The Thunder Rolls

I seem to have an abundance of time recently :) Let's review, first, I nearly destroyed my shoulder and had to drug myself up for the better part of week. Then I had to skip out of town for a good friend's wedding (drinking a bit of madeira in the process). So I wake up Thursday, actually through no choice of my own, because frankly we were in the middle of probably the worst thunderstorms I have ever seen or heard. My power finally went out about 8:00 or 8:30 AM and about 10:00, bored out of my skull and with no TV, TiVo, computer/internet or radio, I went over a friend's house a few miles away. Sure enough about 2:30 as the storm continued if not intensified, his power got dinged too and I was back where I started. On Friday morning, with my power still out, I decided to leave my apartment and head for the "sticks", namely my mother's house about an hour away.

The end result no that I have returned to my home is that our "dinner" that we have been featuring in our choosing a wine from a wine list series of posts is becoming the longest dinner in history. Even so, I could't help but mention this article detailing the two upcoming and controversial films about the 1976 Judgement of Paris Tasting, a tasting that I have discussed previously. (I must admit that I was unaware of the two movies until this article was pointed out by Robin Garr, custodian of Robin Garr's Wine Lover's Page, a long running place for me to both learn and interact with wine geeks from around the world.)

I just want to add a small point, have we lost our _______ minds? (Fill in the appropriate adjective of your choice.) So I guess Sideways wins a few awards so now we're going to start making wine movies - in fact two rival wine movies - about a ______ wine tasting? I can just picture it now, thirty years from now, a movie about William Bellomo and I and our friends from Philadelphia cooking appetizers and drinking wine at the old apartment above the Detour (jazz club) in Manhattan.

Judgement at 13th Street

William Bellomo played by David Beckham

Alan Uchrinscko played by Ashton Kutcher

Doug Donovan played by Drew Carey

James Regan played by Ray Liotta

and starring Michael Madrigale played by Danny Devito.

Can't wait. Waterworld here we come...

Say it ain't so...

If you think that my "normal posts" are circuitous, this one will stop even my most devoted readers in their tracks follow along. A while back, I met my friend William Bellomo through a handful of mutual friends from Philly. We actually didn't put this together until much later, because at the time, we (myself from the City of Champions, my friends from the City that Celebrates Fictional Boxers for lack of anything to actually Celebrate and occassionally William) used to regularly gather on Fridays to have dinner parties: the only requirement was to bring a bottle of wine.

Well on Saturday - would that have been 2002 -- during the winter Olympics, I sat with the Fictional Boxer Idolators and actually rooted against Mario Lemieux. The USA was playing Canada in the Olympic Hockey tournament and I was being forced to root for John LeClair to defeat Mario Lemieux. It was very much akin to picking the grey Army Men instaed of the Green ones or (for you females) trying to hook up with Blair rather than Jo from the Facts of Life with the Dreamie guy. Simply unheard of.

So then it happened. We thought it might. The #8 Budweiser car and its driver (along with it's current and exponentially increasing $2Billion in merchandising) joined forces with Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson - a fate truly worse than death. I strongly considered buying a case of Miller Lite rather than one of cool, crisp mildly-hopped refreshing American lager with nuances of beechwood aging. But I instead began to consider the other, more likable options. Being an emotional person, I considered the immediate purchase of #11 FedEx Merchandise, but cooler heads prevailed (although I have not eliminated the possibilty).

(Here's the point at the end of my seemingly random session of complaints.) Do you know what a corked wine is? A lot of people don't. Let's review. You're at a restaurant. The sommelier offers you a taste of the wine that you are about to consume. You don't like it. Do you send it back? The answer is emphatically no. The waiter allows you to taste the wine to ensure that it is not flawed. If he recommended it, and you detest it, you drink it and never come back. You are given a taste of wine to check for flaws, not quality.

I once submitted a bottle of wine to a journalist that I thought was best in class. (The wine was 1998 Fleurie, Vieilles-Vignes, Domaine Bigot/Alex Gambal.) It was truly unbelievable Beaujolais. The journalist brogught the bottle back to me the nest day and said "Taste this". It was floored. I gave him another and a few hours later he called me to tell me that it was one of the finest under $15 bottles of wine he had ever experienced.

When a wine is "corked", it smelles of wet cardboard. It's a little hard to describe until you experience it, and honestly that bottle of Fleurie was on of the most corked bottles of wine that has ever been. The wine itself is good, but a bacteria gets in the cork and permanently taints it.

This causes a lot of problems for wine geeks because somewhere between 5 and 10% of all wines experience cork taint - and it's completely random.

So to return to Mario Lemieux and Dale, Jr., recently a few producers of Grand Cru Burgundy have decided to begin bottling their Grand Cru wines in synthetic corks - that is corks that are not susceptible to being corked.

My opinion remains: wine is a living breathing thing. There is a better chance that I will drink a wine with the wrong dish or at the wrong stage in its development than pull the cork on one that is flawed. Call me traditional, but when I open a 30 year old-bottle of Vintage Champagne I want to hear a (rather improper by Sommelier's rules) pop. Somehow a screwtop doesn't cut it - even if there's a 10% chance that the cork will fail me.

I want a cork. I don't look down on a screw top - rather I evaluate a wine on quality alone: the importer doesn't matter, the price doesn't matter and the type of encolsure certainly doesn't matter. But do I really have to root for Jeff Gordon?