“Yes, we can talk about making New Year’s wine resolutions. That’s why we’re here.”
The Wine Curmudgeon’s 11th — and final — annual Do-it-yourself New Year’s wine resolutions.
This was always one of my favorite features, which is why I kept doing it even though Substack didn’t allow the necessary coding. So, one final time — click on the drop-down menus and select your wine resolutions for the new year. As always, thanks to Al Yellon, since I stole the idea from him.
A blog tradition — six Halloween stories that are too frightening for wine
No new Halloween wine tale this year, but never fear. Last year’s Star Trek story – the USS Wine Curmudgeon must outwit the Imperial Distributor Empire – is worth reading at least twice more.
And, as noted before, all of them are well done, with the Kolchak probably being my favorite.
Haven’t all of us tried to ferment grape juice into wine?
A Los Angeles animator, using the nom de plumeJavaDoodles on YouTube, understands this wine thing pretty well. His short video, describing what happens when one leaves a bottle of grape juice in a dark closet, is more than familiar to the WC. I did this shortly after I started writing about wine, because isn’t what all all wine writers should do?
And though there was no disc of mold, my result was equally as disgusting.
The other key here? That wine is associated with being an adult, which may be yet another reason why younger, legal-age consumers, drink something else. Who wants to be an adult?
It’s also worth noting that using Java for animations is especially geeky — something else the WC can appreciate.
Long ago, before the tech wiseguys appropriated the term “unicorn,” it was a ’70s hippie thing that meant almost the complete opposite (see pre-Raphalite and “The Lady of Shalott“). Which Sweet Charity Smith on YouTube apparently knows. How else to explain her hunt for a winocorn?
So why all the literary and poetic allusions? Because the hunt for a winocorn reminds me of the time before premiumization and consolidation, and when quality $10 wine was not a unicorn in and of itself.
That’s the WC’s house, mid-century plumbing and all, about where the d is in “and.”
Can someone who appreciates quality $10 wine live in “America’s most-sought neighborhood”?
A new study says the Wine Curmudgeon lives in perhaps the hottest real estate market in the United States, which raises serious questions about my lifestyle – wine included.
Here’s the thing: I don’t have granite counter tops. I don’t have a Wolf range or Bosch refrigerator. I don’t have a sauna or swimming pool. I do have mid-century plumbing and a paid-for, stick-shift Honda Fit.
And, of course, a passion for quality $10 wine.
So when the study said my part of Dallas was “America’s most-sought neighborhood,” I was at a loss for words (which, as regular visitors know, is almost impossible). How can this be? I live there. Doesn’t that automatically disqualify my neighborhood?
Most importantly, does it mean I can no longer drink the wine I love?
Because, as the study notes, real estate seems to be the culmination of 21st century American culture – that we’re a “a nation of virtual carpet treaders” who love “Zillow porn.” Which I can vouch for: I have a neighbor who probably spends as much time on Zillow as I do looking at wine store inventories. Plus, just now, I got yet another text asking to buy my house, which happens with astonishing regularity.
Hence my conundrum. If my neighborhood is really this trendy, what will the hipsters say when I buy this instead of this? And what will they do when they find out that I write – and most convincingly, if I may say so – that expensive wines are not necessarily better just because they’re expensive? Don’t both of those actions defeat the entire purpose of trendy?
Will they snub me when I walk Churro, the blog’s associate editor? Will they point me out to their visitors, shaking their heads and sighing, as the neighbor who is just a little “off?”
Fortunately, the study has its flaws, as the authors acknowledge. If nothing else, it’s based on Zillow data, which may be even less accurate than many of the wine and health studies that claim we’re drunk every night – even though fewer of us drink and most of us are drinking less.
And, as my mother is probably thinking as she reads this, the last thing I care about is fitting in, and especially fitting in with people who don’t understand the value of a paid-for, stick-shift Honda Fit – or a fine bottle of $10 Gascon white wine.
“If more wine writing was this clever, more young people wouls drink wine.”
This year, we’re waiting for Substack to catch up to the WC
One of my favorite things to write has been the blog’s do-it-yourself wine review, which I’ve posted the past eight years. The idea has always been to poke fun at wine reviews, the wine business, and all the rest of the foolishness and pretension.
Which, in 2022, was especially relevant given the upside down world that wine has made for itself. To quote: “four reviews for wine that costs much more than it’s worth, the kind of wine that only a winery CFO and its marketing team could love.” And how do I know this? I get samples of these wines all the time, as well as a surprising number of emails from the marketing team when I dare to question the wines’ reason for being.
The catch since moving to Substack? The platform doesn’t allow the coding to make these work. One can’t use HTML to create the drop-down menu so you can select the various bits of wit, which is the point of the piece. (And, as always, thanks to Al Yellon, since I stole the idea from him all those years ago.)
Hopefully, Substack – since adding real-time chat and its Twitter-like Notes service – will do something about adding the necessary coding in time for next year.
So here are three ways the wine business can leverage current pop culture trends to make wine fun again:
• A dating show called “Wine Love,” loosely based on all those dating shows (“The Bachelor” and so forth) that TV loves because they’re cheap to produce, slightly titillating, and reinforce sexual stereotypes. We rent a Napa chateau, hire 30 or so incredibly beautiful people who know nothing about wine, and spend 10 weeks watching them sip, spit, and fall in love. It can’t be any worse than Fox’s “Farmer Wants a Wife,” can it?
• “The Next Wine Superstar,” because if Gordon Ramsey can call himself a chef, CEO, and mogul, then why can’t someone in wine? We get a fabulously successful wine executive (and you know who you are) to host the show, in which the executive will pick from a dozen incredibly beautiful people who know nothing about wine, but will curry favor in all sorts of ways so the executive will anoint one of them as wine’s next big thing.
• “The Masked Wine Geek,” in which a panel of always screaming Winestream Media types try to guess which contestant is dressed in which wine bottle costume. So someone might come on the show dressed as the legendary 2000 Cheval Blanc; someone else might wear a Barefoot Strawberry Moscato outfit. The panel’s job will be to ask the sort of incredibly wine geeky questions that annoy the rest of us in order to identify the contestants.
Churro, the blog’s associate editor, contributed to this post. He suggested doing the dating show as “Chihuahua Love,” so he could frolic with a bunch of Hollywood starlets.
by Wine Curmudgeon Posted On
