Marlowe, the blog’s official dog, thinks he deserves a Curmudgie for this gratuitous pet shot.
The 2016 Curmudgies: Given annually to everyone who made wine more difficult to enjoy
Welcome to the 2016 Curmudgies, the fifth time we’ve given the awards to the people and institutions that did their best over the previous 12 months to make sure wine remained confusing, difficult to understand, and reserved for only the haughtiest among us.
This year’s winners:
• Worst news release: This year, the award goes to the wine PR business, for something even worse than its grammatically and factually pathetic news releases. This year, it gets the dishonor for the new and decidedly annoying habit of asking me what I thought about the wine they sent me. There is, of course, nothing wrong with asking. The catch – and the reason for the award – is that many of them get angry with me if I don’t like the wine, and I’ve gotten some surprisingly snotty emails in response to my response. This is completely unprofessional. First, I’m allowed to have an opinion that is different from the talking points their client gave them, and second, I’m not here to parrot the talking points, but to offer an objective view of the wine.
• The three-tier system is our friend award: To the New York State Liquor Authority, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and the retailer Empire Beverages. I can’t even begin to explain what has happened over the past 12 months, which has included lawsuits, counter-lawsuits, regulatory rulings, appeals of regulatory rulings, and two vetoes by the governor of a bill that would have clarified the mess. Suffice it to say, if we treated wine like any other consumer good, none of this would have happened, the republic would still be intact, and it would be easier to buy wine in New York.
• The Wine Spectator will always be the Wine Spectator: This year, the honor goes to the editors who put together the Nov. 20, 2016 Hot Wines section of the Wine Spectator Insider, setting a record for unavailability that will be difficult to beat. How many cases of five of the six wines are for sale in the U.S? Try 421 total – 6, 35, 40, 100 and 250, making them all but impossible to buy. This assumes you could afford to, since the cheapest is $150. Why does the Spectator review wines that no one can buy? If you have to ask, you don’t know why this Curmudgie exists. (And a tip ‘o the WC’s fedora to Kyle Schlachter, who passed this gem my way.)
• Would someone please listen to this person? The positive Curmudgie, given to someone who advances the cause of wine sensibility despite all of the obstacles in their way. The winner this year is Jerry Lockspeiser, author of “Your Wine Questions Answered” – 25 answers to the most common wine questions. Jerry’s book is straightforward, easy to understand, and funny, all of which are in short supply in wine. “Many people find buying wine difficult.” he writes. “This is not because they are stupid. The meaning of the words is not clear, the language is complex, and the flavour is a mystery. It is hardly surprising that confusion and anxiety are common. We would probably buy more, with greater enjoyment of doing so, if the people who sell wine made it easier to understand.”
“Judge for yourself its believability and then try to tell yourself, wherever you may be, it couldn’t happen here.”
This year’s annual Halloween post: A terrifying tale about cheap wine and the Parker Monster. Call it Kolchak: The Wine Stalker
Chicago has always been a working class town, a shot and a beer kind of place. So there were some raised eyebrows when people started drinking wine in the Windy City, but hey, what’s the difference between wine and beer? Just another way to enjoy the same vice.
That’s why no one paid much attention when Lee Simcoe opened his wine shop in Rogers Park just before 9 a.m. on a cool October morning and found all of his cheap wine smashed, the broken bottles and the spilled wine in a jagged mess. Kids, he thought, vandals – and that’s the last thought he ever had. Simcoe started toward the back of a the store to get a mop, but stopped. His throat was tight, and he started coughing, like there was something he couldn’t swallow. And the coughing turned to gasping, and he couldn’t get any air. And then the gasping turned to choking, and he clutched his throat and dropped dead.
•
Vincenzo walked out of his office, looked over the Independent News Service newsroom. “Carl, do you have that story, the one I sent you to City Hall to cover yesterday?”
“Oh yeah, Tony, it’s right here,” and I started rifling through one of the piles of papers on my desk.
“Of course he doesn’t have it,” said Updyke, sitting at the next desk and where everything was arranged more neatly than anyone thought possible. “He didn’t go to City Hall. He was in Rogers Park at that liquor store murder.”
“Tony, I’m telling you, we’ve got something there. How does a normal, healthy, 35-year-old man strangle to death in an empty liquor store? With no marks on his throat?”
“What we don’t have is that City Hall story, eh Carl?” Vincenzo’s face did that thing it does just before he starts the “New York wants us to cover that story and you didn’t do it and now I have to call New York” lecture. Since I had heard it before, there was no reason to listen again.
“I’ll go down to City Hall now, Tony, right away,” and I grabbed my hat, camera, and tape recorder and started easing out of the office. “Have that story after lunch. Or later this afternoon. Or early this evening.”
As the office door closed behind me, I heard a loud, wailing, “Carl….”
•
I did start toward City Hall, but then the call came over the police scanner, full of static and panic. “Wine bar in Lincoln Park.. officers down…officers down… respond more units…”
When I got there, the SWAT team had established a perimeter, the sharpshooters were on the roof tops, and the cops were wearing gas masks. But that was nothing compared to the half dozen officers in blue uniforms lying dead in the doorway of the wine bar, and all of them looked like they had strangled to death.
I ducked under the police line and started snapping pictures. That’s when a beefy hand grabbed the camera and a muffled voice said, “I thought we had revoked your press credentials, Kolchak.”
“Now why would you want to do that, Capt. Quill? You know all I want to do is to cover a story.”
Quill was wearing a gas mask, too. “Kolchak, get back behind the perimeter. This is a restricted area.” Two of Chicago’s finest grabbed me by the elbows. “I can take a hint, Captain,” and scurried back to my car, parked near where a detective was interviewing witnesses.
I switched on the recorder. “Let me get this straight,” said the cop, looking at his notes. “You’re in the wine bar, doing a Wine 101 class, when the bottles start breaking and exploding? For no reason? And these were inexpensive bottles? Ten dollars or so?”
A woman in her early 20s was crying. “Yes,” she said, sobbing. “It was super awful. And then Dr. Kopin, who was holding the class, started gasping for breath, clutching his throat. And we just ran out as fast as we could, just in time to see the cops do the same thing when they ran in. The same super horrible thing as Dr. Kopin.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “The cops just started choking? For no apparent reason? All of them?” She nodded yes, stifling a sob, and then broke down completely.
A beefy hand grabbed my recorder. “Kolchak, I thought I told you this was a restricted area,” said Quill, and the two cops grabbed me by the elbows again.
•
Everyone told me one person in Chicago knew more about cheap wine than anyone else, the guy with the brown hat. I finally found him in a bar near Wrigley Field, nursing an Old Style.
“It’s not safe to drink cheap wine these days, Kolchak. A guy could choke to death.”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “No one chokes to death from drinking wine.”
“Let me tell you a story, Kolchak. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. Let’s say younger people want to drink whatever kind of wine they want, without being told by critics or scores what to drink. Sweet red wine. Rose. Cava and Prosecco. And let’s say the wine business is set up to make them drink wine that has scores and reviews by critics and isn’t cheap, and the dark forces who run the wine business don’t want to change that.
“Dark forces?”
“Very dark forces, Kolchak. Companies worth billions of dollars who have had their way for decades and who keep getting bigger and richer. And let’s say they created something, a yeast-like creature, that can react with the sugar in a wine bottle and blow it up. Or can get inside a person’s lungs, turn oxygen into CO2, and choke them to death. Then you’d have the Parker Monster.”
“That’s crazy. Why would anyone want to do that? Kill customers?”
“That’s the wine business, Kolchak. Constitutionally protected. What difference do one or two customers make in the long run?”
•
The restaurant was dark, had been closed for hours. I was sitting near the bar, and a trail of bottles, all cheap wine, stretched from the door to where I was sitting – Gascon white blends, Spanish roses, Sicilian nero d’avolas, some $5 Chiantis, and lots of cava.
I waited. Reassured myself that the control was in my lap. And then bottles started fizzing. Rumbling. Bubbling, Bursting. And then they were exploding like dominoes falling, all the time getting closer to me so quickly that I was frozen with fear. My hand wouldn’t, couldn’t, touch the button on the control. My throat started getting tight. I was gasping. Puffing. Wheezing.
One last try, one last burst of whatever strength I had left. I felt the button with my thumb. Jammed it as hard as I could.
The lights, hundreds of them, came on, reflecting off the restaurant’s mirrored walls, blinding the room. I could breathe a little more easily, and as the warm got warmer, I could take a short breath. And when the room became uncomfortably warm, I took two quick breaths, and when it was summer time hot, the glare of the lights so intense I couldn’t look and the sweat beading on my forehead, I took my first normal breath since the bottles started exploding.
Because heat, of course, kills yeast.
I left the lights on for 10 minutes. I wasn’t taking any chances.
•
Vincenzo didn’t run the story – something about this being even more bizarre than my usual. Which, he said, was saying something.
The guy with the brown hat disappeared. Guess he wasn’t taking any chances, either. And people stopped choking when they drank cheap wine. The cops chalked it up to a gas leak. But I know – and you know – what happened. So the next time you’re enjoying a $10 Spanish tempranillo, and your throat feels tight, turn up the heat. Why take any chances?
A tip o’ the Curmudgeon’s fedora to star Darren McGavin and those who turned a silly TV show into something that was often much more than that. At its best, “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” was part newspaper comedy and horror movie camp while capturing the confusion of the 1970s perfectly. In an era of Nixon, Watergate, Vietnam, and oil shocks, a reporter running around in a seersucker suit chasing monsters made perfect sense.
The Wine Curmudgeon laughed so hard at this video that I woke up one of my dogs.
Want to know how badly the wine business has educated wine drinkers? Then watch this 2:08 animated short, courtesy of downtowndonald at YouTube. The best exchange? How about: “I don’t like red wine.” “Too bad. This got 95 points.” “Then I’ll buy a case.”
And a word about Xtranormal, the software used to make this video: It was brilliant, and allowed anyone with basic computer skills to make funny little movies. I did a couple of videos here, as well as other sites I have written for over the years. But it disappeared in 2013, and I have never found anything to replace it. If anyone knows of an alternative, let me know.
And a tip o’ the Curmudgeon’s fedora to Kermit Woodall for helping me rescue this post when it vanished for about 18 hours while I switched servers for the blog.
The Wine Curmudgeon apologizes in advance for this post.
But I couldn’t help myself. It allowed me to use a groan-worthy headline and make a Monty Python reference, the Curmudgeon’s days don’t get much better than that.
Plus, given how the Internet works, how could I not post a viral puppy video?
Three years ago, I stole this idea from a Chicago Cubs baseball blog. Is that, I wonder, some sort of Freudian statement about how the Wine Curmudgeon approaches wine writing? Or the Cubs?
Nevertheless, it has become a popular post. For one thing, it taps into so much of the silliness we read in wine reviews. Such as: The graphite flavor in wine “most often emanates from the alchemy of expensive wood and wine. Cabernet kissed with finely toasted French oak most often proves the source of such aromas.” And it allows anyone who drinks wine to take aim at the pomposity that is all around us and that the pompous rarely see.
So write your own wine review, using the drop-down menus in this post. Just click the menu, choose your favorite line, and laugh appropriately. Those of you who get the blog via email may have to go to the website — click here to do so. And, if you like this one, you can do the first and second ultimate do-it-yourself wine reviews, too.
“It seemed really counterproductive to be competing against each other since we already dominate the market, most of our wines taste exactly alike, and consumers don’t know the difference anyway,” said a spokeswoman for the new company, which will close all of its facilities but one and fire all of its employees except those a personnel review deems “absolutely necessary.” In fact, the spokeswoman used the words “synergies” and “cost savings efficiences” 173 times during the news conference that announced the merger.
The new CalConTreas Group will revolutionize wine production by taking advantage of those synergies and cost savings efficiencies, said the spokewoman. For example, instead of the thousands and thousands of tanks and barrels each producer uses, the single The GalConTreas Group winery will have just one, factory sized, with thousands of separate spigots for each brand the new company produces.
Said the spokeswoman: “Red, white, varietal character? Does the average consumer really care? Or understand any of that wine writer foolishness? Of course not. All they want is smooth and fruity wine, and baby, that’s what we’re going to give them. And we’re going to premiumize it!”
Reaction to the announcement:
• The U.S. Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission immediately approved the merger. Their only concern? That it included just four of the biggest companies, instead of the eight biggest and their 60 percent market share. “Because, if you’re going to create a monopoly, what’s the point of not doing it right?” asked a Justice attorney.
• Fred Franzia, whose Bronco Wine is the fifth biggest producer in the country, announced Bronco would merge with itself. “If those people think they can get away with this without taking Fred Franzia into account, they’ve got another thing coming,” he said.
• The Wine Spectator said it would produce a special section in upcoming magazines featuring The CalConTreas Group wines, and that each of the new company’s wines would get 92 points.
• The eight biggest distributors in the country, which control two-thirds of the market, said they would merge into one company to better serve The GalConTreas Group, and used the words “synergies” and “cost savings efficiencies” 342 times in their announcement.
• Legendary Internet blogger Jeff Siegel, the Wine Curmudgeon, who predicted these developments in a 2015 blog post, declined to comment. However, a person with close ties to Siegel said he was sitting in a dark corner, mumbling something that sounded like “The horror, the horror,” and hoarding cheap Gascon and Sicilian wine.
Today’s wine question: Why does the birthday card business understand wine in a way the wine business doesn’t?
