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The Stupids' Cull Parties 1 2 3 Cull Party #1 Gotta clear the dogs out of my cellar before I move. So the game is this... I keep opening questionable bottles until I hit a winner. 1) '89 Gour du Challe Gigondas: My grandma must have had her share of digestive distress, probably brought on by a steady diet of Jewish cuisine, badly prepared. I remember standing in her kitchen as a small child while she cooked stewed prunes. They HAD to be for medicinal purposes, because no human being would put something that smelled that bad into her mouth. 2) '71 Pichon-Baron (Pauillac): The bus was my only means of medium-distance transport when I was a student. I stood waiting one day, next to an elderly woman - the kind of woman who had all her worldly possessions in a cluster of garbage bags and muttered incessantly about the CIA, laser beams, and mind control. It was a moment of reflection for me about our policy of letting the insane wander the streets. The bus arrived, I gestured for her to board first. As she started up the steps, me close behind, the bus suddenly lurched. Falling backward, she knocked me over and landed on me, butt to face. I'll never forget that smell. 3) '85 Girard Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon: Love those ticket dispensers on the New Jersey Turnpike. Headin' me North now, past the oil refineries. Hmmm, let's roll down the window. Hey, is my car on fire or something? 4) '89 Pagor Pinot Noir Santa Barbara (Sierra Madre/Bien Nacido): "Is this Napa Animal Hospital? Hi, this is Stuart Yaniger calling. Sure, I'll hold.... Hi, yes, I wanted the doc to take a look at my dog... Well, best I can tell from the symptoms, she must have eaten some Olestra potato chips..." 5) '84 Chateau de Lamarque (Haut-Medoc): A very famous scene. Martin Balsam sneaks up the steps to the room of Norman Bates' mom. He opens the door. The sweet old lady can be seen from behind, sitting in her chair. Balsam turns the chair and we see... Damn, that scene gave me nightmares! 6) '91 Caparone "Brunello" (Paso Robles): Valjean is pursued by Javert. As they go running through the Parisian sewers, they pass under the broccoli cannery. The perfume of the rotting broccoli mixes with the delightful scent of the stagnant sewer. Valjean pauses to take it in, then moves on. 7) '88 Santa Rita Cabernet Sauvignon Reserva (Maipo Valley): We open my mom's cedar chest. And unaccountably, someone has left in it a bagful of wet, rusty nails. Oh, jeez, how long have those mentholyptus drops been in there? Well, the package has a date code of 10/73. 8) '77 Torres Vina Santa Digna Pinot Noir (Penedes): "Hey, doc, my dog doesn't seem to be any better. Can I give her Kaopectate or something?" 9) '91 La Jota Viognier (Napa): Love these cool winter evenings. We light a nice fire and cozy up. The smell as the wood crackles is at once reminiscent of caramel and vanilla, not just smoke. I ask my sweetheart to pass me the fruit bowl. She looks somewhat abashed and hands it to me silently. It is empty, totally empty. 10) '92 Le Reyssac (Bergerac Blanc): Reclining on the beach, a beach with impossibly white sand. The breeze shifts, bringing me the subtle scents of the nearby pineapple plantation. Pushing aside the comical little paper umbrella, I suck some pina colada through the straw, then stretch in the warm sun. Game over. "Bad wines, bad wines, Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they're served to you?" Write tasting notes, that's what! Culbertson NV Cuvee Rouge Sparkling Pinot: Brett, decayed strawberries, palate follows the nose. Nice start. Royal Malgreb NV red: At least this has the color of wine. The best aspect was the TCA. Vendange NV Pinot Noir: Nothing special, but it didn't hurt us like the last two. All flavor scientifically removed. '85 Ridge Park-Muscatine zin: Classic example of a wine where the fruit has sacrificed itself to protect the acid and tannin. '90 Santa Rita Riserva Cabernet Sauvignon (Wine Spectator Critic's Choice award): Musty, stemmy, not even vaguely resembling a fruit product. With a few years in the bottle now, the TCA has fully integrated. '85 La Tour Carnet (Bordeaux): See, even the French are capable of putting vegetable juice in a wine bottle. And I coulda had a V-8! '87 Firestone Cabernet Sauvignon: What up wid dat? My face hurts. '85 Girard Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve: Excellent complexity, consisting of equal parts burning rubber and vegetables. '94 Buena Vista Merlot: Finally a wine we can swallow. For anything else, see "Vendange". '86 William Hill Cabernet Sauvignon Gold Label: Crisp and vibrant, in the sense that battery acid is crisp and vibrant. '87 William Hill Cabernet Sauvignon Gold Label: The hallmark of a great winery is consistency year to year. '84 Sutter Home White Zin: The year is not a misprint. The aftertaste is similar to the taste in your mouth after a good vomit. '85 Sutter Home White Zin: Fortunately, this was horrendously corked. '86 Ridge Cabernet Sauvignon York Creek: Where have I smelled this before? Ah, got it! When I was about 14, a classmate sold me a baggie of a green leafy substance for $10, assuring me it was "really great shit!" It never occurred to my 14 year old hormone-addled brain that I should be suspicious of someone selling me "great shit" at half the going price. Quote of that week: "I don't feel anything yet. Is that what it's supposed to do?"
"No matter how much we might talk about the principles of matching food and wine, when the two are enjoyed within the company of good friends and loved ones, a far deeper, more spiritual connection takes place that makes most any food and wine combination work wonders." -John Ash This is a work of autobiographical fiction. NV Michel Tribaut Sparkling Wine "Brut" (Hayward, CA): One interesting feature of Hayward is appreciated by air when one flies a northbound approach into San Francisco- an array of artificially-created shallow ponds used for treatment of waste and sewage. I highly commend this engineering marvel to tourists visiting the Bay Area. '95 Oak Knoll Niagra (56% OR, 44% WA): A vivid memory of my childhood was the series of semi-animated commercials for a kids' drink, featuring a sweaty anthropomorphic glass pitcher with a smiling face. I always wanted that happy pitcher to visit my house. '74 Chateau Concannon Estate Sauvignon Blanc (sweet): The Oak Knoll with some age on it. '96 Wooden Valley Chardonnay (Suisun, CA): Mormons are instructed to keep a two-year supply of food in their cellars, no doubt as a source of sustainance in the event that the Lamanites return. A great challenge is keeping an accurate inventory and making sure that food that's too old is replaced. During my sojourn in Salt Lake City, I had occasion to assist my landlord in cleaning out some of the now-expired stuff from his stash. While sorting through the canned goods, we stumbled across some canned corn that didn't appear on his inventory sheet. Two things were immediately apparent: the address of the company that made the corn had no zip code but, rather a zone ("Detroit, 4, MI"). This would date the can as pre-1964. And the ends of the can were bulging ominously. I handed it back to him, he accidently dropped it, and the explosion that followed was reminiscent of that infamous restaurant scene in "The Meaning of Life." '84 Charton et Trebuchet Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru "Morgeot": Each day, I drive down American Canyon Road to get to work. The road winds through woods, pastures, and ranches. Naturally, there's a great deal of wildlife in the area, much of which subcumbs not to the predator, but to the automobile. One particular day, I saw a possum that had been hit and had ruptured spectacularly, spreading entrails across the roadway. The eyes were open, and the head was oriented in such a way as to appear to be staring accusingly at oncoming cars. American Canyon Road is outside of the county district for animal control, so that possum corpse just lay there, day after day, in the hot sun, staring and slowly decomposing. It must have taken weeks for it to finally disappear. '77 Torres Vina Santa Digna Pinot Noir: It took hours of phone calls to every Catholic church in this county to finally determine that Santa Digna was the patron saint of embalmers. '84 Heitz Cabernet Sauvignon Martha's Vineyard (Napa): I'm endlessly fascinated with etymology and the origin of phrases and idioms. It's the linguistic equivalent of DNA analysis. Where did that convention for gullibilty, "I've got some swampland in Florida to sell you," come from? Was there really a time when this was a common scam? And what is Florida swampland really like, anyway? I have an image of it (not a pleasant one, I assure you), and I wonder how well it corresponds to the reality. '89 Pagor Pinot Noir (Santa Barbara, mostly Bien Nacido): High school language instruction was a hoot. You really learned the most useless lessons, sentences no-one would ever say, just to illustrate some subtle conjugation that half the native speakers don't bother with. The courses don't seem to consider that most of the people taking them will never use that language again, and the only thing they'll retain is those memorized sentences. In German, I can still buy an old male dog, and tell someone thet the goat is on the lawn of the house of my mother. That ought to prove useful someday. '71 Gruaud-Larose (St-Julien): There are so many human superstions about death, and thus, so many idiomatic terms for it in nearly any language or culture. Consider English, for example (having just admitted my lousy foreign language skills) and its various euphemisms for death: is no more, ceased to be, expired and gone to meet its maker, late, a stiff, bereft of life, rests in peace, pushing up the daisies, metabolical processes of interest only to historians, hopped the twig, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible... quite an array, don't you think? '83 Fourcas-Hosten (Listrac): In the words of Max Bialystock, "No, too good." '75 Mouton-Rothschild (Pauillac,and stored horribly): It's not popular these days to say nice things about the Arabs in their native setting, but I will do it anyway. My experience has been, one on one, that these are the most hospitable, friendly, warm, noble, and generous people on earth (read P.J. O'Rourke for the unfortunate flip side of this sentiment). During the summer I spent in 1970 traveling through Israel and the West Bank, I learned the obligatory ritual when having a conversation with the Arabic residents of those areas: as one must ALWAYS sit at a little table and down jittery amounts of the blackest coffee imaginable, filled with mud and blamed on the Turks. But in its context it all seemed just right, sitting at the table, sipping the coffee, talking about our families and the world. That didn't change how dreadful that coffee was, though. '98 Mariah Zin (Mendocino, never released): The name Enrico Fermi will be familiar to many of you, a prominent 20th century Nobel Prize-winning physicist who pioneered nuclear fission and helped lay the foundations of modern quantum theory. It was said that he was so smart that he never bothered reading papers that appeared in the major journals: he would read the introduction, close his eyes and calculate the correct result, then turn to the conclusions to see if the authors were right. But physics journals, like in all other fields, are clogged with papers from mediocre practitioners. In what was his greatest opprobrium, Fermi once dismissed a particularly pointless paper by giving it the worst insult he could imagine, "It's not even wrong!" '98 Delicato Syrah San Bernabe Vineyard (Monterey, CA): Spring and winter provide particular delights in California to the intrepid forager. Everyone worth his salt knows where the best morel patches are. Smart mycophobes also know that new patches can occur where there were fires the previous year. So, now that I'm no longer living in Southern California, I can tell you that I had rich hunting indeed the year after the Painted Cave fire in the Santa Barbara/ Santa Ynez area. Despite the burnt, ruined appearance of the landscape, one could see green life poking up its head everywhere. Nature recovers, morels are just one sign of that. The big hazard for the mushroom hunter is the junk that people had dumped in what was the woods a year before. During one memorable hike back there, I thought I found a nice patch near a pile of decaying green stuff. Unfortunately, someone had apparently deposited a set of worn-out truck-sized radials sometime before the fire, and the green stuff had its genesis in the rainwater, mud, and fermented formerly-green stuff pooled in the charred rubber carcasses. And that lovely combination was the growth medium for these morels. Needless to say, I resisted temptation and passed that particular patch by. |
