) instead assumes "the fantastic form of a relation between things".
This effect is caused by the fact that the real producers of commodities remain largely invisible. We only approach their products "through the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the products". We access the products of the people through the exchange of money with those institutions that glean profit from the labor. Since we only ever relate to those products through the exchange of money, we forget the "secret hidden under the apparent movements in the relative values of commodities"; that is labor:
"It is... precisely this finished form of the world of commodities—the money form—which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly").... society, gold and then paper money become "the direct incarnation of all human labor", much as in primitive societies the totem becomes the direct incarnation of godhead. Through this process, "Men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way; they become alienated because their own relations of production assume a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action". Although value ultimately accrues because of human labor, people are led to believe that they are not in control of the market forces that appear to exist independently of any individual person.
Pretty heady stuff! At Louis/Dressner, we want to cut through all this "commodity fetishism" and bring it back to the table, not the commodity exchange that bought the table. It is all about the producers, their vines and their wines and not the monetary exchanges between supplier and buyers.
I've been on Chemo since Monday night.
Temodar rocks!
One of the great things about Temodar is you feel like a rock fell on you when you wake up in the morning.
That's when I write all my blogs.
I had a nightmare last night. Everyone I knew in the world called me The Supplier.
Did you know that the word supplier comes from the French word soupplier?
My mother is in the hospital again with a series of chronic problems. She's been seeing a lot of medical advice suppliers every day.
Yesterday, I went to a José Pastor Spanish wine tasting. José is a supplier to Bowler Selections here in New York and also supplies Farm Wine Imports in California. He now also supplies Triage Wines.
I then ate at a restaurant with José and all his growers. The restaurant supplied us with a delicious meal. They are food suppliers.
I didn't have to take a transportation supplier home because David Bowler graciously offered to supply me with a ride.
I'm a little worried about my 5th and 6th cycle of Temodar. I am going to France soon for 2 1/2 months and my medical insurance suppliers do not want to give me advance supplies. Did you know that a one week supply of Temodar costs $6,000!
I fell yesterday and broke the glass shade floor lamp in my bedroom. It is a mogul bulb antique fixture and there is only one supplier of mogul light bulbs in my neighborhood. It is a small artisinal shop on 1st Avenue between 55th and 54th Street. We'll be ordering light bulbs from internet suppliers when the guy retires.
I always like to think that there is something special about wine, but everyone we sell our special wines to calls us suppliers.
My family has a business called All-In-One Suppliers, where my father worked for many years. My cousin and brother still work there and they continue to supply store and showroom fixtures to the garment trade.
Perhaps we Dressner's are destined to be suppliers!
There have been a lot of ugly rumors around the blogosphere implying that I am trading wines for preferable treatment at cancer centers. One blogger even went to far as to suggest that I traded a case of Philippe Pacalet's sensational Charmes-Chambertin 2005 to a prominent neurologist to get better treatment. Another blogger wrote that I offered to fly a medical practitioner to the Paulée in Meursault if he put me on a special trial treatment.
There have also been rumors that I have been laying off Dr. Barbara Hirsch and Dr. Ira Dressner in an attempt to curry favor with the medical community.
Let me assure everyone here, that Captain Tumor Man continues the same high ethical standards that I have always practiced since being diagnosed with brain cancer in November.
These so-called "bloggers" enjoy stirring the pot but no one has yet to find a "smoking gun." Let them get brain cancer and I assure you we'll see no lack of oncology junkets and payoffs.
I don't know what the agenda is of these people attacking my cancer ethics but I assure you their tactics will not stop me from embracing my brain tumor while I continue to pay my Oxford Insurance $20.00 deductible and hang around the waiting room like all the other patients. Whether they be wine importers or retired tailors.
This is my pledge to you, dear readers.
Joe Dressner
Wine Credit Derivatives have been a hot thing for years, but I'm surprised that there is still a hot market for such Madoffesque tomfoolery.
Here's how it goes:
1. You make up a nice label
2. You control who fills up the bottles
3. You get good press scores
4. You get your distributors to sell tons of the wines.
5. You cash out to a large megacorporation and line your pockets.
6. You screw your distributors who can no longer buy the wine
7. The megacorporation has a 4 to 5 year run and then liquidates the label
8. Or they succeed and put even worse plunk in the bottle than you did.
The whole transaction has nothing to do with earth, vines, wines. It is pure paper speculation, the type that liquor companies love. I don't really care what liquor companies do, but I do care when people who pretend to represent fine wine are trying to out-Madoff each other.
I have nothing against liquor salespeople and Gallo and industrial wine purveyors.
They're in a different milieu than niche importers and have a different product than what we love. They're businesspeople who just happen to be selling a commodity based on fermented grapes. That's all we really have in common.
What angers me is when Budweiser sets up "artisan" small breweries and wine industrialists talk artisan wines because they are trying to rip-off a culture based on work in the vineyards and great wines just to line their pockets. I get angry when horrible spoof that's been manipulated for wine wine writers on $25,000.00 junkets uses the same language that Marc Ollivier or Catherine Roussel use.
I don't care if Gallo wants to sell Gallo. But the Gallos, the Constellations, the Southern Wine & Spirits and all the megacompanies should clear out and stop expropriating the language of real wine to sell industrial beverages.
I also think niche wine importers have a resonsibility to remain faithful to the people who buy their wines and who look for their logos on a label. There is a line we don't cross -- we work with small producers and stay loyal to them. We make clear to our customers that what's in the bottle in not a slogan waiting for a cashout but the product of real work.
Who appointed me the wine cop? Nobody. I just believe in honesty and I can play the cancer card and you can't. Although I was an asshole before I had cancer.
I was also an idealist and remain an idealist. Wine is a business but there is still place for idealism, passion and crazyness. It is still based on something natural, something which transcents the Bernie Madoffs, Michel Rollands, paid-off journalists, or market manipulators. It is a fight to keep it honest but there are still enough of us around in our little world to keep real wine alive.
José Pastor is a young guy trying to put together a group of real vignerons in Spain. Someone was going to eventually try to do such a thing and thank goodness it is finally happening.
José and his company have a group of growers touring America. David Bowler Selections, one of our competitors, is having a trade tasting on June 2nd. I plan on going if I'm not too sick from Chemotherapy. Nobody likes a guy sick on Chemotherapy at their tasting.
They will then be in San Francisco at a Farm Wine Imports tasting on June 4th. Farm Wine Imports distributes our wines in California and there are rumors that there are shady dealings between our company and Farm. I won't be attending that tasting.
They'll also be visiting our friends at Triage Wines in Seattle on the 8th of June and Portland on the 9th.
I think the scene in Spain is evolving where finally there are vignerons sick of spoof and importers sick of being spoof delivery machines. Not everybody's goal in life is to sell labels to some other mmonster company. Thankfully, there are still vignerons and importers who live, breath and drink real wine.
Parker posted a sort of apology this morning on his E-Bob Board.
I looked in and there were a lot of people complaining about how Mr. Squires and Parker handled the allegations. One prominent member of that board has just recently been thrown off and the discussion was edited to eliminate criticisms and then locked.
Oh well, they're a very silly group over there. And awfully thin-skinned for professional critics.
Robert Parker just announced he will enforce his no hand-out policy to the entire staff of the The Wine Advocate, not just himself.
Now, I can go back to not liking most everything Jay Miller and Mark Squires write without wondering if Miller and Squires are on the dole.
I don't like their taste in wine. For that matter I don't like Parker's taste in wine, although he is clearly a talent.
But I do believe in an independent press that rejects junkets, handouts and bribes.
I'm glad to see that Parker has been draged into doing the right thing!
He told me to lay off, in no uncertain terms.
I'm in bad health.
I can't take the stress.
Of course, it could have been a fraudulent call.
Not only are they rated the Number 1 Argentine importer by many sources, they also carry great Sake if you don't like wine. This helps them hedge their bets.
They are also carrying a revolutionary beverage called saké2me which has only a little alcohol, which is kind of like a soda, and which lots of hipsters may or may not like. saké2me is meant to appeal to the young drinker who doesn't like Argentine Malbec and who does like the price tag on sake. Apparently, the target market likes to hand out their tongues and lick bottles of beveragge.
There are no capital letters and saké2me fits nicely into a text message: cu later 2 s2me bro! This is yet another way for the VC (not the Viet Cong but Vine Connections) to hedge their bets in this difficult market.
What's next? A beverage with no alcohol, no sugar, no flavor, that's refreshing and light and from artisan beverage companies?
How about Artisan Water from Africa or the Amazon?
The kids will love that!
Vine Connections is now distributing another artisan product called saké2me.
According the Vine Connections, this is the latest cutting edge sake drink, "infused with all-natural Asian flavors." There are also a lot of "exotic asian themes" in the VCs latest alcohol product.
Unlike many of the Vine Connection products, saké2me is being marketed as a wine alternative. The VC suggests it be "served chilled as a refreshing alternative to beer, wine and cocktails."
saké2me is also a natural product. According to the VC site, it is "naturally sweetened with pure cane sugar."
Following in the footsteps of Sidney E. Frank, the old Jägermeister and Grey Goose Vodka promoter, the VC is getting the word out there about saké2me to the people who count. All these pictures are from the VC web site promoting this new visionary beverage....saké2me (I suppose everyone is too young to remember the Rowan & Martin show.
Drank a fabulous bottle of Menu-Pineau from Pascal Potaire on Sunday.
The wine had a bit of fizz and was bottled with a beer cap. Something mineral, something light, something salty. A great wine to drink with friends and without great thought. Gobs of hedonist pleasure.
Pascal has a tiny estate in the Loir-et-Cher, home of some of the world's greatest winemakers, and is making excellent white wines these days.
As far as I know, the wine is not available in America. The bottle didn't even have a label. It would probably be impossible to sell and too expensive with the current currency exchange and the three-tier system.
I was shocked to hear about this on today's episode of Medium.
More next week during the exciting season's finale of Medium.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to welcome wine industry veteran Joe Riley to this site. As most of you know, Joe is the very knowledgeable guy who runs Ace Beverage in DC.
Joe has taken an active role in the comments sections, correcting my errors about the Vine Connection. The problem with all these blogs is we have a slim staff and no proofreaders. Only The Sheriff and Steve Edmunds are constantly vigilant and they don't have enough time to proofread.
I think it is great that Joe has taken on this task.
Welcome aboard!