New Site

Still here? Thanks for staying tuned. After a bit of an unplanned hiatus from this site, I've gotten the itch to do some more wine writing again, but I grew a little tired of this format. So I put together a new site with a somewhat different concept and look. If you're still curious to read my ramblings, please follow me there: cellarbook.wordpress.com. Thank you!

As Easy As 1-2-3

The Drinks Committee of the Editorial Board of the fine food blog What’s She Eating Now recently asked me if I might be interested in submitting a few guest blog posts on the subject of wine. So if you’re curious to read my thoughts on wine from a somewhat more introductory perspective than the inside-baseball stuff I post to this blog, here are the three posts I put together, on Germany, France, and Italy.

You Can’t Take the Seine from Me

“So, four or five hundred years ago,” wrote the late Frank Schoonmaker in a piece anthologized in History in a Glass: Sixty Years of Wine Writing from Gourmet, “they celebrated the excellence of Burgundy in the taverns and cabarets of Paris: ‘If I had a gullet five hundred ells wide, and the Seine ran this good wine of Beaune, I would go down under the bridge, stretch myself out, and I would let the Seine run down into my belly.’” I’ve seen those words before:

I photographed those verses in the Musée du Vin in Beaune awhile back, planning to attempt a translation (with help from Babelfish) when I got home. Here is what I came up with, taking a bit more poetic license than Schoonmaker.

If only my lips were a mile from side to side
And the Seine were a river of Burgundy wine;
I would stretch athwart its banks,
Descending to the coast to drink
All the Seine’s five hundred miles,
And hold it all inside awhile;

If the King should grow displeased and summon men
To wrest me from that bridge across the Seine,
I’d concede the King’s domain
And quietly proclaim,
I grant you Paris, great Henri,
But please don’t take the Seine from me.

The Taste of Gold

I finally got around to reading The Billionaire’s Vinegar, Benjamin Wallace’s account of how high-end wine collector Hardy Rodenstock apparently hoodwinked a slew of his fellow megacollectors with fake wine. The most notorious of these wines were a cache of filthy hand-blown bottles inscribed with the initials “Th.J.,” which he attributed to America’s third President and first oenophile, Thomas Jefferson. Rodenstock sold several of those bottles for extravagant sums at Christie’s auctions and opened them for numerous V.I.P.’s with whom he wished to curry favor.

Wallace’s book is one of the most engaging wine books I’ve read in a long while, mostly because it has all the mystery, plot twists, and eccentric personalities of a suspense novel. But since it’s not a novel, it leaves some of its central mysteries unsolved. Now, everyone knows the Jefferson connection was a hoax—attempts to authenticate the “Th.J.” inscription showed it to have been made with a modern dental drill—but radiation tests of the wine in some of the bottles established that they may well have dated from Jefferson’s time. We may never know what they were, but they were certainly more valuable than vinegar.

Michael Broadbent, the Christie’s auctioneer who sold the wines for Rodenstock and drank many of them with him, was so irate with the way he was portrayed in the book that he sued Wallace for libel. Indeed, it’s easy to imagine readers of the book getting the impression that Broadbent was woefully negligent in the way he went about authenticating the provenance of the bottles. But in my reading of the book he came across as a sympathetic character. If he didn’t investigate their provenance as diligently as a more skeptical man might have, it was only because he was a wine lover to the core, and his real fault was not negligence but the sentiment of that iconic poster hung above Fox Mulder’s desk in the X-Files: “I Want to Believe.”

Broadbent was not the only one who wanted to believe. It seems every person who crossed paths with one of the Jefferson bottles became so entranced with the founding father that they immersed themselves in Jefferson lore. Believing in the bottles gave them a connection to something even more profound than what the wine inside promised.

But the wonderful thing about Jefferson is that he can still be relevant for us in many ways even if you do not own a bottle of wine from his collection—in matters of civil society, or of wine. As I write this post, I’m sipping from a Grand Cru-quality bottle of Meursault La Goutte d’Or 2005, from the Domaine Bernard Millot. Nobody writes much about Goutte d’Or anymore; Perrières is the trendy Meursault vineyard of choice these days. But Jefferson had a special fondness for La Goutte d’Or. According to James Gabler’s book about Jefferson’s wine and travels, he consumed at least 250 bottles of the 1784 vintage while he lived in Paris, advised a Philadelphia wine merchant in 1791 that it was the “best quality” wine of Meursault, and remarked on its value relative to the three-times-more-expensive Montrachet. Today most people take the word of journalists for such information, but Jefferson came by that knowledge the old-fashioned way—by drinking. If you’re ever inclined to pursue the exercise of drinking what Jefferson drank, include a bottle of La Goutte d’Or. (In addition to Bernard Millot’s, permit me also to recommend Domaine Buisson-Charles’s stunning bottling, a bargain from Oregon’s Vinopolis Wine Shop.) The most valuable thing Jefferson bequeathed to future generations of wine drinkers wasn’t a stash of bottles to occupy the trophy case in a billionaire’s cellar, but rather the connoisseurship with which he turned a pastime into a passion.

Goodwill & Bad Wine

Everybody knows a high point score from a famous wine critic can move a lot of wine, but very rarely do you see an actual demonstration of its precise cash value. Would you have guessed $40 million? That’s the price just paid for a controlling interest in Kosta-Browne, a California pinot noir maker with no vineyards, no winery, and no other assets to speak of besides a mailing list and a brand that had gotten 18 scores of 95 points or higher from James Laube of the Wine Spectator since the 2003 vintage. In fact, Laube is the only major wine critic who’d ever taken a fancy to K-B—even Robert Parker panned the stuff—making the purchase price a jawdropping demonstration not just of the value of scores in the abstract but of the Spectator’s scores in particular. I almost feel sorry for Laube, watching other people cash in to the tune of $40 million after he did all the work.

Changes

Is there a more depressing sentence in the English language than “Times change, and we have to change with them”? Those were the words spoken to me last night when I asked the folks at Chanterelle whether the rumors were true that they were revamping the restaurant to add a bar, tear up the carpeting, and start serving small plates. It’s true. Tonight, August 15, is the last night Chanterelle will exist in its current format, which is just as I remember it from my first visit a decade ago, before New Yorkers became obsessed with “small plates.”

Chanterelle does real French cuisine, but not the stale variety that doomed creaky East Side institutions like La Côte Basque and Lespinasse. Roger Dagorn kept the wine list focused on Bordeaux and Burgundy standbys and a few French country wines, but delighted in curveballs like the occasional sake pairing. It’s fashionable these days for restaurants to tout fresh, seasonal ingredients, and that’s been the theme at Chanterelle forever, without descending into ingredient-worship of the sort where the waiter gives you the name, town, diet, and hobbies of the animal you are about to eat. Dishes are finished with rich, complex sauces. Meals are a civilized four or five courses, not marathon tasting menus that cause you to lose your appetite by the time the kitchen is done showing off.

The cheese course is essential—done the proper way by pointing to the cheeses you want on the board, rather than getting a few tiny slivers pre-selected by the kitchen with pointless fixings. And they’re stunning. Von Trapp Oma is Vermont’s answer to Reblechon or Abbaye de Citeaux, and I can’t wait to buy some for myself at Murray’s. But I have bought Tomme Crayeuse at Murray’s dozens of times, and none compared to the runny raw-milk one on Chanterelle’s board.

With Chanterelle abandoning this format, it’s probable that no one else in New York is doing it—and it’s certain that no one else in New York is doing it as well. And I feel terrible about it. I wouldn’t have been there yesterday if I didn’t know it was my last chance. The last time I got this maudlin about a restaurant I committed the following bit of sappiness, but it sums up even better how I feel today:

I think much of the appeal of these kinds of restaurants lies in their ability to become time capsules, impervious to changing trends and as comfortable as an old beloved sofa. We forgive the consequent quirks and take the rest for granted, putting off visiting when we know we should, like they’re old relatives, banking on the certainty that they’ll still be there for us, unchanged, when we find the time.

But I don’t go to restaurants all that much anymore, so I couldn’t have saved the place even if I’d tried. With a dog we can’t bear to leave home alone and a baby due in the fall, at the end of a long day it’s the comforts of home and my own kitchen I tend to crave more than a meal at a restaurant, even a great one. Times change, and we change with them; fortunately that’s not always a sad thing.

Deconstructing Pollan

A Missouri farmer notices that The Omnivore’s Dilemma has made all sorts of people feel qualified to have an opinion about what he does for a living, and fights back. The opening salvo, against one clueless culprit:

[H]e expects me to farm like my grandfather, and not incidentally, I suppose, to live like him as well. He thinks farmers are too stupid to farm sustainably, too cruel to treat their animals well, and too careless to worry about their communities, their health, and their families. I would not presume to criticize his car, or the size of his house, or the way he runs his business. But he is an expert about me, on the strength of one book, and is sharing that expertise with captive audiences every time he gets the chance. Enough, enough, enough.

Nota Bene, Redux

A New York Times column arguing that wine tasting notes are pretentious and prolix calls attention to a little essay titled “On Wine Bullshit,” by Princeton economist Richard Quandt, as “[t]he canonical work in the wine-adjective field.” Quandt’s point that wine writing has its share of bullshit artists is well-taken, but I fear the essay represents another false arrest by the bullshit police. Quandt catalogs dozens of adjectival phrases favored by wine critics and singles out a few for snarky derision, like “scorched earth,” “crushed rocks,” or “olive-tinged black currant.” But the truth is, these things only sound like bullshit until the first time you experience them yourself, and then they make perfect sense. I once thought the notion of “lead pencils” in wine was bullshit, until I drank a 1995 Lynch-Bages from Pauillac (ground zero for lead pencils) which reeked of them. Quandt complains, “I have never been near scorched earth, perhaps because Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan were a bit before my time,” but if he’d ever sniffed a burnt-out campfire he would instantly recognize the scent in a wine like 1970 Haut-Brion.

The objection to excessive adjective use is not that they’re bullshit, but that they’re usually besides the point. It’s appropriate to deploy the “scorched earth” cliché to describe a wine like Haut-Brion that really is powerfully evocative of scorched earth, but when it’s just one of a dozen descriptive phrases it loses its relevance. The essence of the wine’s character usually lies in something else.

Excellent Choice, Sir

Sometimes a bout of envy can ruin your whole day!

Via Instapundit, here’s a melodramatic story about a woman at the Chicago restaurant Alinea, who had just finished the eighth course of a twenty-five course meal when she noticed a diner at the next table getting the same dish—but in a grander presentation, personally sculpted at her table by the chef de cuisine. The woman’s heart sank. Specifically, “She began to cry, got up from the table, and briskly walked to the bathroom. They cut their meal short and left soon thereafter.”

Instapundit calls the story “from the ‘get a life’ department.” It’s true that the woman’s tears and departure come across as both pitiable and petty, but her gripe was a fair one. As I had occasion to note once before, if you’re going to treat someone as second-class, use some discretion and make sure they don’t find out!

Compare the Alinea story to an episode discussed by the philosopher Alain de Botton in his insightful little book on the phenomenon of Status Anxiety:

On a foggy evening in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, the bourgeois narrator of Marcel Proust’s [Remembrance of Things Past] travels to an expensive restaurant to have dinner with an aristocratic friend, the Marquis de Saint-Loup. He arrives early, Saint-Loup is late and the staff, judging their client on the basis of a shabby coat and an unfamiliar name, assume that a nobody has entered their establishment. They therefore patronize him, take him to a table around which an arctic draught is blowing and are slow to offer him anything to drink or eat.

But, a quarter of an hour later, the marquis arrives, identifies his friend and at a stroke transforms the narrator’s value in the eyes of the staff. The manager bows deeply before him, draws out the menu, recites the specials of the day with evocative flourishes, compliments him on his clothes and, so as to prevent him thinking that these courtesies are in any way dependent on his link to an aristocrat, occasionally gives him a surreptitious little smile that seems to indicate a wholly personal affection. When the narrator asks him for some bread the manager clicks his heels and exclaims:

“Certainly, Monsieur le baron!” “I am not a baron,” I told him in a tone of mock sadness. “Oh, I beg your pardon, Monsieur le comte!” I had no time to lodge a second protest, which would no doubt have promoted me to the rank of marquis.

However satisfactory the volte-face, the underlying dynamic is bleak, for the manager has not of course amended his snobbish value system in any way. He has merely rewarded someone differently within its brutal confines—and only rarely do we have the opportunity to find a Marquis de Saint-Loup or a Prince Charming who will speak on our behalf to convince the world of the nobility of our souls. More commonly, we are made to finish our dinner in the arctic draught.

What rankles isn’t the stratification per se but the insult, the insinuation that it’s who you are that makes the difference and the implied glass ceiling if you’re not among the elite or the otherwise well-favored. To its credit, Alinea has come up with an egalitarian remedy:

I suggested that we make that “VIP” experience available to everyone who was interested in it. The Tour menu was created. It was the entire repertoire of the kitchen. Twenty to 30 courses in length, it was the “kitchen sink.”

By making it available to everyone we had covered our own butts. If a table noticed a neighboring table receiving a course they did not, it was for the simple reason they elected to not order the menu that the course was on. But more importantly, we now made our “best possible” experience available to everyone.

Capitalism is a wonderful equalizer. Everyone’s dollar is as good as everyone else’s.

Hype

Sports Illustrated features a fascinating conversation between baseball sabermetrician Bill James and Joe Posnanski, working towards an understanding of the nature of hype.

James: “I wonder if this is a definition of Hype: that hype celebrates potential before the potential is realized, in an effort to profit from it when it is realized.”

James again: “Here’s the difference, I think, between hype and scouting. A scout looks carefully at the player himself . . . and asks whether he can succeed as a major leaguer. Hype starts on the other end. Hype starts with the question ‘Who can be a superstar?’ and attempts to project each player several levels ahead of where he is . . . not only each player but all the players, to figure out which one is going to be the big star.”

Posnanski: “I think Hype also is the product of human nature. The birthday present gift-wrapped up will more often than not be better than the gift once you open it. The recruiting class usually looks better before anyone plays a game. The excitement of what’s behind door No. 3 will make people give back the perfectly good prize they found behind door No. 2.”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go buy some 2008 Bordeaux futures and figure out which California mailing list is going to be the next Screaming Eagle.

Thread-Skipper #2: The Decline and Fall of the Parker Empire

Thread: Too many to list, including “Letter to the Editor of the Wall Street Journal,” eRobertparker.com; “VERY interesting article on Parker in today's Wall Street Journal,” UK Wine Forum; “Robert Parker and the End of the Road,” Wine Berserkers; “What bothers me about wine blogs,” eRobertParker.com; and assorted other threads and blog posts all over the Internet, except on Wine Disorder, where nobody really knows or cares much who Robert Parker is, and on eRobertParker.com itself, where the most popcorn-worthy threads tend to get locked or purged just when they’re getting good.

Background: Old-fashioned investigative journalism on the Dr. Vino blog confirms long-suspected rumors that world-renowned wine critic Robert M. Parker, Jr., for whatever reason, tends to surround himself with jerks. Further investigation reveals that the inner circle consists of both jerks and parasites, the latter of whom apparently approach their association with Parker the way former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich approaches vacant U.S. Senate seats. The gist of the accusations is that Parker’s writers have been taking industry-sponsored junkets to taste the wine they report on rather than paying their own way like the big man himself. In addition, the logically and epistemologically challenged Jay Miller is apparently best buddies with the guys responsible for most of the undrinkably disgusting Australian and Spanish wines that get ecstatic reviews in the Wine Advocate.

The coverup: Parker’s business partner Joe James circles the wagons in pathetic I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I fashion by attacking the integrity of “bloggers” as if each one were part of some sort of secret society engaged in an ancient shadowy conspiracy like in a Dan Brown novel, except that the alleged object of the conspiracy was to get subsidized hotel breakfasts rather than to assassinate the Pope. Parker, rather than disclose his business partnership with James, responds how he always does to shameless, incoherent brown-nosing—with a pat on the back and more tinfoil-hat ranting against his ever-expanding enemies list, which now includes “bloggers,” “or should I say blobbers since they are the source of much of the misinformation,distortion,and egegious [sic] falsehoods spread with reckless abandon on the internet.” Parker touts his pure-as-the-driven-snow independence while complaining that “bloggers can’t continue to exist without wine-related advertising.” Hey, where’s my check? Parker continues the tirade in published comments in his journal wherein he rails against “blogs authored by anybody who can string a noun and verb together, and by many who can’t,” an odd slinging of stones from the glass house of someone whose own online postings are notoriously rambling and who still hasn’t grasped such basic rules of form as using a space after punctuation.

The martyr: New York retailer Dan Posner asks some innocent questions about the double standard, for which he is eventually purged.

The sideshow: Kevin Zraly used to be the wine director at Windows on the World until it was blown up by the Religion of Peace. Afterwards, he continued to run the Windows on the World wine education program, which attempts to teach grownups about wine in much the same way that Mr. Rogers teaches children how to tie their shoes. He was hired to moderate a similarly conceived wine education forum on eRobertParker.com a few years ago, which suffered the Internet equivalent of tumbleweeds and when he resigned from eRobertParker.com, it took months before anyone noticed. In case anyone was still wondering what he’s been up to, it turns out that he has been posting bizarre non-sequiturs about wine on Twitter, which are even funnier when you read them in the voice of Norm MacDonald impersonating Larry King. In a related discussion, blogger Arthur Przebinda links to a fascinating report on wine and social media, the thrust of which is that the future of wine commentary is infinitely more interesting than Robert Parker sitting in his throne and telling everybody else what to think. Further evidence that Parker does not understand where the value in online content comes from appears in his pleas for the most active contributors to his site to give him money, rather than the other way around.

The shit hits the fan: The Dr. Vino story goes mainstream in the Wall Street Journal, prompting Parker to complain that the Journal didn’t tell his side of the story, prompting the New York Times’s Eric Asimov to query how the Journal was supposed to know his side of the story after he refused their interview request. The most interesting reactions get deleted but are preserved elsewhere.

Damage control: Miller, who has apparently been friends with Parker for thirty years, gets thrown under the bus and “disciplined”! The Wine Advocate’s writers lose most of their free trips, but the double standard nevertheless receives official codification.

Aftermath: It’s impossible not to feel shitty about yourself after wasting hours of your life following the Parker-vs.-the-Internet and the Parker-vs.-his-own-staff conflagrations.

The truth is, no matter how much of Parker’s brand identity is invested in the illusion that he actually, say, writes the Rothschild family a check to cover the barrel sample he spit out and rated 1,000 points, nobody really follows Parker for his purported impartiality. Parker gained his influence by championing a new standard for what wine should be, a standard which is just as bankrupt in aesthetic merit as the modern standards in virtually everything else but has its fans for the same reason people go see Jerry Bruckheimer movies. To complain that praises of such wines are tainted by friendships or free travel is besides the point. I’m reminded of the rhyme, attributed to one Humbert Wolfe:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
(Thank God!) the British journalist,
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

Along similar lines, an old joke about New York Times reporters had it that if they weren’t on Stalin’s payroll, they were getting ripped off. But the New York Times didn’t need the incentive of bribery to spread Communist propaganda any more than Parker’s posse needs further incentive to push the Mollydookers and Monbousquets of the world. There is so much criticism of Parker to be made on substance that any criticism on process seems, and probably is, pretextual. It’s almost surreal that after all the bad advice Parker has dispensed, it’s Jay Miller’s feeding from the trough that prompts people to raise questions whether the sun is finally setting on Parker’s power. But I think Max has it right in that analysis. Parker’s influence won’t wane until more people feel like they’ve gotten burnt following his advice, and it’s fitting that the most spoofulated vintage in the history of Bordeaux may serve as the tipping point.

Update: Parker finally takes notice of “the number of communications I’ve gotten from once dynamic and valuable posters that this board has taken on a mob mentality riddled with demeaning and unsavory comments,” but delusionally thinks the nastiness originates solely with his detractors rather than his enforcers. Even curiouser, he continues to view the world as divided between honest, independent people like himself and people “driven by a hidden agenda” “exploit[ing] [their] own self-interests.” He has it exactly backwards. It’s only Parker and his staff who have a financial interest in pushing their opinions. Everyone else is in it just for the love of it.

Circle of Life

Peanuts & Crackerjacks &c.

It’s not too soon to name the Most Valuable Player of the 2009 New York Mets: Danny Meyer. (Well, it sure won’t be anyone in the Baseball Department.) Thanks to Mr. Meyer, proprietor of the new Citi Field outposts of Blue Smoke and my beloved Shake Shack, the quality of the food available to Mets fans is no longer as atrocious as the quality of the baseball being played on the diamond.

It takes more than 45 minutes to reach the front of the line at the Shake Shack, but it’s at least as worthwhile a way to pass the time as watching Oliver Perez surrender another home run, Daniel Murphy mishandle another routine hop, and David Wright whiff for another third out stranding men in scoring position. The food is just as good as the Madison Square Park original, albeit with an abridged menu. The fans should rise up to demand chocolate shakes (and a decent clutch hitter). For whatever reason, the barbecue at Blue Smoke isn’t quite up to the level of 27th Street, although it has the distinction of offering by far the best of the five different kinds of french fries available at Citi Field. They’re better than the crinkle-cut fries at the Shake Shack, which admittedly somehow taste better than any crinkle-cut fries have a right to taste.

(The less said about the “fries” at the standard Nathan’s Famous concessions throughout the park, the better. By far the worst abuse of the potato it has ever been my displeasure to experience, Nathan’s soggy “fries” have the texture of a baked potato splattered in grease even when they’re fresh out of the cooker. Compared to the grub at Nathan’s, the 1962 or 1993 Mets could have held their heads high. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Art Howe was the chef. Prison food probably tastes like this.)

My favorite culinary option at Citi Field might be Catch of the Day, situated in relation to the centerfield food court somewhat analogously to the cookie stand in Kevin Smith’s magnum opus, Mallrats. The Old Bay–seasoned skin-on fries are nice and crispy and the $17 “never frozen” lobster roll is a quality critter in a perfect summer sandwich (which it should be, for $17, but then, so should the Mets, for $138 million). Removed as it is from the crowd-control nightmare within the bounds of the food court proper, the lines here are shorter and more manageable, minimizing the amount of time one must spend listening to faux nostalgiacs wax about the good old days when the food was junk and everyone just came to watch the game. (I have as much patience for these people as the people who complain about Giuliani winning the war on crime on the ground that New York just isn’t the same without the graffiti and the omnipresent stench of urine. Can somebody give these people a mugging and a concussion, just for old-times’ sake?)

The Shake Shack line dwindles by the late innings, enabling fans patient enough to resist the middle-innings Carvel temptation to fetch a vastly superior custard or black-and-white shake just in time to watch the Mets go down one-two-three in the bottom of the ninth. By the time the home team goes sulking back to the dugout, one is too well-fed to care.

Asset-Bubble Autopsy

The Vintage Wine Fund is a hedge fund that seeks “[h]igh capital appreciation by investing in fine wines from regions including Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Rhone Valley, Tuscany, Piedmont, Champagne and Portugal.” The minimum investment is €250,000, so these people are serious. In both 2006 and 2007, fueled by the unprecedented bubble in wine pricing, the Fund achieved an impressive 23.97% ROI.

The Fund’s monthly reports, available on its web site back to January 2004, provide a fascinating glimpse into the mentality that inflates asset bubbles. Since the biggest inflation occurred in the wake of the offerings of the 2005 Bordeaux and Burgundy vintages, that's where we will begin our story.

The first mention of the 2005 vintage occurs in the Fund’s April 2006 report, which stated: “Prices will seem high, but one must not forget how much the market has moved up over the last two years. The 2005 first growths are truly great young wines and so it is only reasonable for release prices to take into account the current price of other great wines—both young and old. Those who think release prices should somehow be related to previous years’ release prices are literally stuck in the past.”

What were the “current” prices of those wines that would serve as the benchmark for the 2005 vintage? Wine-Searcher Pro's index of historical prices indicates that in the first half of 2006, Chateau Lafite-Rothschild 1996 could be purchased from a number of retailers in the $300-$400 range. Numerous offerings of the 2003 Lafite were posted at just under $400. This is significant because both vintages had been widely acclaimed following Robert Parker’s 100-point rating of those wines and thus represented the absolute price ceiling for a young vintage of a Left Bank first growth at that time. “This is one first-growth worth mortgaging the house for,” Parker wrote of the 2003 Lafite in an ironic example of the irresponsibility that would come to poison the market. By the same time next year, only one “futures” offering of Lafite’s 2005 was available for less than $600—in other words, over a 50% premium to the last two vintages of comparable quality (one of which had a 9-year head start on aging).

In response to such audacious price hikes, some consumers, worried they would never again be able to afford some high-end wines that they had acquired a taste for, started bidding up the price of the back vintages. Those $300-$400 ’96 Lafites disappeared from the market. Within a year, the typical retail offering for the ’96 Lafite started around $800 and went up from there (with the notoriously overcharging Sokolin asking, and maybe even getting, $1,495). In June 2006, the Vintage Wine Fund reported that “many 2005 prices make more mature wines look incredibly good value,” naming some that “look fantastically cheap when compared to the price at which their 2005 versions have sold out." The Fund did not consider it odd that “we have the latest vintage just released at prices well above comparable wines from other recent vintages but selling easily; this leaves just about every other good vintage in between looking significantly under-priced.” One could also have concluded that it made the new vintage look significantly overpriced, and it’s curious that the market did not make this judgment.

In hindsight it seems clear that the wine bubble was just one manifestation of a bubble in everything that led people to believe they were wealthier than they actually were. But irrational exuberance still ruled in March 2007:

So, how far can prices go? The price per bottle of a first growth Bordeaux hardly looks expensive when one looks at the money which is spent by the well-heeled every day on their other passions. It might be cars, clothing, jewellery, travel, boxes at the opera/sporting venues etc or perhaps the slightly less edifying pleasures of Las Vegas or Macau where the cost of the Lafite, Krug or DRC is insignificant compared with what is being spent on the main entertainments. The message is clear: the demand for fine wines is growing at an accelerating pace and supplies can never increase. Prices are set to rise rapidly and who knows, this year could be remembered as the one in which fine wine prices doubled.

In September 2007, something interesting happened. The Vintage Wine Fund posted its first loss in 32 months. The monthly report blamed “private investors [who] felt the impressive gains they had built up over the last few years were worth locking in.” In other words, those “investors” took a look at the state of the market and decided it had hit its ceiling.

The Vintage Wine Fund, however, remained bullish. The next month, it reported:

This equilibrium may persist for a little longer but one thing is sure—the supply of wines from investors taking profits will dry up long before consumers stop desiring the world’s best wines. Ultimately we will find ourselves in precisely the same set of circumstances which started the bull run in the first place: low levels of stock held for resale (i.e. by merchants and investors) coupled with strong global demand. As that imbalance reestablishes itself, prices will continue their climb upwards.

They didn’t. The fund lost more money in November and pleaded for “patience”: “It is only natural that with the uncertain economic outlook that some investors feel it is prudent to leave the market. While that is keeping a cap on prices at the moment, it does not mean that the underlying imbalance between demand and supply has permanently altered. . . . [T]he upward pressure on prices will naturally return.”

Sure, the market still looked healthy. But what if a global recession happened? Wouldn’t that diminish some of the exuberance? No, the Fund explained in its January 2008 report:

As one might expect, a lot of people have been asking us how a global recession would affect our market. It is our belief that although it may be at a steadier rate than we have enjoyed in the recent past, price appreciation will continue. Gains may also be a little more erratic on a month by month basis but demand would need to fall a long way before it was anywhere near being outweighed by the overall level of (rather than momentary blips up in) supply. We firmly believe that we can continue to provide investors with very respectable returns even if the worst fears of some economists prove accurate.

In July 2008, when the worst fears of some economists were about to prove accurate, the Fund announced that “it seems clearer than ever that with global demand robust and continuing to grow the outlook for the coming months is very positive.”

The economic shit hit the fan in September 2008 when 300 million Americans, who had until then assumed we were merely in the middle of a routine economic correction, woke up to the news that the President of the United States was insisting he had to nationalize the entire banking industry to prevent the next Great Depression. In times like this, the notion of a $1,500 bottle of wine that won’t taste very good until the year 2030 begins to seem absurd, so it’s hard to blame anyone who decided to trade liquid for liquidity.

The stampede to the auction block led the Vintage Wine Fund to complain that “in the last week we saw a handful of sellers who were in such a rush to liquidate their holdings that they started selling at whatever price was offered to them. . . . From the behaviour of the sellers you would think that fine wine had been found to contain some lethal poison.” In its comment that “[w]hen too many people run for the door in any market, they just end up hurting each other and themselves,” one can almost sense the Fund whining that if everyone would just cooperate, they could keep the bubble going. Its prediction the next month of a “quick and full recovery” seemed nearly as desperate. In the most recent report posted online, a graph shows the Fund’s value back near 2006 levels, but the managers remain upbeat, concluding that “it is perhaps some sort of consolation that the greater the pain becomes, the shorter it will probably last.”

In “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” Rudyard Kipling wrote:

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:—
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.

There’s No Place Like Home

One of the trendy virtues these days is authenticity. The proliferation of the artificial everywhere we look seems to have awakened a craving to cherish what’s real. But there is another sense in which the cult of authenticity is not so much a backlash to the cultural degradation of the modern age but another manifestation of it. Part of the reason the virtue of authenticity has become such a trendy substitute for the classic virtues, I think, is because it so easily compatible with relativism. If the virtue lies in being the truest exponent of whatever you are, then being an authentic representation of something great carries the same weight as being an authentic representation of something mediocre. The most memorable line in William A. Henry III’s In Defense of Elitism was, “It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.” But if putting a bone in one’s nose is as authentic an expression of savage culture as putting a man on the moon is of Western culture, then by that standard they’re the same thing after all.

Eric Asimov’s New York Times column this week criticizes a common apologia for lousy California pinot noir, that it is somehow a more authentic expression of California’s terroir than the wines produced by those who have aspirations to something finer:

It’s fashionable among the makers of bigger, heavier pinot noirs to reject any comparison with Burgundy. We don’t make Gevrey-Chambertin, they will say. We make wines representative of the Russian River Valley, Santa Rita Hills or Santa Lucia Highlands—take your pick. This stance implies that California conditions dictate wines of extravagance and power.

It also dodges the question whether there is as much value to being representative of the Santa Rita Hills as there is to being representative of Gevrey-Chambertin. If there isn’t, then these producers are guilty of exactly what many of them contemptuously accuse Old World producers of doing: promoting their wines on the basis of typicity to disguise the fact that they can’t compete on the basis of quality. Moreover, while convenient for growers with unremarkable vineyard sites, such rationalizations are insulting to producers that make wines fully capable of expressing the virtues characteristic of great Burgundy. Using the term Burgundian to describe one of those wines doesn’t mean they are trying to imitate Burgundy. Rather, the best examples are distinctive and individual expressions of the sites they come from while featuring the harmonious composition and silky, weightless finesse that make Burgundy so captivating.

A case in point is the Copain 2006 Kiser Vineyard En Haut. Copain used to make big wines that got big ratings from the critics. Proprietor Wells Guthrie told Asimov, “In 2006, I made the decision to pick earlier to retain freshness and vibrancy rather than play the game of picking ripe and adding water and acidity later on. It was the first year I made pinot where I didn’t have to add acid or water, and it felt good.” The Kiser En Haut is only 13.3% alcohol. Robert Parker decided to punish the effort with a lukewarm 85 points. He never understood Burgundy, either.

And in fact Burgundy was the first thing I thought of with my first sniff and sip of the Kiser. But what Burgundy, in particular, did it taste like? None of ’em. It was as though someone had transplanted an entirely new village smack in the middle of Burgundy that shared the proportions common to all of them but plenty of other characteristics that you can’t find in any of them—specifically the vivid crushed-pebble minerality front and center in the aroma and flavor. The rocks come steeped in a cool red-fruit profile that contributes to its easy drinkability but otherwise has completely transcended its fruit. It performed at a bona fide Grand Cru level.

Outrage du Jour

Here’s a story about a “food co-op” in Brooklyn “considering a ban on Israeli products because of the conflict in the Mideast.” For those who haven’t read the papers lately, the “conflict in the Mideast” has been going on roughly since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Presently it pits several dozen Muslim countries and one or two Muslim non-countries, who want to slaughter all Jews everywhere, against one country of Jews, who occasionally assert their desire not to be slaughtered. The new President of the United States is strongly in favor of finding a compromise between these two positions.

The parties involved, however, have been unable to come to a workable compromise so far. It turns out the Muslim countries and non-countries are not satisfied slaughtering only some Jews, while Jews are not happy sometimes getting slaughtered. Several wars and a few smaller skirmishes have been fought over this, most recently in the Gaza Strip, a small Muslim non-country that other people might find desirable for its attractive beachfront exposures but whose inhabitants prefer to use for burrowing tunnels to Egyptian weapons stockpiles.

Faced with the choice between destroying such weapons stockpiles and the people who use them or plucking the shrapnel of nail bombs out of Israeli schoolchildren, Israel occasionally chooses the former, at least when Labor is not in power. This is always and invariably followed by denunciations of its actions by European Jew-haters, American college professors, their brainwashed students, and the type of people who buy their groceries at a “co-op.”

But in fact killing terrorists is not exclusively an Israeli policy. Other countries do this, too, such as the United States. In fact, the new President of the United States, who—I’m just guessing—won a healthy majority of the votes of the members of the Park Slope Food Co-op, just announced he was sending 17,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. Yet the Park Slope Food Co-op has not seen fit to consider a boycott of American-made food products. This is very confusing. Why boycott one country for bombing terrorists but not another? What is there unique about Israel that would explain why someone might single them out?

Joe the Peeler

Joe Ades, a.k.a. the Potato Peeler Guy of the Union Square Greenmarket, died this month. The Daily News, on the occasion of Valentine’s Day, tells the story of his life and loves, which could be the stuff of an epic novel.

His sales pitch made for irresistable street theatre, mostly because of the unapologetic kitsch of it. “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession,” wrote Milan Kundera. “The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.” New Yorkers, even those that had seen Joe at work many times before, loved being moved by gathering around the guy with a suit and a sales pitch that seemed plucked out of another time. The local papers loved doing stories about him for the same reason.

I first saw him working the greenmarket almost ten years ago. Of course, I bought a peeler. R.I.P.

Nota Bene, Ctd.

There is at least one publication leading the way to a post–tasting note form of wine criticism. Last year, Edward Behr’s Art of Eating inaugurated a new wine column called “Why This Bottle, Really?” The column’s rotating authors each write a page’s worth of copy on a single wine, aiming to describe not only its character but its history, cultural milieu, and what Behr calls “the essentials of consumption.” Those essentials include, most obviously, the customary advice on food pairing, but go beyond that to address what moods and personalities each wine is suited for. “An enologist would likely see Musar as a catalog of wine faults,” writes Jamie Goode in the inaugural column about Chateau Musar’s 1999. In the current issue, Alice Feiring writes of Clos Roche Blanche’s 2006 Cuvée Cot, “When I return from fruit-driven California, this is the wine I crave.” The stated purpose of the column, as Behr quoted one future reviewer in his introductory editorial, is to be “a review of a wine that was not just tasted and found worthy, but rather a wine the reviewer actually drunk.”

This approach is long overdue. Indeed, in every other field of criticism, it’s the norm. A book reviewer doesn’t write three-sentence reviews of a few hundred different books after reading a random chapter of each. He focuses on one book at a time and tries to say something intelligent about it. Consequently, a good book review is rewarding to read even if you are not using it for consumer advice on whether or not to buy the book. It has long puzzled me why wine criticism should be practiced so differently.

Edward Behr gets it. His editorial in the current Art of Eating announces a new approach to restaurant reviews. The old paradigm “assume[s] a more or less adversarial stance, aiming at consumer protection.” Behr prefers to “go beyond an opinion about something someone ate . . . and provide insights that will help you get the most out of the food in question no matter where you eat.” There ought to be a place in the world for thoughtful wine writing that does the same.

Nota Bene

Rational Denial remarks on the uselessness of the dominant form of wine “tasting notes,” a peculiar genre that’s somehow become the primary vehicle for critical commentary about wine. No equivalent exists in any other field of criticism. Nobody would find any use in a similarly styled music “listening note” (“notes of piano, drums, and guitar, with a finish that lasts at least four minutes”) or an art “looking note” (“notions of yellow and red on a deep orange background”).

I’ve written before on the limitations of this exercise, what Joe Dressner called “the Heinz Variety Tasting method.” One insidious effect of it is that the genre comes bundled with a normative ideal of what a wine should be. If wine is supposed to be evaluated with a laundry list of so-called “descriptors,” the multiplicity of such “descriptors” becomes synonymous with quality. Wines that don’t lend themselves to such commentary—perhaps because they are so harmonious that nothing protrudes conspicuously enough to register as its own “descriptor”—are penalized in the evaluation, then penalized in the marketplace. “At bottom,” wrote C.S. Lewis, “every ideal of style dictates not only how we should say things but what sort of things we may say.” Few people bother to think about the ideal of style subconsciously embedded in the medium of the tasting note.

In addition to carrying aesthetic bias, most tasting notes tend to be quite useless, a point dramatized by the contrast between the following three notes:

1. “layers of cedar and raspberry strike a sharp upfront note, while clove and creamy notes add body while contributing an exotic, sumptuous character that conveys luxury in its essence. Might there also be a trace of rubber, though?”

2. “aroma of underripe bananas . . . the fruitiness opens up on my tongue with a flick of bitterness that quickly fades to reveal lush, grassy tones”

3. “fruity (with a high-profile role for the deliciously garbagey, overripe smell of guava) plus floral (powdery rosy) plus green (neroli and oakmoss)”

As the article from which I plucked those notes reveals, none is a wine; they describe, “respectively, a chocolate, an olive oil, and a perfume.” But the fact that each one of them could have described a wine implies that the essence of vinosity lies in some facet or facets of the wine that have nothing to do with the assorted scents and flavors catalogued in most notes.

All Your Bottles Are Belong to Us

Via Wine Disorder, an English translation and live-action version of the Japanese manga wine adventure Drops of God have been discovered!

Dreams From My Cellar

At Slate, Mike Steinberger expresses his hope that Barack Obama will change the White House’s dreadful wine list. The problem is that the wines the White House serves to foreign dignitaries are not just bad, but a specific type of bad that reinforces condescending Euro stereotypes about Americans (brash, uncouth, graceless, fat, etc.). No wonder they leave hating us (cf. those Barcelona hamburgers). The White House even served Newton Unfiltered Chardonnay to Queen Elizabeth. Were they trying to kill her?

Alas, the President-Elect’s tastes in wine are not exactly an upgrade from the outgoing administration’s. And since the rise of the oceans will slow and our planet will begin to heal Any Day Now, I don’t see the President-Elect cottoning to the so-called “carbon footprint” associated with Steinberger’s proposal to lift the de facto White House ban on imported wine. I would advise visiting dignitaries to inquire about corkage.

Bubblenomics

Last year in this space, I wrote that the bubble in wine prices was unsustainable. An article in Prospect magazine covers similar ground this month. “The bubble . . . is about to pop,” authors Ben Lewis and Jonathan Ford write, pointing to the book Manias, Panics, and Crashes for the following diagnosis of a bubble market:

[M]anias typically start with a “displacement” that excites speculative interest. It may come from a new object of investment or from the increased profitability of existing investments. It is followed by positive feedback as rising prices encourage less experienced investors to enter the market. Then, as the mania gets a grip, speculation becomes more diffuse and spreads to other types of asset. Fresh assets are created at an ever faster rate to take advantage of the euphoria and investors try to increase their gains by borrowing to buy assets or using derivatives. Credit ultimately becomes overextended, swindling and fraud proliferate, and the mania ends in panic as investors seek to liquidate their positions.

“The moment of ‘displacement,’” write Lewis and Ford, “was driven by the emergence of a global class of the new rich.” The number of billionaires worldwide more than doubled over the last five years, which included the usual stock characters: brash Wall Streeters, Asian CEOs, shady Russians. They bought into the market heavily and ran prices up while the “[r]ising prices,” in turn, “were sucking in new investors.” In one of many mind-boggling sales, a consignment from the personal collection of the owner of Château Pétrus sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $86 million. And it began to seem that if you couldn’t play at this level, you couldn’t play at all: “Established collectors dropped out or were nudged sideways towards lesser known [wines] by the activities of the new rich.” Some producers let their greed get the best of them and abandoned their traditional distribution channels to place their new releases “straight into auction.” But “it is a condition of a speculative mania that new ‘assets’ be manufactured to meet raging demand.” As a result, even some producers that had been immune to the hysteria experienced “tenfold” increases in their auction prices in as little as two years—and speculators lacked the connoisseurship to notice that many of the auction purchases they’d spent millions chasing were, quite simply, meritless crap.

This is probably the best autopsy of the wine market of the last three years I’ve read so far. But Lewis and Ford actually weren’t writing about wine. The subject of their article was the bubble in the market for modern art. The meritless crap was not wannabe California “cult” wines but fashion art by the likes of Damien Hirst. The record-setting $86 million consignment did indeed come from Château Pétrus owner Jean-Pierre Moueix, but it was a triptych by Francis Bacon. The “new ‘assets’” that had to be “manufactured to meet raging demand” weren’t 2005 Burgundies and counterfeit DRCs, but rather the works of newly trendy artists like Hirst who in better days would have been deemed to lack the requisite vindication of history to justify the prices they asked. (Actually, in better days it would have been regarded as completely ridiculous that Damien Hirst could make a living as an “artist” at all.)

As I write this post I am finishing a bottle of Château Latour 1995, purchased recently for just slightly more than it cost when it first hit the shelves ten years ago. Those of us who didn’t have the thrill of riding this bubble on the way up will enjoy the consolation prizes on the way down.

Don’t Forget the Lyrical

“C.K.” of Sacramento, California writes to the Smart Set’s “Ask a Poet” column, “Can you suggest some wine pairings for specific poems?” Unfortunately, C.K. got some boring wine advice, so I’ll offer my own suggestions.

“To Autumn” by John Keats.—Many wines are praised as “bottled sunshine.” R. López de Heredia’s Rioja Viña Bosconia is the more pastoral alternative—bottled autumn. Keats writes of the autumn’s “[c]onspiring with [the sun] how to load and bless / With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; / To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, / And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.” It’s the ripeness of those apples that Bosconia evokes, when it feels a need to evoke ripeness at all; instead of the scorch of the sun that characterizes the prevailing aesthetic of wine today, Bosconian fruit resembles Keats’s “mellow fruitfulness” in the dusk of “the soft-dying day.” Stanley Plumly called “To Autumn” a “symbolist masterpiece realized independently—it seems—of its implied author, as if it were an object, self-created,” which could just as easily describe Bosconia, a wine so seamless and purely bereft of the fingerprints of the winemaking process that it feels like it came into form organically.

“Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold.—Two Victorian lovers standing on the coast of the Channel to admire the moonlit French coast in the distance can only be drinking Champagne—ideally a deep and weathered one like Selosse Substance—and the “tremulous cadence slow” of the bubbles in the glass is the thing to contemplate while experiencing the “grating roar” of Dover Beach’s waves. No wine is a better chameleon to its context than Champagne, inspiring a toast to “be true / To one another” when you’re with your love on the cliffs of Dover, summoning “[t]he eternal note of sadness” and a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” when you drink it alone. If the lovers overcame their “confused alarms of struggle and flight,” one can imagine them toasting Dover over many bubbles in the future, but the poem is too ominous to allow faith that it will end well. To “be addressed / As sort of a mournful cosmic last resort / Is really tough on a girl,” responded Anthony Hecht in “The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life,” but even if she gave up on love she probably didn’t give up on Champagne—unless the “bottle of Nuit d’Amour” in the last line was a stand-in for Nuits-St.-Georges.

“To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell.—“Had we but world enough, and time / This coyness, lady, were no crime,” writes Andrew Marvell, or, in other words, “Life’s too short for this shit, babe.” The appropriate wine is sexy but a constant tease that it won’t be ready to drink until one hears “[t]ime’s winged chariot hurrying near,” turning “into ashes all my lust.” I vote for Huët Vouvray Demi-Sec.

“My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning.—The duke in Robert Browning’s monologue is a shallow cretin, constantly name-dropping the artists he commissioned to create the ostentatious junk adorning his manor. And, oh, by the way, he killed his wife. One can imagine the duke enjoying many of the Top Ten Tackiest Wines of All Time. Pour yourself an expensive glass of trophy wine and shed a tear for the last duchess, and the next one.

“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman.—There are two characters here, the learn’d astronomer with his “proofs” and “figures” and “charts” and “diagrams,” and Whitman, who “wander’d off by [him]self” and “[l]ook’d up in perfect silence at the stars.” The poem therefore demands two wines—one of spotless technical perfection and the other characterful but contemplative. Compare a Bordeaux engineered by Michel Rolland to Lebanon’s Chateau Musar, or a U.C. Davis-style California pinot noir to an old-school Burgundy with the stench of the barnyard. Plenty of Learn’d Winemakers can point to the “proofs” and “figures” and “charts” and “diagrams” to show, as a matter of scientific fact, that each of the latter wines is flawed—but the Learn’d Winemakers are powerless to explain their beauty.

“The Gods of the Copybook Headings” by Rudyard Kipling.—The copybook headings are the eternal truths which persist in undermining the best-laid plans of mankind whenever we come to deem ourselves too sophisticated for the copybook’s trite wisdom. The appropriate wine must be so simple and straightforward it’s almost a cliché—but eternal nonetheless. The answer is obvious: merlot! Merlot instantly fell out of fashion as soon as the American public took the variety’s disparagement in the movie Sideways as the new consensus of wine cognoscenti. In the movie, misanthrope Miles famously rants, “If anybody orders merlot, I’m leaving. I am not drinking any fucking merlot,” whereupon his party proceeds to guzzle spoofulated pinot noir from the likes of Kistler and Sea Smoke, which have a cellar shelf-life only slightly longer than milk. If Miles had heeded the Gods of the Copybook Headings and cellared some traditionally made Pomerol and St.-Emilion instead—say, from the Moueix stable—he might have been happier.

“Medlars and Sorb-Apples” by D.H. Lawrence.—“I love you, rotten, / Delicious rottenness. . . . / What a rare, powerful, reminiscent flavor / Comes out of your falling through the stages of decay.” When it comes to choosing a wine here, Lawrence doesn’t leave much to the imagination: “Something of the same flavour as Syracusan muscat wine / Or vulgar Marsala.” But the poem deserves a better wine than Marsala, and I wouldn’t know where to shop for Syracusan muscat. Any botrytized wine will do, to savor the taste here of the “grape turning raisin,” the “brown morbidity,” “[a]utumnal excrementa.” Yum! Delicious rottenness. Some other time, open a bottle that will summon remembrances of the first wine that ever entranced you, and read Lawrence’s “Piano.”

Consider the Turkey

While Barack Obama was eating corned beef, Sarah Palin (be still, my heart!) was performing the annual civic ritual of pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey. Somewhat darkening the festive mood of the occasion was her decision to take reporters' questions with farmers draining the blood of not-so-lucky Thanksgiving turkeys in the background.



MSNBC and the New York Times predictably have their panties all in a bunch. National Review Online readers react to the hissyfits of the media primadonnas, who must hitherto have believed that turkey meat is harvested like soybeans, here and here. One reader makes an important point about modern alienation from the means of (food) production: “City people think that farms are ‘where life happens.’ Nonsense. Farming is about killing stuff. . . . [A]n increasingly large cohort of America in the lower 48 (and probably Hawaii) are pussies. They have no clue where their food comes from, they don’t hunt, they don’t fish, so they get to act all high and mighty about scenes like this.” Another reader retorts, “She should tell the media that she apologizes and she’ll do her next interview inside an abortion clinic.” Mark Steyn, whose very existence constitutes a hate crime in Canada and on most American university campuses, adds, “After she’s sworn in in 2013, I hope President Palin arranges for a ritual turkey slaughter to be going on behind her at every press conference, if only during David Shuster’s questions.” Last word, Baseball Crank: if you think that’s bad, “you should see the machine they put the moose in. . . .” Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

American Splendor

Château Mouton-Rothschild 1982 is a legendary wine. But Baroness Philippine de Rothschild wasn’t in New York to talk about the wine—she came to talk about the label. The occasion was a vertical tasting of all the Mouton vintages for which the Rothschilds had selected a work by an American artist for the label, from the 2001 (tacky) back to 1959 (ugly, but what a wine!).

A vertical tasting is one of the few exceptions to my conviction that wine is better experienced by the bottle than by the “taste.” It’s true that you don’t get the full experience of any of the individual wines, but what you do get is at least as illuminating. Each vintage is a different variation on the same theme. Bringing them together makes it easy to discern which characteristics reflect the theme and which reflect the variations, sketching out the Platonic ideal form of the wine.

The signature theme of Mouton-Rothschild? There isn’t much of one. Mouton doesn’t have the screaming personality of some of its peers, such as Haut-Brion or Cheval-Blanc. If it deserves its official classification among the first growths of Bordeaux at all, it’s mainly because it feels luxurious—but anonymously so. The tannins are fine-grained and sophisticated, even in years that tend towards coarseness like 1988, but the underlying material doesn’t show much personality.

Even the 1982. It was decades too young to drink, but was oohed and aahed at by many participants in the tasting on the basis of its reputation. (It was clear that the reputation rather than the wine in the glass sealed the deal for these tasters, because at least half of them were drinking samples from a magnum that was corked.)

But at least the label was full of life. I’m convinced the legendary stature of this wine owes a lot to John Huston’s bold watercolor of a prancing ram on the label, which seems to embody both a howl-at-the-moon triumphalism as well as carefree dolce vita. Philippine said she calls it her “Nureyev lamb, because it dances like Nureyev.” Judge for yourself.